f13.net

(Wow, did I post this in the wrong subform. Can I get a move please?)

Hell, it's as good a metric as any.

Title; number of hours played; xfire rank; developer; publisher

World of Warcraft  419341
 #1  Blizzard Entertainment  Blizzard Entertainment 

Guild Wars  21195
 #8  ArenaNet  NCsoft

Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning  14848
 #13  EA Mythic  EA Games

The Lord of the Rings Online: Shadows of Angmar  10005
 #18  Turbine Inc.  Midway

Eve Online  9551
 #21  CCP  Simon & Schuster

Diablo II
Diablo II: Lord of Destruction 5441
 #37  Blizzard Entertainment  Blizzard Entertainment

Lineage II  4179
 #44  NCsoft  NCsoft

Second Life  3621
 #49  Linden Lab  Linden Lab

Age of Conan: Hyborian Adventures  3479
 #51  Funcom  Eidos Interactive

Final Fantasy XI  2756
 #57  Square Enix  Sony Online

Star Wars Galaxies: An Empire Divided
Star Wars Galaxies: The Jump to Lightspeed 2316
 #67  Sony Online Entertainment  LucasArts

 City of Heroes  1759
 #87  Cryptic Studios  NCsoft

I threw D2 and Guild Wars in there on a whim.

I prefer google trends for no compelling reason.  :)

http://www.google.com/trends?q=warhammer+online%2C+guild+wars%2C+world+of+warcraft%2C+diablo+II%2C+age+of+conan&ctab=0&geo=all&date=ytd&sort=0

(http://img227.imageshack.us/img227/325/tempof8.gif)

I love how they still list Simon and Schuster as the publishers of EVE and list Sony Online as the publishers of Final Fantasy XI.

That's pretty much how relevant Xfire is. It's a good signature generator though.

Oh. I see what happened.

Edit: Didn't read the last bit. Second Life still isn't a game though.

Meh. XFire is about linking gamers up. (Whether it accomplishes that goal is another topic.) Not keeping track of who's been bought out by EA yesterday.

I do think that the amount of hours played is a better indicator of subscriber bases than actual subscriber numbers.

I didn't even know Xfire existed until about two months ago, and I've been playing MMO(RP)Gs and online FPS games since 1997. *shrug*

I signed up in 2004 (I think) and really don't use it at all. It isn't worth having another app running, and it doesn't mesh well with IM consolidation apps.

That list seems pretty suspect for me. For instance, Diablo 2 should have a much, much higher number of hours played. I know people who still play it sometimes.

I'm also suspicious that Warhammer has a higher number of hours played than LOTRO. LOTRO had its issues but the game has had steady players for over a year.  Currently there are short queues to get onto a server.

Edit: Isn't that google trends basically the number of news stories and articles about the mmos and not subscriber numbers?

http://www.google.com/intl/en/trends/about.html

The list itself is total useless bullshit. XFire caters to such a tiny, tiny, tiny subset of gamers that it's not even worth discussing in any sort of rational debate. It's a useless metric and I'm tired of seeing it on websites.

Google trends isn't very useful either unless you're trying to determine when and how hype builds up. Of course WoW is a monster, we don't need Google Trends or XFire to confirm that.

/shrug

Useless stats are useless.

My speculation is the same reason Eve is there, Xfire has a higher number of PVP gamers.

On google trends, I think you'd have to also add "WoW" to the terms, i search all the time for stuff but never use the full name. I don't think it accounts for that(?)

True. I never search for World of Warcraft, I search for WOW. I never search for Lord of the Rings Online, I search for LOTRO, and it's the same for all games. I don't think I've ever typed Warhammer Online for instance.

Yes, but like all statistics you're counting on the trends.

xfire might not be popular but if the user base is fairly stable then the trend should be accurate.  Same with google trends, not everyone searches for a game on google but of those that do this is the trend.  The only time these trends might not reflect subscriber movement is if something happened to alter the sample base;  Mythic bans xfire or google stops allowing searches for World of Warcraft.

We know WoW is extremely popular and sure enough they score high on both xfire and google trends.

We know AoC started out popular and crashed quickly, and sure enough google trends shows that.

We know more people play on the weekends than during the week, and what do you know both xfire and google trends show this.

A 30 day closeup of google trends shows this better.

Warhammer, WoW, Guild Wars - 30 days
(http://www.google.com/trends/viz?q=warhammer+online,+world+of+warcraft,+guild+wars&date=mtd&geo=all&graph=weekly_img&sort=0&sa=N)
http://www.google.com/trends?q=warhammer+online%2C+world+of+warcraft%2C+guild+wars&ctab=0&geo=all&date=mtd&sort=0

So while raw numbers would not be accurate the trends should be.  If you see a downward trend then I think it's safe to say the number of players is dropping.

Oh good. And Xfire thread. Our conversion is now complete.  :oh_i_see:

Conversion to what? MMORPG.com? That's awesome.  :awesome_for_real:

*scratches head*
number of hours played...?

You mean by the entire playerbase??

At the moment my head hurts attempting to find any direct relevance to any of these correlations.

Ill read up on how xfire works later today.. Or would I be wasting my time?

You would be wasting your time. It's a useless metric.

Xire tracks how many hours it's users spend on games that are supported by the Xfire application.
From their own site, Xfire has 11 million users, and- as I type this- about 280k users online.
The "hours played" I believe is for the current week.

So it's tracking the users who play game whatever and also run Xfire in the background while they're playing.

