The PC gaming utility, Raptr, tracks the time its users spend playing titles and aggregates it into a monthly press release. Because its purpose is recording game footage, adjusting quality settings, and so forth, it is not limited to any specific catalog of games. It allows a comparison developers, publishers, and distribution platforms, as long as the average Raptr user is representative of that market.
It should be noted that, because game-hours are the recorded metric, it is not necessarily a good experiment to judge sales figures from. It is weighted by the average session length per user and how frequently the average user plays it, and not just how many people use it. As such, it will probably over-represent MMOs, MOBAs, and other multiplayer games… unless you are looking for aggregate game time, which is exactly what this survey provides (and sales figures are bad at determining).
From last month, League of Legends lost a bit of share, down from 22.54% of total to 22.25%. The second place contender, World of Warcraft, jumped from 7.63% of total game time to 8.53%. This means that League of Legends dropped from being 195% more popular than WoW to being 160% more popular. World of Warcraft is expected to jump further due to its Warlords of Draenor expansion that released in early November. The October bump, reported today, was likely due to the pre-expansion patch and promotional events.
Diablo III, the other Blizzard title on this chart, lost three places (and almost half of its play time) this month. It currently rests above Minecraft as it dropped below Smite and Counter-Strike: GO and ArcheAge moved up past it. PAYDAY 2 and FIFA 15 represented the capital letters by jumping onto the list (back onto in PAYDAY 2's case) in 14th and 15th spot, respectively.
Borderlands: The Pre-Sequel and Middle-Earth: Shadow of Mordor are new games for October, and appeared on the list in 18th and 19th place. Both titles bumped Team Fortress 2 down to 20th place, almost spiting the Halloween promotion, although its play time increased from September.
ArcheAge moved up yet once
ArcheAge moved up yet once again? Dayum, this smells like a true success after all.
How is this considered
How is this considered accurate?
From the steamcharts.com data:
dota2: hours played = 372,000,000
cs:go: hours played = 93,000,000
If you want to take away anything from raptr’s data, you would hope that the percentages for the games which we have accurate real hours played reflects the data they are reporting (if not then certain games are being over / under represented)
If the 3.88% for cs:go was accurate that means 1% = 23,969,072 thus dota2 having 5.62% would mean 134,706,185 players, which is massively lower than the real stat shows.
This shows either cs:go is over represented or dota2 is underrepresented in the raptr data.
Thus if the percentages for cs:go and dota2 don’t even remotely reflect their real hours played differences thus most of the other stats probably don’t.
Also compare the product, maybe lol players have a higher need to use the raptr third party recording system than the dota 2 players due to better ingame features …
Don’t dare question the
Don’t dare question the almighty statistical sampling methods. Raptr is perfect.
That’s basically the point:
That's basically the point: accurate to what? Here are some things to consider…
Steamcharts gets its data by polling concurrent players once per hour, per game. For the sake of argument, let's assume it does it on the hour. Also, from what I understand, Raptr sums end timestamp minus start timestamp, per session, per player. This means that Raptr will count a player that begins at 1:05pm and ends at 1:55pm as playing for 50 minutes, but Steamcharts will count it as nothing (unless Steam has some smoothing algorithm in their concurrent players). One game with shorter play sessions could get more uncounted sessions than another game that forces users to play some multiple of 60 minutes per sitting, give or take a bit. It will also over-represent games which have organized events on the hour (or whenever Steamcharts polls them).
Personally, I would expect that DOTA2 would be OVER represented (versus CS:GO) if that were the case, though — not under as your evidence shows.
As you said, it could also be that LoL (or CS:GO) players are more inclined to use Raptr than DOTA2 players. Perhaps they use it for in-game recording? Or maybe the AMD Gaming Evolved App was advertised somewhere that LoL players frequent? Or maybe GeForce Experience was advertised some place that a disproportional number of not-LoL players frequent, like StarCraft tournaments?
This is the point — this is data. It is up to us to use it properly.
great constructive reply,
great constructive reply, thanks!
Thanks!
Thanks!
As with every month, what a
As with every month, what a mostly depressing list.
Sad state for PC gaming when
Sad state for PC gaming when MOBAs, MMOs and f2ps are the most played games.
I leave my computer on 24/7
I leave my computer on 24/7 with Archage on…I am so glad its moving up the charts.
What the heck??? Where is
What the heck??? Where is “Plants vs. Zombies: Garden Warfare”? Everyone should give it a try. My 10 year old son and I play it as our #1 game now, it was hard to find a title that could get us away from Minecraft… but once we started, it quickly became our favorite.
So far the best news that I
So far the best news that I heard on this game and it feels great that it went up. It feels right and looking forward for this game to go up on top 3.