When you compare groups of MMO consumers, grouped by game title, it’s easy to be overwhelmed by World of Warcraft’s market dominance. Indeed, many developers have learned the wrong lessons from Blizzard’s success, and copied/are copying WOW features – without copying WOW’s reasoning, methodology, or execution. The result are products that feel derivative and incomplete, with features that the consumers identify as being less than organically developed. Furthermore, WOW’s market reach is so extensive that the most influential players in a social network sense will identify a borrowed feature as being WOW’s (even if WOW itself borrowed the feature), and cost the new product credibility as innovators.

You know what was fun, back before there were MMO games (or the Wii) to make an essentially solitary hobby a social event? Street Fighter tournaments. A bunch of people would pile into a den or a basement, throw on Street Fighter, and duke it out. There were lots of different kinds of players at one of these events. There were the Game Masters, who bragged about being able to kick your ass with any of the available characters. There were the Specialists, who studied one particular character and its associated moves, mastering the most complex and thumb-spraining sequences. There were Strategists, who analyzed every fight to develop “if/then” patterns and plans.

Then there was me. The most feared archetype of all. I was… the Button Masher. I had no idea what I was doing, and I utterly lacked the dexterity required to execute the fancy moves. Well, intentionally anyway. I could pull off the most astounding routines by crushing every button on the controller at the same time.  I also got really excited and shrieked like a cross between a hyena and a banshee, which could throw off anyone’s concentration. Finally, I was subconsciously convinced that if I lifted the controller up very high, my character could jump, and if I lunged to the right, so too would the avatar. You couldn’t predict me, plan against me, or even think while you were fighting me. I was undefeated for weeks.

So it is with much nostalgic joy that I note that fighter games seem to be enjoying a bit of a renaissance. At the end of last July, we saw the release of Soulcalibur IV. Mortal Combat vs. D.C. Universe came out in November. And Street Fighter IV released last month. (The old 2D Street Fighters are now on the Xbox Live Arcade.)  Today, we at GamerDNA are going to take a brief look at how that niche is performing.

By the way, we didn’t exclude Virtua Fighter because it wasn’t awesome enough. We decided that it wouldn’t be a fair apples-to-apples comparison with the other three games, though, because the ’08 Xbox release was actually a port (albeit one with bonus  features) from an ’07 release on another platform.

Mortal Kombat and the Soulcalibur franchises have remained in the public eye since their introduction in the 90s. Street Fighter, which first appeared in the late 80s in coin op arcades, took a ten year break after the last iteration of Street Fighter III hit the shelves in 1999. That is, the Street Fighter franchise took a ten year break – Capcom continued to produce games featuring the characters themselves in the interim. Still, for the purposes of market awareness, MK and Soul games kept their brand front and center in a way that Street Fighter did not.

Mortal Kombat’s current game is as every bit a spin off as the interval Capcom games were, featuring as it does the crossover characters, but has the franchise name on the box. No doubt the intent was to keep the franchise in our collective gamer minds, and to boost sales, but compared to the other two games, the result was probably not what Midway was hoping for.

Street Fighter IV is off to a great start. We’ll come back to this in the future to see how it held up.

Meanwhile, what else do we know about these games?

Here I must first confess that I make these charts with Excel, and that I am totally incompetent with common graphics programs. Seriously, I only recently learned how to resize images. Therefore, in place of the delicately colored Venn diagram you should be getting, you will have to use your imagination.

What kind of overlap do we see amongst the three newest fighting titles? Is “fighting games” like the “MMO” bucket, wherein fans of the genre usually try all the available options?

The pool for this set of numbers includes everyone who played at least one of our three games. As of yesterday:

Soulcalibur has the edge by this yardstick, having been out the longest. Even though Street Fighter was just released a few weeks ago, there’s already some strong overlap between players of Soulcalibur and Street Fighter. A decent number, 7%, has already sampled all three games. The lowest scoring category was of those players who tried both Mortal Kombat’s latest offering and Street Fighter. I admit to being a bit surprised. Ancient and decrepit gamers such as myself will recall that back in the early to mid 90s, people did tend to pick one of the two franchises, and have noisy arguments about the superiority of one versus the other. I would venture to guess, however, that there is an entire generation of gamers that don’t remember this somewhat ridiculous debate, and combined with the older gamers who never gave a hoot in the first place? I expected a little more overlap than a meager 4%.

Not having tried the new MK, I can’t say if it’s because the crossover title is being perceived as too niche, if there’s a quality issue, or if fighting game fans are simply not aware of the title at all. Certainly I remember seeing plenty of ads for Soul and Street, and not for MK. But my anecdotal experience is not data, so I welcome your comments.

But before we get to your two cents, we’ve got one more tidbit, just for fun. Steve the Data Man mined the traits that our members assigned to these games. Here’s what came back as far as what people liked the most for each game:

Soulcalibur IV: “Character Customization,” “Weapons,” “Arcade-y”
Street Fighter IV: “Competitive,” “Old School,” “Strategy”
Mortal Kombat vs DCU: “Fatalities,” “Super Heroes,” “MK Characters”

You can see the strong thread of nostalgia working for all three games, with the whole old school arcade FATALITY thing. Also, just a hunch, but it would seem the super hero crossover is limiting that nostalgic appeal for the MK franchise fans. Not everyone wants chocolate in their peanut butter.

