Get In Gears… Gears of War 2, That Is

You totally expected to see something about Wrath of the Lich King, didn’t you? Well, listen, GamerDNA is for all gamers, not just MMOG nerds like… um… me. And second, if they had launched on a Tuesday like EQ2 and LOTRO are going to, giving us enough time to pull data, maybe we would have.

Okay, seriously. Gears of War was THE shooter hit of 2006 in many ways. Three million copies in ten weeks is pretty awesome. To date, the title has sold over five million copies. Microsoft is currently predicting that total sales of the Xbox 360 will hit 25 million at some point this holiday season, with 22 million having been sold at the end of September. If no one buys a single copy of Gears of War from this moment on, and if Microsoft hits their goal, more than one of every five Xbox households will have a copy of this game.

Expectations for last week’s launch of Gears of War 2 were pretty high, you might say. Two million copies have already been sold. One week! Two million! Man, it must feel good to be Epic right now.

Can the data tell us anything we didn’t already know? To the numbers!

We’re not concerned with sales figures so much as we are with actual player behavior. Who cares if you buy the darn thing – we want to know if it’s in your DNA, to coin a phrase. Out of all GamerDNA members with an Xbox 360, 32% have already played Gears 2. Let me give you a little perspective. The last game that we tracked that managed to get more than 30% of our members playing in the first week was Grand Theft Auto IV, which has been played by a total of 53% of our Xbox people.

Just a smidgen under 76% of our members have played the first Gears of War. Sure, the first Gears has been out for a year and a half longer than GTAIV, but these heavily marketed titles grab most of their sales in a relatively short period of time. For example, Halo 3 is currently sitting at 71% – and at the time where Gears 1 was out for the same number of months, it had 70%.

In other words, the signs all point to another smash hit for Gears 2. Or, as I said during the meeting this morning… duh.

Let’s see if we can leverage the data that is unique to GamerDNA. Here’s the breakdown of Bartle types for our users as a whole. I know it’s crude, but the best I can do is to sort people by whichever quality they scored as highest. In other words, if your highest score was in the killer category, you’re a killer – even if just a few percentage points behind killer is “socializer.” Sorry. I’m slicing the numbers with an axe, here, but as we grow, I’m told I’ll get a scalpel!

All right, so, our baseline is 28% Killers, 13% Socializers (which blows my mind on a site that has its roots in SOCIAL ACTIVITY, but okay), 19% Achievers, and 40% Explorers. First, let’s see how the first Gears offering deviates from that baseline. I watched someone play the first Gears for approximately seventeen billion endless, gory hours. Only Fallout 3’s disgusting head shot slow motion views are bloodier. I also noticed that the little COG Tag things were everywhere, making this a cross between a gruesome bloodbath and a fun scavenger hunt. So, it would seem like the Killer score would be up, the Achiever score would be up, and given that one’s progression through the world is pretty linear, I would expect the higher scores to come at the expense of the Explorer score.

Wow. I’ve been wrong before, but this time I was… really wrong. The difference in Explorers is a measly 3%. The Achiever score is up by 1%, and Socializer is up 2%. The Killer score for one of the bloodiest games in my memory is totally stagnant. Well, actually, not TOTALLY. The precise scores are 28.1% Killers for the overall GamerDNA family, and 27.7% Killers for Gears of War players.

Yeah. Killers are actually DOWN a bit.

I have a shiny new theory, one with which Steve the Data Man also puts forth. Some games are just such massive hits that it carves across all categories, and our data’s ability to be predictive loses value. When “everyone” buys a game, demographically a game’s scores will look like the general population.

Let’s check out Gears 2. These are the early adopters, here, so maybe we’ll see a difference in the chart.

Now, this is more what I expected to see, although I admit I still thought the Killer score would be even higher. But even this is explainable – the game may be GORY, but that’s not necessarily the thing Killer archetypes are going for. Gears is a more thoughtful franchise than the usual run and gun format; a player needs to take advantage of shadow and cover. In fact, Gears 2 is taking this to a new… high? Low?… by letting you use the bodies of your late enemies as cover.

Finally, let’s see the top five Xbox 360 titles were affected by the launch of Gears 2:

We looked at playing sessions, meaning whether or not a player logged into a particular title. Therefore,  a player who played two games in one session would find himself represented in both categories.

As with all statistics, we can’t read too much into them. Fable 2 took the biggest hit, both in terms of percentages and raw numbers. Fallout 3 looks like it took a gentler hit. However, the Fallout 3 group is so much larger that the hit in raw numbers was pretty similar to Fable 2’s. I can’t properly analyze Call of Duty’s drop off, given that COD5 was released (in North America) in the middle of our sample. The level of obsession with Halo 3, given that it released longer ago than Fable or Fallout, translates to much smaller raw numbers than the other titles. Similarly, the thrill of Rock Band has sufficiently faded that while the percentage increase looks exciting, I don’t need to bother with theories and explanations because the raw number of sessions was measured in the hundreds.

I would interpret this data as saying that this fall has been such a treasure trove of hot releases that gamers are almost certainly veering towards the newest, shiniest thing right now. The real test for these titles will be “what are they playing – and encouraging their friends to buy – in January?”

Share your thoughts here. Which of these titles was your favorite, and why?
 

Tags: Bartle, gears of war, Gears of War 2, Xbox 360