Three-year special
Slightly more noisy this year, here’s the new special graph, in commemoration of 3 years of data gathering and graph generation. Only the most major titles are drawn.
This website gathers data for various First Person Shooter games for PCs, and then build graphics with those numbers. This brings no answers, just questions. Where do we go from here?
December 24th, 2007 at 9:58 am
Thanks, it’s quite interesting to look at this graph. One thing that is odd is how much regular counterstrike dives when battlefiled 2 came out. You would think it would be counterstrike source that went down in players since the requirements for that match closer to that of bf2. It’s also interesting to see how 2142 effected bf2’s player base. And also how over the 3 year range wolfenstein et has remained at such a steady level.
I wonder if counterstrike is ever going to stop increasing in the number of players? It’s a fun game and it runs on pretty much any hardware now, so I think thats why it not only remains popular but continues to gain players.
December 24th, 2007 at 10:14 am
Funny enough, I think the biggest reason for CS’s popularity is… CS’s popularity itself. It’s much easier to enjoy a game when you’re sure to have a lot of players and servers to play against, or when all your buddies are playing it.
I didn’t expect it to continue rising though. I’m not sure there will be anything able to stop it in the next few years, if ever. There are too many parameters leading to its continuing popularity. We’d need a major shakeup in online FPS gaming for that to change.
December 24th, 2007 at 12:21 pm
Counter-Strike’s dip actually begins and finishes before BF2 comes out. Perhaps it’s the demo’s influence? I can certainly remember that thing being insanely popular.
December 24th, 2007 at 7:15 pm
Counter-Strikes popularity has to do with it being such a solid, skill based game, available to the masses. Every game on that list has tons of problems associated with them(BF2 biggest culprit? They can’t fix a fucking thing).
This chart is funny though, people thought the game was declining, but opposite is true.
December 25th, 2007 at 12:16 am
Most games decline with popularity with age. There’s very few exceptions. These include CS, CSS, CZ, W:ET, DoD, DoD:S (due in part to the free weekends, no doubt), Half-Life and the Halo demo. Games that have remained relatively steady include Soldier of Fortune 2, Halo, and UT2004. Price, developer support, and 3rd-party development (maps and mods) seem to be major contributions to the continued success of these games.
December 25th, 2007 at 4:29 am
Quite an interesting graph. Looks like about 35K people left to play Halo 3 in September, but ultimately came back.
Hmm… any chance we can get a version of this graph using the log(# players) as the y-axis? It would make all those games bunched up at the bottom easier to follow.
January 2nd, 2008 at 12:04 am
offtopic: but how come cod4 isnt listed anywhere!
March 2nd, 2008 at 1:29 pm
Great website! Very interesting, I would never have guessed CS is getting more popular.
I just jumped on here to ask for a log plot, but I see Mark beat me to it. If you haven’t tried it I’d recommend it, they’re easy and really useful for analysis.