Finally, we have a glimpse at our members’ favorite characters:

Soul: Kilik, then Ivy
SF: Ryu, then Chun Li
MK: Scorpion, then Joker

Well, as an old Street Fighter champion, I can totally see those results making sense. Even though Chun Li was way better. And I’m afraid my most recent experience with Mortal Kombat was, um, the movie. Which had a bitchin’ soundtrack, so don’t even make fun of me. Anyway, the point is you guys need to speak up! Tell me more about these characters, and what you think is making one game more popular than the other.
 

Hey, guys, just a little something to hold you while I finish tonight’s serving of data fun: http://www.gamasutra.com/php-bin/news_index.php?story=22486

One of our more popular older columns was a look at “second favorite games.” We were trying to see if your love for one game predicted what your OTHER favorite games would be. Now we’re wondering… does the amount you love a game predict your other favorites? Let’s take a look.

We chose for our survey a bunch of Free To Play titles, just to keep it consistent. Of course, we included WOW just to establish a benchmark, but for the most part, we were kind of hoping to see patterns among a series of games that analysts tend to lump together.

Today’s PC game data is pulled from GamerDNA members who use Xfire. Even the “small” games have over a thousand players (at least at the “dabbled” level) from whom we can pull data. But please note that the free to plays have a lot of dabblers, but not a lot of people who have played more than a hundred hours. There is still a decent sample size, but I caution everyone to realize that only the traditional MMOs and console games have massive numbers of people playing at the 100+ hour range. All the products on this list have devoted followings, and since this is an “also played” column I went ahead with the numbers. But keep that in mind. And with the caveats out of the way… here we go!

First, let’s just kick off with the thousand pound gorilla, World of Warcraft.

It’s like a line of toy soldiers marching off into the sunset. In fact, that’s the most interesting thing about this chart. It’s completely regular. The proportions are nearly the same for each game, and every line trends UP. The more devoted a WOW player someone is, the MORE likely they are to play other games more often. That is awesome news for the game industry, if you think about it!

But the conventional MMO seems to produce more conventional gamers, even as they’re more devoted. The top also-played games for WOW devotees are all very mainstream success stories. There’s nothing quirky or odd or unusual about the favored games of WoW players. As many have noted, one of the secrets to the success of WoW is that it appeals very much to the mass market, and the tastes/talents of that market. The only title that appeared on the top ten list of 100 hour players that did not appear on the less devoted WOW consumer’s list was, unsurprisingly, Warcraft III. Big shock, the people who really adored the IP went looking for other examples of that IP, and for Blizzard, it hardly matters if they went from the MMO to the other, or vice versa.

Maplestory has something missing from its greatest also played hits list. See if you can see it.

You’d really have to see all the other charts first in order to catch it, to be fair. Every other game in today’s survey has its players listing Call of Duty. WOW players, for example, have THREE COD titles in the top list. Call of Duty 4: Multiplayer, COD4: Single player, and COD2: Single player. At first we thought it might say something about the user’s computer, but the longer you stare at the data, the less likely that explanation seems to be. And it can’t be a disaffection with shooters, not with Counter-Strike in the number two spot, and Battlefield, Wolfenstein, and others up there as well. Maplestory players, please explain!

Perfect World is a weird one.  Technically, “Perfect World” is a game portal, not a game. Perfect World International is the free to play MMO in the portfolio, but there’s a variety of games included in Perfect World, including “Hot Dance Party,” bless them.

“Only” half of those who dabbled in Perfect World tried WOW. Half is a crazy number, sure, but considering the rest of the games show 60% or more in the Tried WOW category (well, fine, Runescape is sitting at 58%), that 10% difference is pretty big. 

However, the degree to which the Perfect World players grow less likely to have played WOW (as involvement in their primary game increases) is not terribly sharp. The sharpest change comes from Shaiya players. 61% of people who tried Shaiya have also tried WOW. But of Shaiya players who have put in ten plus hours, only 49% have tried WOW.

The most remarkable thing about the Shaiya chart, IMO, is the way that the more devoted the players are to that particular free to play title, the less they seem to game at all. The drop-offs in play time for all of the most popular “also played” games are steep, except for the freebies that come with one’s computer… and Combat Arms.

That game appears on both the Perfect World and the Shaiya chart. If you’re unfamiliar with the title, check it out – http://combatarms.nexon.net/Intro.aspx. No one should be surprised that people who enjoy free to play games (completely free, even to the extent of the game itself) would also enjoy a free to play FPS!

Shaiya has one other interesting outlier, one that I couldn’t put on the chart – the most devoted players have Last Chaos on their favorite list, and it ranks very highly. 30% of the 100 hour crowd gives that game as an also played. That title doesn’t even appear on the dabbler lists, and indeed, doesn’t appear on ANY of the other top ten also played games for the other titles in this article. The explanation isn’t too mysterious, however – Last Chaos is run out of the same portal as Shaiya. Just as the Sony Station Pass has been the salvation of several niche titles, the portal concept has really goosed a lot of games on the margins of the mass market.

Runescape has, in some ways, a player population even more unusual than Shaiya. See if you can see the thing that struck me first:

Yep. The top “also played” game for all the other titles is always WOW, among the dabblers, and stays in the top ten even if it drops off sharply. For Runescape fans, WOW is beaten out by both Minesweeper AND Solitaire.

