The Digital Dozen: 17 June 2014

The rankings of the top twelve MMORPGs as determined by the players of the Xfire community from play on Sunday, 15 June 2014.  For more details about the methodology, click here.  Historical data can be found here.

Rank	Prev Week	Game	Score	Hours Played	+/- %
1	1	World of Warcraft	36.0	6,567	+9.7
2	2	Wildstar	15.0	2,742	-24.6
3	3	Guild Wars 2	12.2	2,223	-0.9
4	4	Star Wars: The Old Republic	8.1	1,486	-1.4
5	5	EVE Online	5.8	1,051	-1.2
6	T6	Final Fantasy XIV	5.6	1,013	+10.5
7	T6	Tera	3.9	718	-21.7
8	8	Aion	3.6	663	-5.4
9	9	Elder Scrolls Online	2.9	532	-22.2
10	10	Runescape	2.8	509	-2.9
11	--	Neverwinter	2.1	375	-2.8
12	12	Maple Story	2.0	364	-6.9

 

Total Digital Dozen Hours: 18,243

The Xfire community's shrinkage continued on Sunday, with members spending 4.1% less time playing MMORPGs than the Sunday before.  I'll break off from the usual format, as I have something to say about that later in the post.

Technical Difficulties - While Wildstar is enjoying a great start, the game is experiencing some technical difficulties that sometimes keeps players from logging in.  That could account for some of the decline in Wildstar's numbers this week.  But the trend is a bit disturbing for launching less than two weeks ago.

E3 Excitement - Did Final Fantasy XIV producer Naoki Yoshida make a big splash at E3 this year?  Not only did he announce a new Ninja class coming in the 3.0 expansion, but patch 2.3 is due to launch on 8 July.  I get the feeling that E3 introduced some excitement to the game's fans and they displayed it on Sunday.

Why Not Raptr?  Regular readers of this weekly column know that Xfire is rapidly dying.  Don't believe me?  On 12 February 2012, the date I published the first column, Xfire members spent 176,521 hours playing the twelve most popular MMORPGs on 10 Feburary 2012.  Twenty-eight months later, that number had declined 89.6% down to 18,243 hours.  To give another example of how the Xfire community has shrunk, the only game this week that exceeded the 12th place game in the first list was World of Warcraft.  In fact, five times more time was spent playing WoW on 10 February 2012 than was spent playing the top 12 MMORPGs on Sunday combined.

I started using Xfire over Raptr over 2 years ago because I didn't need an Xfire account in order to access the data.  The data is freely available.  Not so for Raptr.  To obtain the Raptr data I have, I signed up for a Raptr account and downloaded an app.  As such, I had to agree to abide by Raptr's Terms of Service, which includes this section:

"Copyright. The Site, the AMD App, Raptr App and the Service are protected by U.S. and international copyright laws. Except for your use as authorized above, you may not modify, reproduce or distribute the content, design or layout of the Site, the Raptr App and the Service, or individual sections of the content, design or layout of the Site without Raptr’s express prior written permission."

I am reading that as including making a column based on Raptr data obtained from the site.  As Raptr actually makes money from selling the data it collects from players, they probably would look unfavorably on me distributing that information freely.  So, no Raptr data here.

Is my use of Xfire data treading a fine line?  Possibly, but I think I'm on the right side of it.  But at this point I doubt I'd get sued because Xfire needs all the publicity it can get.