Raptr, a popular game tracking application, has released some new playtime stats for World of Warcraft: Cataclysm.
Not surprisingly, the top 11% of hardcore fans are driving the majority of overall playtime. In fact, the top player for World of Warcraft on Raptr clocked in 149 hours in one week. That’s a little over 6 days straight.
On the flipside, overall playtime averages for WoW were nearly identical to other top FPS games on console. For WoW, the average total playtime on the 1st day of release was 6.23 hours, which is comparable with such top-tier game series including Call of Duty and Halo. The average game session length is 2.1 hours, which is also comparable. How is that possible considering how different these types of games are?
Digging into the data we see that the reason these averages are so closely aligned is because while there may be avid gamers out there who are regularly clocking in +30 hours a week (which is about 1/3 of the overall audience), there are also a significant number of gamers that play less than 5 hours a week. Even in a massively addictive and deeply enthralling game like WoW, a good chunk of leisure gamers will only play a few hours here and there, even if they got the expansion pack on day one. There appears to be a distinct ying yang balance between avid gamers and leisure games in just about any game, which results in playtime averages that hover around the same range.
Other interesting stats:
* World of Warcraft playtime has grown 5 times since the summer of 2010, as previous subscribers flocked back to the game to drive up overall playtime to record highs.For more details on the World of Warcraft: Calaclysm report, head over to Raptr’s blog at:
* World of Warcraft time played per day has grown 1.5 times since the summer of 2010.
* World of Warcraft playtime per week has grown to 20 hours – almost double of what it was in the summer of 2010.
* World of Warcraft stole the most playtime hours from StarCraft 2, Call of Duty: Black Ops, and League of Legends.
http://blog.raptr.com/2010/12/17/raptr-world-of-warcraft-cataclysm-report/
Raptr is also giving away a 1-year subscription to World of Warcraft for “liking” its FaceBook page located here: http://www.facebook.com/pages/Raptr/15408989556. An extra entry for the contest can also be earned by “liking” the new report on the blog additionally.