What do Perfect World, Shaiya, and Maplestory users all have in their top also played lists? Silkroad. Which of those games are also adored by Silkroad players, enough to break them into the top ten or twelve?

None.

In fact, the interesting thing about Silkroad players, at least in our sample, is how conventional they are. Four of their also played games are the Windows freebies. The rest are shooters. America’s Army is the most unusual title on the list, in terms of overall popularity among GamerDNA players. THAT made me go “hrm?” Silkroad Online is a Korean free to play PVP MMO. Its “thief versus guard versus trader” setup is an interesting twist, and it could be that the combination of PVP and purposeful gameplay is enough to set it apart from the other free to play MMOs.

So, now that we’ve had our fun looking at all the games, any big picture thoughts?

Well, first off, we are a nation of Solitaire junkies. Shaiya fans have the card playing game ranked the lowest at fourth place, but everyone else has it in the winner’s circle. Even WOW players, who are less likely than the others are to have the free Windows games in their top ten, still have Solitaire in third place.

Portals are where it’s at. A player that has tried one offering from a portal is much more likely to try another offering that takes their account name and password.

Most obviously, those who have tried a free to play game are more willing to try other games that don’t take a regular bite out of your wallet, but are not at all unwilling to spend money on a mass market success. But that’s really the only thing they’ve got in common. This data seems to prove that you can’t lump together the free to play aficionados, any more than you can lump together all shooter players.

What do you think?
 

(Note to readers: We will be updating this blog with this kind of column every other Friday for the foreseeable future. Thanks for hanging in there with me while we figure out the best plans of attack!)

If you play WoW, chances are that you know someone who stayed home from work or school on launch day for Wrath of the Lich King, just to make progress on the brand new levels. You may even see that person in the mirror every day, and you know you should be embarrassed but you’re totally not.

We took a look at a sample of our WoW players from the launch of Lich King until now, just to see how the leveling went. Come along and see how the ponies ran.

First, as always, let me define the sample. There are more than three thousand people in our sample today. This is not a truly random sample, because everyone in it had to have a level 70 character at the time that WOTLK launched. (We ruled out people who played Death Knights as their main, because a) there weren’t very many, b) they started at 55, so comparing how fast they got to 80 to characters starting at 70 wasn’t fair, and c) any class with that much “new shiny” isn’t going to be a good comparison to the old classes.) Finally, to make the comparisons as fair as possible, we only included people who got the expansion in the first ten days. Leveling up in a newly opened area is a different kettle of fish from leveling in an area that doesn’t have a giant glut of humanity.

So, how long did it take?

Fortunately for my sanity, the bulk of players – 44% – took between 16 and 30 days to go those ten big levels. More importantly, the straight up average number of days given the whole sample was 29 days. It’s good to know that the average user in our sample took bathroom breaks occasionally.

However, we can’t say that for 18% of the users in our sample who managed the maxing out trick in less than two weeks. EIGHTEEN PERCENT, y’all. Sure, the sample wasn’t random, and we looked at people who were at the cap and bought the expansion as soon as they could. Sure, the sample is therefore slightly biased towards the higher end of the casual to uber scale. But really, people. Two weeks? That’s a lot of used vacation time there, because I don’t care how casual friendly WoW is, you don’t go ten levels in less than two weeks with just an hour or two in the evenings.

All right. If we broke down each of those pie wedges by class, what would we see? Let’s start by refreshing our memories as to what the class breakdown across the population for WoW (pre-Death Knight) looked like:

Okay, now let’s see the new numbers:

Note: The pie wedge colors don’t match. Sorry. If I had endless amounts of time, I’d go back and make the old chart match the new charts, but meanwhile, just make the adjustment in your head.

That is interesting as all get out. The crazy people who probably peed into empty Red Bull cans at their desks are evenly spread across the classes. There’s no one class that leaps out at you as being particularly fast at the level game.

The other three leveling speeds look more like our class breakdown chart, but not exactly. The distribution is far more even than I would have expected. Clearly, in WoW, there isn’t a particular class that sucks up all the minmaxing leveling junkies.

Ah, but is there a race that is most efficient? Here are the pies:

As with the class spread, the spread among races was not nearly as wide in the group of players who raced to 80. I find the pie for the most typical leveling speed to be the most interesting – you’ve got your two big clumps for the two most popular races, which makes sense – but a very even racial distribution across the board for the rest. The slower leveling groups reverted to closer to the proportions found in the actual population.

Finally, is there a class/race combo that did the Lich King levels in record time?

I’m not seriously suggesting we analyze that chart. I just think it’s neat.

I took the liberty of removing every class/race combo where none of the four time frames got even two percent of the total sample. We are talking about very small raw numbers of people, and I’d be concerned about trying to assume too much. You can get out a magnifying glass and look at the big chart if you’re that curious.

A bunch of class race combos had the majority of its players max out in the first two weeks: Tauren Druid and Shaman, Night Elf Priest and Rogue, the Undead Priest, Rogue, and Warlock, Human Priest. The Human Paladins and the Night Elf Druids both had the majority of their members finishing in the third group. And most of the Night Elf Hunters finished the race way behind the curve… or perhaps Night Elf Hunter players are too smart to bother racing? Who knows?

You can’t look at this chart and truly determine the most efficient leveling combination, because the results of this bar chart reflect how popular a particular race is. But you can certainly see within each group how fast a particular combination was able to max out.

