The MMO trends at Raptr are here. Not much is happening with the top games on PC.
The Raptr numbers reflect how many hours players spent with the Raptr add-on in an online PC game. Due to the nature of MMORPGs, they usually rank quite high, as they do this month.
Why we use the Raptr numbers to determine the trends instead of “official, calculated, representative” numbers, as some players might wish, is as follows: There are none. You can read more about that in our article on player numbers in MMOs.
Blizzard with 3 games in the Top 7
In January, once again League of Legends tops the chart. Followed by World of Warcraft. This remains relatively stable. Compared to the peak month of December, it lost 5% of playtime. An attack on the top spot during this add-on seems unlikely, but no one seriously expected that. A 5% decrease in playtime is certainly still within reasonable limits.
In contrast, WoW’s sister game “Hearthstone” made a leap, as the first full month now had the expansion “Goblins vs Gnomes” and this brought 24% more playtime.
The big winner is Diablo 3. The hack-and-slash game increased by over 70% and is shooting up from the middle of the pack. Now in February, the new season started – so one can assume that February will be even stronger.
The dominance of Blizzard is impressive. For the future, they are also gearing up: On March 3, the next expansion of Hearthstone is set to be presented at Pax East in Boston. Additionally, they are bringing the next online games with Heroes of the Storm and Overwatch into position. Perhaps Blizzard will dominate the list again in January 2016, but with different games.
ArcheAge can stop the bleeding, stabilizes, but how accurate are the numbers?
There is quite good news for the sand park MMO ArcheAge. It looked like a crash since November, but now it has recovered and even gained a bit in playtime. However, it is unknown how much of that was actually “active” play.
ArcheAge invites players to keep their characters “logged in” even when not playing. Recently, Trion Worlds made this easier and removed the AFK timer.
Guild Wars 2 and Final Fantasy XIV with a slight upward trend
Guild Wars 2 benefited somewhat from the announcement of the Heart of Thorns expansion. Playtime went up. However, that could change again soon. No date has been set for when the expansion will really come, according to ArenaNet. And there is no big “interim program” to keep players entertained in the meantime.
Somewhat improved is Final Fantasy XIV. Here, they cleverly work with free weekends, larger content releases and promotions. However, a breakthrough has yet to occur. Here, Square Enix prepared a rich employment program until the release of the expansion “Heavensward”.
Interested in which PC games were particularly popular in December? Here are the Raptr numbers from last year.
