I’d been meaning to post about this already, but I somehow missed doing so; it seems The Nosy Gamer has picked up the baton on tracking XFire numbers for MMOs, and in a most persistent way. In his latest round of reporting there are some interesting, if expected, figures:
- With the expansion release, WoW is back on top among MMOs. Not back on top among all tracked games, though.
- Guild Wars 2 is still holding up pretty strong; it’s still early but it appears to be weathering at least the Storm Over Pandaria fairly well. Conversely, the hit on WoW from GW2 is visible in these numbers.
- Having not paid attention to this for quite a while, I’m surprised to see Star Wars: The Old Republic at number three. Still, it’s a rather large, cliff-like drop-off from the #2 spot.
- EVE Online and Aion have roughly comparable numbers to SWTOR. LotRO comes in at #7, which is in my judgement pretty strong, considering that its expansion is still awaiting launch.
- APB: Reloaded and Star Trek Online come it at #8 and #10, respectively. I had no idea. Perhaps a point for further commentary later.
- The rest of the top 10 is made up of Games Ardwulf Doesn’t Give A Shit About. Except maybe for Mabinogi, which despite the art style has some interesting things going for it.
I’m glad to see someone with more patience than I is doing this. I’ll be keeping up with this very avidly.
You really can’t say GW2 us holding up well at all – there’s a 70% drop in player engagement since launch according to Xfire:
http://beta.xfire.com/games/gw2
And that doesn’t have to do with other games… people just aren’t playing it.
Sorry that you got this flagged as spam (due to the link,) and that I didn’t catch it for days. I did delete the duplicate comment, though – bad sockpuppet!