All right – over to you. Any surprises? How close to “normal” were you in the horse race? Do you think the horse race was kind of silly, or is it always worth it to max out as soon as possible? Most importantly… did you actually pee in an empty Red Bull can at any point, and if so… why?
 

Back in October, we ran a couple articles that gave you a snapshot of the kind of person who played the various classes in World of Warcraft. (I know, in internet time, that was ages ago. If you want to frolic down memory lane, the links are http://blog.gamerdna.com/blog/2008/10/17/bartle-gender-and-wow/ and http://blog.gamerdna.com/blog/2008/10/24/horde-vs-alliance-data-smackdown/ – enjoy!)

Now that the Death Knight class has been out for nearly three whole months, we figure the flavor of the month kids have had their turn at bat, and the real fans of the new class are settled in. The sample for today’s column is a little more than 500 people, all of whom were active WOW players before the launch, and actively playing their Death Knight. “Actively” as measured by playing sessions – just having one of the new class in the character list isn’t enough to count here.

On with the show:

First, a fun fact: 47% of all Death Knights being played as the primary character are level 80. 77% are 70+. Levels below that are just a tiny number of people at each level, with one odd data point – 7% of primary death knights are at level 64 exactly. Without being a death knight myself, I can’t venture a guess as to any possible causes. I look forward to the comment threads.

Humans and blood elves, what a surprise. In raw numbers, those are the two most popular races for WOW as a whole, so the fact that they are the two most popular races for the Death Knight isn’t a surprise. Even when people are trying to play something as tough and powerful and cool as a DEATH KNIGHT, they still want to be pretty. Admittedly, people seem to care less about being pretty death knights as opposed to other classes – human characters are 38% of the total in the game, and as you can see, DKs are only 24% of the total.

I am told that humans are a popular choice in part because there’s less faction grinding required for the widest possible access to in game goodies. This makes sense, given that the class started life as an alt for most people. And it would explain why the proportion of human characters of the new class is bigger than any other class. One problem with that theory – there is no equivalent faction explanation for Horde that I’m aware of, and the blood elf proportion is even bigger than the human wedge of the pie. So, I’m going back to the pretty theory. I said back in October that even though everyone tries the freak races, they tend to gravitate to human before long… and blood elves are as human as the Horde gets in terms of appearance. This has nothing to do with gender – male players are less concerned than female players about being pretty, in that there are almost no female players with orc characters and only a handful more playing dwarves. But men still want to look good.

This pie shows the gender of the player, not the character. In WOW as a whole the ratio of men to women is still around 4.5 to 1, so the DK (at least as a main character) is definitely skewing to the manly players. Again, not really a shock to anyone.

Each column represents the average number of points spent in each tree by players with a DK as a main. I made the mistake of asking some DKs of my acquaintance to tell me a little more about the different builds. My head exploded. One of the people I spoke with, a former reporter who understands the perils of too much information, suggested I check out an uberguild’s DK forum and provide a link, rather than try to regurgitate it all here: http://elitistjerks.com/f72/

Last, let’s look over the Bartle data. Here’s the breakdown for everyone who has ever taken the Bartle test:

Basically, this represents everyone’s primary stat. So, if you took the quiz and your highest score was in the killer category, you would be represented in the killer pie wedge.

(Side note: These days, everyone wants their hired writer to be sure to include terms in the finished piece that will goose the Google ranking. GamerDNA is hereby claiming the hotly contested KILLER PIE WEDGE search term.)

Now let’s check out the pie for WOW:

Why, I do declare… it’s almost like WOW players make up such a significant part of the pool of users who have taken the Bartle that the results are similar. A single percentage point was subtracted from Explorer and given over to Killer, which, to be honest, kind of makes me giggle. I mean, of all ways for WOW players to deviate from the overall pool, an extra point to “killer” would have been my last guess.

But, as usual, I digress.

Let’s see the pie for Death Knights.

You know that t-shirt that says “Join the Army: Travel the world, meeting interesting people, and kill them”? Apparently that is the official shirt of the typical Death Knight, or at least of the typical player with a Death Knight main.

So, to sum up. A Death Knight is probably a male, the strong silent type who really loves exploring and killing, doesn’t go for the more fantastic race choices that often (but will choose a non-standard race more often than the general WOW player does), and really, really loves the game – because he’s not only got his DK over 70, but his DK is at least his second character.

Your turn! How does your Death Knight deviate from the norm?

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 25^th or the 26^th 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 25^th. 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 25^th and 26^th 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 25^th and the 26^th. 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 25^th or 26^th. 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?

(Note: You may have already seen this article on other sites. This is my clever way of telling you that we’re exploring partnerships with awesome news sites, where they publish our ideas and data as exclusive news, and then we post a few days later. You’ll always be able to find the material here, but probably not on Fridays anymore. But, hey, you’re reading the blog every day, right? Right?! *looks hopeful*)

What a freaking year. The weather outside is frightful for newcomers to the MMO genre, with a Blizzard that’s been going on for so long that no one remembers what swimsuit weather is like. WAR broke out. Expansion packs rained down like meteors, but left no craters in the marketplace. And yet, good news abounds if you know how to read the signs. Come along with us as we look over the second half of 2008.

Today’s column features data from July through December. GamerDNA being a startup, our data collection in the first half of the year was not consistent enough to use for anything but wild guessing and drinking games.

