Are *any* games as popular as World of Warcraft?

[Daniel Remenak]

No other single game has the market penetration and staying power of
WoW as things stand.

XFire collects statistics[1] from their (large) network, if you're
interested in "minutes played" as opposed to "copies sold."    Be
aware that it's not a random sample, though; some game communities
(like Call of Duty) have a proportionally large XFire presence
compared to others.  As far as subscriber-driven MMORPGs go,
MMOGCharts[2] is another reasonable source of statistics (note that
Guild Wars and certain other MMOGs are not subscriber driven, so they
won't show up on their lists).

[1] http://www.xfire.com/cms/stats/
[2] http://www.mmogchart.com/Chart7.html

--Daniel Remenak

On 10/1/07, Dan Kegel <dank06 at kegel.com> wrote:
> I spent some time noodling around looking
> at what games are really popular (I wouldn't
> know firsthand, I don't play much).
> There's some data at
> http://www.amazon.com/gp/bestsellers/videogames
> (click on PC Games).
> I tried to cross-check titles with Google Trends to
> see which ones seem enduringly popular, but I
> haven't found any that beat World of Warcraft yet:
> http://www.google.com/trends?q=world+of+warcraft%2C+guild+wars%2C+tomb+raider%2C+bioshock%2C+half-life+2
>
> Is Google search popularity a bad measure, or does it
> reflect the public's mood well?
> - Dan
>
>
>