The Hits of the Holidays
By now we’ve all seen the sales charts. Games make great holiday gifts – easy to wrap, and the recipient vanishes from underfoot for days afterwards. No one even pretends that video games are a niche market and strictly for pasty-fleshed young males, especially now that WOW is a firmly established mass market success – over the holidays that title was being advertised on For Better Or For Worse’s website, for crying out loud. (FBOFW is a “domestic” comic strip detailing the adventures of a young stay at home wife with two small children. X-Men, it is not.) EVE’s flashy ad peeked out at me this morning from the Washington Post’s opinion section. Facebook wanted me to try all kinds of games in the waning hours of 2008.
Anyway, under the tree or the shrub or the menorah or whatever were all kinds of games – many of which were bought by people who do not actually play games. Holiday sales are therefore often the triumph of advertising and end cap display tactics. If BigPublishingCompany can convince Aunt Myrtle that everyone is dying for a copy of “Big Guns Go Blooey: Electric Bugaloo,” never mind that it’s a hunk of derivative and badly scored crap, they will win the sales chart game. And their investors will love them. And the whole scam resets and plays through again.
But if you’re reading this, you know better. Real success is what people actually play past that first post-holiday morning. Those titles pick up word of mouth and come to own the coming year. Look at Call of Duty 4 (specifically, look at the chart from the last column). That puppy launched in November of 2007, and picked up serious steam as the year wore on. I don’t know if we can call the next COD4 based on one week of data, but what the hell, ya’ll, it’ll be fun to try. Let’s see what we’ve got!
We defined a “holiday present” as a game that showed up on a GamerDNA member’s profile on the 25th or the 26th of December. I know there are other winter holidays besides Christmas, but even the heathen such as myself without any creed beyond secular humanism tend to exchange gifts on the 25th. A spike in new additions on those days is predictable and statistically significant. Anyway, we examined the titles that were new to our members, for PC and Xbox.
Here were the top new (to the player) PC games, the ones that were added most frequently on profiles on the 25th and 26th of December, 2008:
Left4Dead leads the pack with 7% of the new titles added. I doubt anyone into games enough to be reading this wonky-ass column is shocked. It’s a pretty good “gimme” present from people who don’t know much about games. The cover is creepy, every store on the planet had an end cap for it, the reviews are good enough that the buzz has seeped into the back of the brain in anyone shopping for computer games… into the cart it goes. Sequels are another easy pick for anyone shopping for presents. “Hey, I’ve seen that name on the box on the coffee table, this must be a new one, let’s chuck it in the cart.”
I did not expect to see any MMOs on this chart, or any expansions for MMOs. Anyone who lives with a hardcore MMO player knows that any expansion pack that comes out is snapped up on day one. No one who loves an MMO would have been happy getting a long awaited expansion a month after everyone else has gotten in and looted up. And you don’t usually see MMOs as a gift anyway, since it’s less “game” than “lifestyle.” But Warhammer: Age of Reckoning was obviously under a few trees, shrubs, or candelabras. And so was EVE, they of the completely insane December advertising spree.
Seriously, y’all, my MOTHER was asking about it. She mentioned it during a two hour tutorial on How To Burn Files To CD, conducted over the phone from Maryland to New Mexico. If something to do with my career field has seeped into her consciousness, you may rest assured that the purveyor has achieved total advertising penetration.
Anyway. There are the top PC titles we can reasonable conclude were given as gifts. So, what impact did the gift giving have on the “most played” charts? The time periods in question are the week before Christmas, and the week after. The numbers here are the percentage of GamerDNA members who have logged in to play each title.
Okay, first of all, let me just say, in terms of what people played on the PC, WOW was on top. 18% of our members who play PC games were playing WoW the week before Christmas, and 17% played during the week after Christmas. I did not put those on the chart because it completely fubars my scale, and I have trouble making the little jagged broken bar thingy that indicates crazy scale issues in Excel 2007, thank you so much Microsoft for making this old b… er, dog, try to learn to new tricks. So just picture it in your head, WOW dwarfing everyone else and given them inferiority complexes.