Listen, a start up tech company can make ANYTHING into a drinking game.

We’re using Xfire, and the pool consists of GamerDNA members who have created a profile. This sample pool has grown steadily since the summer – you can look at Part 1 here: http://blog.gamerdna.com/blog/2008/12/19/the-gamerdna-year-in-review-part-1/ We are only looking at the top 100 titles in terms of logins, which means some titles dropped off the chart even though they didn’t lose significant numbers of customers – for example, Pirates of the Burning Sea has found a core of dedicated players, but while their logins remained relatively stable, other titles grew to the point of knocking POTBS off the chart.

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.

December numbers are projections, since December is not yet over. The projections are based on the time played in December up to the point where we pulled the data, and typical player behavior trends during the winter holidays. (Next week, we’ll be doing a feature on player behavior over the holiday. What titles were hot gifts? What games were good enough for the day after Christmas, but not good enough to last until the New Year? Be sure to tune in!)

I have two “outliers” in there to give you all some points of comparison. Call of Duty 4 was, according to Xfire data, the most played non-MMO on the PC in the second half of 2008. And Shaiya has, at least among GamerDNA members, been one of the more popular Asian Free To Play MMOs this year. Having those data points gives you an idea as to the bigger picture outside the MMO ghetto.

Finally, what today’s data is reflecting is the number of playing sessions each game enjoyed with GamerDNA members. It’s not a perfect yardstick – if you logged in at all, it counts. That means the guy logging in to check his auctions is counted the same as the freak who raided for 24 straight hours, you know who you are, and dude, that’s not healthy. What our data does NOT reflect is subscription rates, number of players, or anything like that. You might say these charts reflect interest and motivation, not financial figures.

On to the charts! First, let’s look at trends in log ins. Starting from a baseline set in June, we looked at the percentage changes in log ins from month to month. Raw numbers are important – we’ll get to them in a bit – but here we can compare growth a little more fairly. Tabula Rasa adding 200 users is a big deal. WOW adding 200 users is slightly less exciting than watching CSPAN, in that it may be exciting to wonky dorks with calculator watches, but the rest of us have games to play.

All right, that’s a little hard to read. I just like seeing all the lines together. Let me break it down a little for you:

So, how did the launch of a triple-A title affect the log in patterns of other big MMOs?

The launch of WAR had a devastating effect on Age of Conan. Guild Wars (which is a little inflated with GamerDNA, in that more GamerDNA members play it than would appear in a true random sample. That community was an early partner with us) and LOTRO stagnated during WAR’s launch, but both began growing again the following month. A slight dip happened for Tabula Rasa, but that title immediately rebounded. Anarchy Online, Star Wars Galaxies, and EVE grew during WAR’s launch. The growth rate in the number of played hours for WOW was utterly unimpeded by the launch of WAR.

In other words, the launch of WAR, a highly anticipated title, had no lasting negative effect on any title besides one that was already trending downwards, *and* occupying the exact same playstyle niche. As we saw in other Market Trends columns this year, the only thing WAR seemed to do was to remind people who had stopped playing MMOs how much fun they were. It didn’t eat into other games (besides the one in the same ecological niche), but although players didn’t necessarily stick with WAR, the other PVP games in the genre showed improvement in the weeks following the launch of WAR, particularly Guild Wars and EVE.

Aside from that, what do the numbers tell us? Let me begin with one caveat – GamerDNA’s own growth is not accounted for with these numbers. In other words, a slight growth line is actually a function of more members for GamerDNA, NOT the product. In previous Market Trends columns, we’ve addressed this by using the same group of players and taken snapshots of their playing habits over time. With this year in review column, we are looking at total logins for every member. And since the number of members is growing, so too are the logins. Upward trends are not as good as they appear, and downward trends are actually worse than they look. So keep that in mind as you’re reading.

The impending cancellation of Tabula Rasa is depressing in that any such event is depressing. And certainly given NCsoft’s expectations for the title, the game’s performance and growth was not acceptable. But until the cancellation announcement in November, numbers were trending in the right direction, however slightly. Players were growing more interested in the sci fi MMO shooter, and logins were on the rise. If its development had not been so long, so expensive, and so vastly overhyped and mismarketed, this title could have been left alone to find its legs and found some small measure of success in a long tail environment akin to the Sony Station Pass.

Of concern to EA, the number of logins to Warhammer Online are trending in the wrong direction despite a successful launch. Exact subscriber numbers are unknown (the press releases have described registered users, which counts players on their thirty day trial, and not paying subscribers), but estimates are consistently under a half million and falling. It is too soon to determine a genuine trend, and the situation bears close examination in the coming year. The team behind the title is famous for agile patching, and any game so dependent on PVP balance needs time to find its stride. Considering how good the launch of WAR was for the entire genre, proving beyond a doubt that a rising tide lifts all boats (well, except for the boats with giant holes in the hull), everyone should be hoping for long term success.

WAR’s companion in the PVP fantasy niche, Age of Conan, was trending downwards before WAR’s launch. Logins dropped dramatically during that event, and then resumed the slower bleed. However, AOC can’t be counted out of the game in 2009. Its developer doesn’t give up easily. Anarchy Online, which I included just for this paragraph’s comparison, put up raw numbers close to Dungeons and Dragons Online and Everquest 2 – and had a much more consistent year than either of those two products – and had an even worse starting year. And the numbers for December were very encouraging – players had already played more in the first half of the month than they had in November.