...and the number of hours played can be gamed easily in Xfire. It does not care if you get up and walk away AFK, or do things in another window while the game sits there.

I see now
Its a windows application that offers some interesting services and allows us to see what games people are playing while using the service.
Oddly enough, I didn't know about the service. You would have various issues if you were to try and use xfire as barometer for how popular a game is however.

In one case, one of the MMOs you mentioned has a large portion of its players on PS2, Xbox360, and PS3 and don't even speak English. Then you have a potentially even larger number of players who do not use xfire over people who do use xfire with in just the English speaking PC market.

I apologize if Xfire does have support for more languages.
The website and the download appear to only be in English.

It also doesn't account for people who play multiple EVE sessions on one PC.

Roll that around inside your head some more. Get back to us when you've spotted the batshit.

It also doesn't account for self-selecting groups.  People in Game A tout it, so more of its players install it to be part of the 'in' crowd.  Players of Game B don't, so it does not have an equal proportion of adaption.

It can give trends amongst the people who do use it, but extrapolating outside of that group is fraught with problems.

I really would have assumed Eq2 would have been in that list.  I'm guessing Eq2 players don't generally use xfire.  I know I don't. 

Going to a sample of xfire pages and pulling player numbers rather than hours played.

Number of xfire clients (number of hours)

WOW - 100,716 (416,332)
GW - 8,399 (21,221)
WAR - 4,844 (14,403)
EVE - 3,224 (9,521)
CABAL - 2,777 (13,539) <--  grind fest? 
LotRO - 2,639 (12,766)
DII - 2,251 (5,728)
AoC - 909 (3,655)
EQII - 471 (687)

I still say the trends are valid regardless of the ability to game the system.  The numbers are derived the same way for each game and the 'gaming' of the system should be fairly consistent.  I would agree that trying to derive specific numbers from xfire is foolish and you can't say with any certainty that EVE has more players than LotRO because we don't know if, for example, EVE players are more apt to use xfire or not.

Unfortunately there's no mistaking the fact that WoW is #1.  :(

edit:  for fun I added hours played next to number of players

What about sales figures and subscription numbers?

Not sure what you're asking.  These numbers have no direct correlation to subscription numbers, but I believe if you see these numbers dropping and the google trend numbers dropping you can expect subscription numbers to fall or flatline soon enough.

actually sorry about that.
My last question was a bit of a mistake.
That was one of those questions I asked and then realized I already knew the answer but did not have enough time to come back and correct my mistake before you responded.

I agree with you on being able to see trends with xfire though. Not so much with subscription numbers or sales figures. Though sales figures and subscription numbers do tend to follow trends I think it is apples and oranges compared to how often the games are played and when. Its pretty interesting indeed.

Things like people playing more often on the weekends or holidays ect can be quite useful information for some people especially advertising companies interested in doing in game advertising.


Hmm I would also hold some off beat answer suspect like X game gets a better communication solution implemented in the game itself omitting the need for the benefits that xfire has to offer. You might see this happen with setups like Steam or when Microsoft brings out its new windows live thing they have mentioned. Not all spyware serves an "evil" purpose hehe..

No more or less batshit than multi-boxers or counting inactive accounts.

(http://www.theforce.net/kids/coruscant/probe_droid/palpatine.jpg)

Graphs like this tell me that Conan is the biggest failboat yet. It launched at the perfect lull, enough to garner THAT much attention.

Then promptly farted in their customers faces and giggled. The end. (soon)

I saw this and knew he had to be one of the Warhammer kids who managed not to get run off the board.

Thanks, I haven't been called a kid in a long time.

What the heck's in the water these days that we're using crap like Xfire and wikipedia entries (http://forums.f13.net/index.php?topic=15387.0) to divine the state of MMOs. We know the state. WoW is so #1 it's more relevant to talk about #2*. That's more a valid comparison to the rest of the MMOs. And the companies at #2 aren't divulging info in a useful way because they needed to do better than they ultimately did. So we're really back in 2002 when the only games competing against each other are the 150k-300k variety.

Which we did back in 2002  :oh_i_see:

I'm getting old.

I think you're reading way too much into what's been said.  I don't know the goals of the original poster, I was having fun with trends.  I then continued to have fun explaining why I thought the trends, not raw numbers, were valid.  You know fun?

I would not equate this thread to a wikipedia entry, statistics are much more fun.

That's kind of what I was interested in. If you take Guild Wars out of the list, WAR is a solid #2. And I kind of dislike tagging Guild Wars as a MMOG because of it's lack of persistance.

Anywho, I posted to spark conversation, and didn't know if anyone has posted XFire's numbers lately.

This is obviously a definition of the word "fun" that I was previously unaware of.

Guild wars; still kicking every mmo's ass without even being considered an mmo  :drill:.

garlicwolf: posting on things he has no idea about.

UnSub: Picking fights with noobs.

 :grin:

Noob implies eventual acceptance.

Given his 1 - completely nonsensical - gaming post, and 2 shitty politics posts, I simply don't see this as being the case.

What can I say? There weren't any cripples around.

I was playing The Witcher and it crashed on me after I won a big fight. I'm slightly cranky.

Jeez, foo went to Politics right away?  :awesome_for_real:

hasn't it been a year+ since the last guild wars expansion? 

That's pretty surprising

Yeah even *I* had had the sense to lurk for a while first  :why_so_serious:

They stopped work on expansions and campaigns to focus on Guild Wars 2.  They still have some people working on the original though, as I'm always downloading new tweaks.

So only grindy everquest clones are popular, good to know.