The GamerDNA blog have done some further stat crunching for calendar year 2008 (Part 1 and Part 2 here).
The findings? The excitement around Warhammer Online’s launch translated to players bleeding from Age of Conan, but essentially no impact on the leader, World of Warcraft . There’s an enormous array of other data worth reading through, but the take-home message for me was:
The top 100 chart was remarkably stable for the last six months of 2008. Some big launches made a splash – Spore, Fallout 3 – but overall the big players stayed the same. Four titles were in our top ten “most logged in” the entire time: WOW, Call of Duty 4, Counter-Strike: Source, and Guild Wars. Two other titles were up there four out of six months: Lord of the Rings Online and Warcraft III: The Frozen Throne.
It remains difficult to forsee any real challenge to World of Warcraft’s dominance as a gaming world anytime soon – do you agree?
The new year will become an interesting time for virtual worlds as a whole as many of them are launching.
The new year will become an interesting time for virtual worlds as a whole as many of them are launching.