The smoothest, most inexorable trend line on the whole chart is WOW. If you squint, you can see a faint disturbance in the force during the WAR launch, but the infamous juggernaut shrugged it off and kept marching. To me, the big story is how smooth that line is, and Blizzard shouldn’t necessarily be pleased. Remember how I said that some degree of upward trending on this chart is a reflection of GamerDNA’s growth, not the titles? I suspect that is what’s going on here. If you look at the data in this analysis, you can see that WoW was actually very faintly losing ground before the launch of Lich King.  It’s incredibly minor, but it’s there.  

Lord of the Rings Online is performing slightly ahead of WOW, in that regard. Their loss rate was a little bigger than WOW’s before the launch of their expansion pack, Mines of Moria. Their growth rate since then has been slightly ahead of the industry leader.

Turbine in general must be pleased. In addition to the solid performance of LOTRO, DDO has staged a bit of a comeback. It’s not on my line chart, because DDO fell off the top 100 chart in the middle of the summer… but it came back two months ago. Its login numbers have tripled since the summer, and if the trend continues, the game will be a solid performer in 2009.

DDO would probably be even more successful if Turbine offered something similar to Sony’s Station Pass. SWG and EQ2 are living proof. Like DDO, EQ2 fell off the top 100 chart in the middle of 2008, but came roaring back with yet another successful expansion pack (The Shadow Odyssey). It was so successful that EQ2 is now posting the best login numbers out of all of the older/smaller MMOs. SWG is hardly having a bad year – they have stabilized with their core user base, and their numbers remained remarkably consistent.

EVE was tremendously successful in the second half of 2008. Their gains were proportionally more significant than any of the other examined titles, and trended upwards on an exponential line. Their community communication has always been solid, and their content enjoys regular infusions of new material. As resistance to PVP fades (and the fact that player versus player design and balance has been improving steadily in the last five years is probably not a coincidence), and as the market gorges itself on Yet Another Batch Of Naked Elves, a solid Sci-Fi PVP title is in a great spot to take advantage of users looking for something more.

Let’s check out the last chart, for a look at the big picture. The actual numbers belong to GamerDNA, but these bars represent the number of logins for each month. As I said long ago at the beginning of this marathon column: If you logged in, checked your mail, and logged out, it counted as one log in. So no, it’s not perfect – it measures the email checker and the catassing raider as equal – but it’s better than nothing.

Raw numbers can be misleading in terms of showing you the progress a title has (or hasn’t) made. But nothing beats raw numbers for giving you a sense of where people spend their time.

Declining or not, WOW is still hands down the place where the most time is being spent.

If we had been able to show a full year of data, AOC’s initial numbers would look much like WAR’s – and might suggest to some that the premise of a PVP centric game is too niche to support a multiyear development process and triple A budget. For what it’s worth, I don’t think that suggestion would be fair – we have not yet seen an MMO PVP game launch with the balance, the systems, and the technology right out of the gate. When that happens, hold on to your hats.

You can see that EVE and LOTRO are equally successful in terms of the time that people are spending there.

Guild Wars is hard to judge, given their early adoption of GamerDNA and disproportionate presence in our community skews the results. Their lack of subscription fee is also a factor that may be affecting the numbers – when it costs nothing to log in and check out how things are going… why not do so as long as the game is installed on your computer?

Finally, my eye is on Shaiya, and other titles like it. Their costs are lower. Their maintenance is less intensive and expensive. Customer service expectations are lower, as opposed to traditional subscription titles where the customer feels that his fifteen bucks a month entitles him to fast, personal service from a live human. And while it’s no WOW when it comes to sheer market share, getting a Shaiya out the door isn’t the gamble that getting a WOW, a WAR, or an AOC out the door can be. It’s no wonder that many similar games are in development right now – especially as the larger studios are collapsing or tightening their belts.

So that was the year! What do you think we’re going to see in 2009?
 

Now that the trait system is getting more of a workout, we here at GamerDNA decided the resulting data pile deserved a column of its own. Remember, you too can participate in this experiment by following the directions in last week’s column.

This week’s column is hard to pin down, thematically, so just chant to yourself “not all who wander are lost,” and come with me.
Some traits are easy. When it comes to a game’s setting, some things leap to mind. “Fantasy.” “Sci fi.” Even “post-apocalyptic” is one of those things that most people recognize when they see it, even if spelling it proves to be a bit more of a challenge. The “playing against” trait is even easier – most people say “players” or some variation of “NPC.” In fact, you see pretty clear clusters of results for all the traits but one: “Playing As.”

Either we have a massive identity crisis here in the gaming world, or what you think you are has nothing to do with the games you play. Rampant individualists for the win!

Within the Playing As category, the blue lines were all of the responses that got more than 2% of the category. The red is the percentage those particular traits represent for the entire trait system. Simply put, there are a crazy number of people who boot up a game in order to play as a soldier. Sure, that’s a reflection of how many games there are where the main character is a soldier of some kind, but the games wouldn’t be produced if there weren’t a tremendous hunger to portray that archetype. Interesting, given that our culture does not encourage people to become actual soldiers.

But as with all statistics, you need the big picture. Those eight traits in the Playing As category are the most popular, sure… but the rest of the category consists of 974 others. No other category has such a long tail. That’s what I mean by rampant individualists.

