In the MMO trends for June, there is an offensive from casual games and dinosaurs.
To start with, the note that you will probably ignore to complain in the comments: These 20 games in the list are not the real “Top 20” PC games, but rather reflect the hours that users of the program Raptr have spent on each game on PC. Raptr is linked to the graphics card manufacturer AMD. So, only “trends” can be observed if one assumes that the user group of the Raptr program remains relatively constant over the months.
Real numbers could only be provided by the game developers and they simply do not do that, those rascals.
Blizzard is doing it again – WoW and Heroes of the Storm are improving
WoW is back in the top 3, after it significantly lost in May. This is not due to more hours being played overall. Despite the Hellfire patch at the end of June, playing time has decreased further (which is quite normal in summer), but it has lost less than Dota 2 or GTA.
Heroes of the Storm was officially out for a full month in June and now finds itself in a strong eighth place. Diablo 3 is struggling quite a bit under the summer heat and the lack of new game content. A major patch has already been announced, but it will take time before it shows up again in the MMO trends. Hearthstone remains consistent.
Dinos win in June
The big winner in June is clearly the dinosaur MMO “Ark Survival Evolved”, which is still in Early Access, but has already achieved some sales success on Steam and is the “good mood” story of the summer, even though the game does not run on every PC and still has a long way to go.
Apart from Ark, especially casual games are on the rise. The dreaded Clicker Heroes is a time sink that many have running in the background. It launched on Steam in June. This is noticeable in the playtime. Raptr’s hour counting furthermore ensures that such games are strongly favored. This peculiarity of Raptr had long benefited the sandbox MMORPG ArcheAge with good rankings – you also received advantages if you let it run, even if you were not actually at your computer.
Disillusionment for classic MMORPGs waiting for their expansion
June was rather disillusioning for classic MMORPGs. For Final Fantasy XIV, the expansion came, but only late in June, and there was no observable trend shift yet.
Also, Star Wars: The Old Republic and Guild Wars 2 are losing rankings while they wait for the next big expansion. Guild Wars 2 even disappears entirely from the top 20, along with War Thunder. It appears to be the case: The better World of Tanks does, the less there is left of the pie for War Thunder, which was also shaken by a severe crisis last week.
