The MMO trends in November are not looking good for online games overall. Fallout 4 takes its toll. Only Heroes of the Storm is on the rise, while Guild Wars 2, Ark Survival Evolved, and SWTOR are declining.
The numbers come from Raptr. This is an online service installed with AMD graphics cards. The figures refer to play hours and the PC; they are not representative. There are no official numbers. Overall, 3.7% fewer play hours were recorded than in October.
Fallout 4 is eating up playtime
November saw the release of Fallout 4 – and Fallout 4 proved to be a real time consumer, entering at number 3, nearly pushing WoW out of the top 5. And this is despite Blizzard’s flagship gaining slightly in playtime.
Unfazed by this: LoL, which continues to thrive at rank 1.
Is there already trouble for Guild Wars 2 and SWTOR?
If you look at the middle of the table: SWTOR and Guild Wars 2 had their expansions, but playtime is surprisingly declining in November. GW2 is down 14%, SWTOR 8.7%. This is unexpected: Both games had made strong gains in October. Both expansions were released “at the end of October.” Heart of Thorns on October 23, KotfE for pre-order players on the 20th, and for the “rest” on October 27. So playtime could have increased again in November.
And even the surprise hit Ark Survival Evolved is losing momentum: 19.4% fewer hours were played in November compared to the previous month.
The MOBA Smite loses 23% of its playtime. Among all these bad news, there’s also some good: For HotS there is a 4.4% increase with the November patch.
Diablo 3 is extremely quiet again, Hearthstone hardly makes a ripple despite the adventure
Diablo 3 is very quiet again in November, losing 46% playtime. It’s a yo-yo game, depending on whether there’s a season or not, playtime drastically fluctuates. Surprisingly, Hearthstone loses 2.8% playtime on PC – despite the fact that an adventure came out in November.
While Warframe falls completely out of the top 20 from position 15 after a strong October, FF XIV improves its rank to 19. In November, 3.1 content eagerly anticipated came out.
Mein MMO says: The numbers clearly show what experts have long argued: Everything is interconnected; the different markets cannot be viewed in isolation. A “major event” like Fallout 4 affects the entire market, including online games.
That the three winners from October, GW2, SWTOR, and Warframe, are losing playtime in November is still surprising. We would have expected an increase in playtime for GW2 and SWTOR – perhaps it really was Fallout 4 or the multitude of other strong releases in November. Or the expansions are not as motivating in the long term as one would expect from MMO expansions and have already lost some motivation after just a few weeks.
Both are rather “unusual” expansions, with GW2 lacking the typical vertical progression (without a new level cap), and SWTOR using the episodic model.