Just for fun, by the way, here are the current traits across the entire system that have managed to garner at least 1% of the total entries:

So, what interesting patterns emerge when we run comparisons? Let’s revisit the MMO world and see what trends pop out at us.

One thing MMO people do that isn’t done by players of other genres is to identify very closely with their particular classes. This habit tends to fragment their “playing as” trait participation, since each game has multiple classes, and often unique names for the classes.

But given that MMOs have a lot in common with each other, let’s take a look at the other trait categories. For simplicity’s sake, I’m going to limit this to four titles: WOW, WAR, LOTRO, and EVE.

When we look at the How It’s Played trait… no one agrees on how the games are played.

The most popular trait for WOW users in the How It’s Played category was “massively multiplayer,” with 32% of all WOW players selecting that trait.

Big deal, right? Everyone will pick that! In fact, I figured there would be enough overlap that I could make you a pretty graph to illustrate.

BZZT!

“Massively multiplayer” didn’t even make the How It’s Played list for EVE. The top How It’s Played trait for EVE was “complexity” with 24%. A tiny handful of WAR players chose “massively multiplater,” but when I say tiny, I mean less than 1%. WAR players went overwhelmingly with RVR, with 45% of players choosing that trait. 32% of LOTRO players selected “massively multiplayer,” but almost as many (31%) chose “story.” 29% of WOW players chose “raids” for How It’s Played, a trait that doesn’t appear in the lists of the other three games in our sample at all.

The Setting: The IP matters… except when it doesn’t.

Obviously, EVE is going to be a bit unusual here, given its non-fantasy setting. But the thing I find interesting about the EVE numbers is that EVE’s players did not get creative with the traits. 91% said the setting was “space.” Everyone else said “sci-fi fantasy.” The end. No long tail of craziness, no outliers, no one guy putting down “gay.”

The blue lines are WOW. The votes are clumped into three areas – Open World (30% of WOW players chose this), Fantasy (30%), and Dungeons (17%). The rest have fewer than 5% of players selecting them. The name of the IP is only given as the setting by 2% of players.

Compare that to LOTRO, where the name of the world was given as synonymous with setting by 53% of its players, or WAR, with 38% – both the top scoring Setting traits for the games.

“Fantasy,” a top trait of the system as a whole, did appear for all three fantasy MMO titles, but it was only a high scoring trait for WOW.

Finally, as I said, EVE players only gave one of two traits for the setting. LOTRO players were relatively precise as well, although in what I think is a lovely testament to the artwork, 26% of LOTRO players gave “beautiful scenery” as a setting trait. But WOW and WAR players got crazy with the traits in the long tail. I mean, Medieval Middle East (WAR)? Fantasy Hard Core? Or, really, my favorite, WOW and LOTRO are “high fantasy” but WAR isn’t?

Again, EVE players are precise and in agreement. They are playing against players. The end. No discussion, no farting around. Their opponent is clear. Not one single EVE player said anything different. It’s an example of group mind.

LOTRO and WAR players are a little more spread out than that, but the traits they list for their game’s Playing Against category are reasonably limited. WAR players offer five possible traits, four if you consider that Destruction and Order translate to the same thing as the WOW player’s version, the “opposing faction.” LOTRO players limit themselves to six, with poetic entries like “Armies of Sauron” and “Evildoers.” LOTRO players also list “Freeps” as an enemy, which is interesting given that the term means “Free Peoples of Middle Earth,” so by choosing that option, they’re essentially saying that they play as monsters.

WOW players are completely bonkers. They have given forty one possible options, at first glance. On second glance, the problem is getting them to agree on terms. LOTRO players, for example, all tend to simply say “NPC” when they mean any kind of non-player character, from monster to humanoid to instance boss. WOW players are more…creative. Terms include undead, demons, monsters, mobs, NPCs, elementals, murlocs, goblins, aliens, epic bosses, dragons, and more are all on the list, and all in statistically significant numbers, too. Once you lump them all into a single NPC category (and consolidate “alliance” with “alliance scum” and so on), you get a slightly more rational twelve traits.

So what do we see?

WAR, which has quite a bit of PVE content even with a PVP emphasis, triumphs with its marketing message of PVP action. WAR players are also likely to specifically declare the name of the opposing faction as their enemy, which may suggest that WOW players are more likely to have characters of both alignments than WAR players. In WAR, Destruction is vastly outnumbering Order players, whereas the situation is reversed (and not quite as drastic) in WOW, where the sides are called Horde and Alliance.

And even after the consolidation, when WOW players think about what they’re fighting, a lot more comes to mind, allowing this title to be more things to more people.

Finally, let’s talk Tone.

This time, LOTRO and EVE players are both tightly focused, and both WOW and WAR players can’t seem to agree. Again, that’s not a disadvantage in an MMO – you want to appeal to as many people as possible!

Look at the words WAR users have chosen – dark, violent, sexy, serious. 7% say it’s awesome. You’ve almost certainly got a good mental image right now. Now contrast that with WOW traits – colorful, fun, amusing, addictive. 14% said fun.

Just for the heck of it, I went back to the main data pull that Steve The Data Man gave me this morning. I wanted to see what MMO games got the fun trait from users.

WOW.

And City of Heroes.

I don’t know what that means, exactly, but I think it means the industry has some work to do.
 

