| Rank | Prev Week | Game | Score | Hours Played | +/- % |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | 1 | World of Warcraft | 42.6 | 9,515 | -10.5 |
| 2 | 2 | Guild Wars 2 | 15.7 | 3,497 | -7.4 |
| 3 | 3 | Star Wars: The Old Republic | 9.5 | 2,120 | +0.6 |
| 4 | 5 | EVE Online | 6.2 | 1,377 | +1.3 |
| 5 | 4 | Final Fantasy XIV | 5.9 | 1,328 | -18.5 |
| 6 | 7 | Tera | 4.4 | 973 | +11.0 |
| 7 | 6 | Aion | 3.3 | 732 | -30.8 |
| 8 | 8 | Neverwinter | 3.2 | 711 | -4.8 |
| 9 | 10 | RIFT | 2.6 | 581 | +1.8 |
| 10 | 9 | Planetside 2 | 2.3 | 513 | -18.4 |
| 11 | 12 | Runescape | 2.3 | 507 | +5.6 |
| 12 | 11 | Lord of the Rings Online | 2.2 | 489 | -6.3 |
Total Digital Dozen Hours: 22,343
The Xfire MMORPG community continues to see a decrease in the amount of time spent playing its 12 most popular games. Sunday's 8.4% decrease in time played was led by World of Warcraft (-1116 hours) and Aion (-326 hours) while Tera (+96 hours) was the only game that was a greater than 18 hour gain.
A Long Slide - For the first time World of Warcraft saw Xfire users spend less than 10,000 hours playing the game on a Sunday. In comparison, the first week of The Digital Dozen saw the Xfire community spend 88,221 hours playing WoW. The last Sunday in which players spent over 100,000 hours in Azeroth was 22 January 2012, when Xfire recorded 103,443 hours played. While WoW has lost millions of subscriptions during the past two years, I think the decline really shows how players are abandoning Xfire for alternatives.
Anti-climatic? - Last week ArenaNet launched the final patch for the first season of Guild Wars 2's Living Story, the Battle for Lion's Arch. Normally a release of a Living Story patch would result in an increase in the Xfire numbers the following Sunday. This Sunday saw a decline. Do players find the ending anti-climatic, or is something happening and players figure they have two weeks to run through the content?
Wild Card - I wonder what the effect of games in closed alpha/betas like Wildstar, Elder Scrolls Online, and EverQuest Next Landmark are having on the numbers for the existing games. Guild Wars 2 had a huge impact whenever ArenaNet held a beta weekend and I can't help but feel the same is true today. While ESO is supported by Xfire, I do not see any entries for Wildstar or Landmark, which makes judging the impact of events like Wildstar's Alienware closed beta event that occurred this past weekend.