You can see that Left4Dead definitely got a bump from its status as a big gift this year. The MMOs at the top of our charts (WOW, WAR, GW, EVE) all slightly declined in members logging in to play (even the two that achieved Probably Gift Status – except for LOTRO, which saw more people popping in the week after Christmas.
I didn’t post the sub-1% figures on the bar chart, but Far Cry 2 jumped up a half percentage point the week after the holiday, and Runes of Magic didn’t really benefit from being a gift – its numbers fell a half percentage point. Spore and C&C improved, but barely.
The data for Xbox is a little sharper. When I say “top gifts” here, we’re looking at games added to existing GamerDNA profiles on the 25th and the 26th. This process is automatic, so if one of our members put a new game into his or her Xbox360 on one of those days, it would register. It’s not a perfect indicator of whether a game was a gift or not, but it’s not a bad one, either.
Kung Fu Panda and Lego: Indiana Jones appear on this list in no small part due to their presence in the Xbox… box. Microsoft likes to include E For Everyone rated titles in the package with their console, and those were the ones you got this year.
But it’s clear that COD5 and Left4Dead were actual gifts this year. Fallout 3, Guitar Hero World Tour, and Gears of War 2 round out the top five, all with 7% or more. (In other words, out of every new title played by every member, 7% of them were Gears of War 2. The latest title in the Call of Duty franchise represented just shy of 11% of every new Xbox game given to our members this year. Happy New Year to YOU, Activision!)
That’s what Santa threw down the chimney. But we all know the pain of popping in a new game, only to put it down an hour later and go… meh, I should have gone sledding instead. We at GamerDNA wanted to know what people were still playing as the holiday season drew to a close.
Everyone will boot up their gifts once. If they didn’t quite fall in love, they MIGHT go back for seconds. But no one goes back for thirds unless it was really, really tasty. So I’ve set the cut off at three days. What games soaked up three or more play sessions during the week after Christmas?
What?!! Kung Fu Panda didn’t make the cut! Man. I NEVER SAW THAT COMING.
Oh, how the sarcasm burns.
Dear Aunt Myrtle – If any of the titles on the chart were from you this year, you may rest assured your gift was very, very much appreciated. Good job, Auntie!
The new Call of Duty was a hit, and not just in sales figures. It appears to be genuinely loved. A holiday puts a lot of demands on a player’s time, and yet if you take everyone who got it as a present, they managed to boot it up for an average of four playing sessions in the last seven days. Close on the heels of that title in terms of player absorption comes Sequel Row. Good grief, but it’s hard to be cranky about the stranglehold sequels have on the gaming world when people clearly love them. And apparently the only thing more fun than flopping on a couch like a beached manatee to WATCH sports after eating your own weight in turkey and yams is… flopping on a couch like a beached manatee to pretend to play sports.
It was interesting that Guitar Hero World Tour appeared as a probable gift far more often than Rock Band 2 did… but Rock Band 2 edged out GHWT in total new player absorption. But could it be that Guitar Hero fans were simply split between GH3 and GHWT, since both titles are there on the chart? Either way, it’s gonna be a good year for rock and roll.
Remember, this chart is looking at how often a title was played by people who JUST cracked the box open on the 25th or 26th. They may have heard about it, or played it at a friend’s house, but hadn’t had it for their very own until this holiday season. This chart is an excellent measure of how absorbing a particular title is.
Last year, COD4 was a hugely popular holiday present, and the momentum propelled the title to a great year of being the most popular guy in school. This year, that honor goes to… COD5.
So. Your turn. Did you get any games as presents this year? What titles would you have recommended to Aunt Myrtle, if only she had asked you? Which of these games is going to take off in 2009?
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MattF