I have to confess that after years of working professionally with elves and the people who love them, I have a serious thing for zombies, lasers, and rocket ships. Sometimes your mind just needs a palate cleanser, you know? And furthermore, every time I see a multiplayer title with a sci-fi or post-apocalyptic setting, I shake my metaphorical pom poms for it. See, the massively multiplayer industry won’t stop making WoW clones until something besides fantasy hits a home run. Could be Star Wars, could be Starcraft, could be one of the billion things in development, but until it happens, I will turn an encouraging word to any multiplayer title with either robots or the undead.

In the past, that has meant I’ve been cheering for things that did not deserve my love. It’s like high school all over again. But the latest zombie title is getting lots of love, and critical accolades to boot. And even though it is technically a shooter, it’s taking advantage of gameplay elements familiar to any fan of MMOs (new content releases, dynamic enemy spawn, cooperative gameplay with healing).

Left 4 Dead, aside from the egregious title spelling, has made a lot of good choices, and players are responding. http://www.shacknews.com/onearticle.x/56173 Here at GamerDNA, we strive to tell you a little more besides “omg, lots of people bought it.” We also strive to introduce new features that will tell you more about the games you love, the games you might love, and the people who are similar to you.

So, today’s column seeks to kill two birds with one stone – we’re going to take a closer look at the kind of player who picked up L4D, and get more of you to use the trait system.

See, the trait system is relatively new to GamerDNA, and not all of you have tried it yet. (This is your chance! Log in. Click your name, and choose “My Home” from the drop down menu. Choose the third tab, “Games.” Add games if you need to do so. If you select “liked it” when you add a title, it’ll appear in a chart on that page, with an option to add traits. Click on “add traits.” The system will offer you the most popular options, but if they don’t work for you, click the plus sign and add your own – it could be that what you’re about to add only needed your vote to become one of the most popular options!) The trait system is going to provide some awesome columns in the future, but only if you make it happen.

Onwards! Let’s take a look at what OTHER games our L4D contingent is enjoying – if they are Xbox players:

We looked at the top twenty games enjoyed by the GamerDNA members who grabbed Left 4 Dead on the Xbox. The early adopters of the zombie game are pretty dedicated Xbox players across the board. Compare those same games with the general population:

As you can see, the early adopter guys are more likely than the average player to have picked up… oh, everything. The only title that I would have expected that is not on the list is Fallout 3 – a bizarre omission given the setting and the graphic nature of the title. It’s even stranger given the presence of Oblivion and Fable on the list. But this is a list of the top games played by all Left 4 Dead players, and somehow there just wasn’t enough crossover to crack the top twenty. (It was close, at 53%, but you know what they say, close only counts in horseshoes and hand grenades.)

Let’s see how PC players of Left 4 Dead compare to Xbox users, in terms of the other titles that they’ve played. This chart is looking at Left 4 Dead users, and the top PC games they’ve played throughout their tracked history.

Obviously, Halo 3 players don’t have a PC option, and PC players have more options in terms of massively multiplayer games. And Fallout 3 does appear in this top twenty… along with Minesweeper. Oh, you crazy grid game, how we all secretly adore you, calling you for 3 AM booty calls but never, ever putting you into our DNA. But I digress. I think it’s interesting that Fallout 3 makes the PC list for the L4D players but not the Xbox list, and BioShock makes the Xbox list but not the PC list. I would have expected all three titles to be on both lists, myself.

Just for the sake of balance, here’s the chart to see how those PC games compare to the regular Xfire population:

Now we get to the GamerDNA goodness – the traits. This sample pool is a bit small, but has over a thousand different system entries to draw from. It could be interesting to see if this data changes after this article runs, just to see if you column readers changed the shape of the results.

About 45% of the traits were assigned by PC players, and 55% came from people who played the game on the Xbox. In each of the following charts, the percentages reflect the percent of their own pool. Or, put another way, 19% of PC players say that the game is a cooperative multiplayer game, and 14% of Xbox players say the same thing.
 

You can see that everyone can agree that it’s a cooperative multiplayer game. Interestingly, so far only PC players described the game as fast paced.

PC players, huddling in their dens, describe the game as intense more than twice as often as their couch dwelling brethren do. But Xbox players are twice as likely to use the genre as synonymous with tone than PC players. And they’re the only ones to use the word aggressive to describe the feeling they get when they play.

From this one, I conclude that Xbox players are slightly more likely to take the option to play as a zombie than the PC players are. We can double check with the next trait:

Yep. More than twice as likely, as a matter of fact. By the way, with MMOs, players tend to put in their specific class/race for the Playing As trait. Shooters, not so much. But with this hybrid style of game, we had a decent number put in which of the different characters they chose – just not often enough to show on the chart, the way the female and the one zombie did. Taken collectively, though, it was a decent number.

And here we see that PC users are quick to describe the type of urban environment, whereas the console players (who seem to me to ALWAYS play in some kind of nasty decayed environment) were more likely to simply describe it as urban. But, lest we make too many assumptions, Xbox players were more likely to describe the setting in a creative way, whereas the PC players said “post ap” and called it a day.

In other words, it’s safe to say that your medium will dictate to a large degree your emotional response to the product – even if the product is exactly the same.

Now that’s an interesting thing. So, what other titles do you think benefit (or suffer) from that phenomenon?