Xbox Live top games of 2007
Major Nelson – of the Xbox Team – has posted a few lists with the most popular games for Live, the online system used on the Microsoft consoles. The list is ranked by number of unique users (or sales, in the case of Live Arcade titles) and covers the entire year of 2007. No raw numbers are listed, but it’s still interesting.
January 11th, 2008 at 2:33 am
Hey guys I am a student researching about gaming. My research includes the monetary aspect of gaming and gaming as a career. I have researched on the Web and found various websites that offer money for playing games, but most of them are con operations, could you guys help me with a few websites that offer money for playing games…..I found one that really works and pays decent amount of money for playing, this is the link for reference purpose….. [link removed] , do help me out and send me a few links…
January 30th, 2008 at 6:53 pm
I would have expected that you’d just delete that whole comment. Heh.
Since there’s no other place to put this… any idea what the latest huge dip in player activity is from? It seems too late and too big to be effected by school, especially when you compare it to the previous year.
I did notice that ET:QW seems to be calculated correctly once again. Steam issue was fixed with 1.4 update, but it seems some non-Steam players are having some game-breaking issues now. It doesn’t seem widespread, but it does make me question the developers. I thought they were better than this.
January 30th, 2008 at 7:21 pm
Heh, it’s because the post /seemed/ legit – I could be wrong anyhow – so I decided to leave it there and just remove the link.
About ET:QW: you’re right, it seems to be correct. I was going to post a follow-up to the ET:QW article, but I still don’t know much about the specific issues the server query had before.
Huge dip in player activity: I had to change some things on the way cronjobs are ran on the server. As a result statistic reading didn’t work well for a couple of days (and I didn’t notice), so some data is missing. This is no big deal though, it’ll solve itself in a couple of days (missing entries are interpolated and short discrepancies will disappear once the 7-day average takes place anyway).
The good news is that this cron change will solve the problem of not running the mod graph updates (in the future, I still have to change some things).
January 30th, 2008 at 7:38 pm
I thought I had waited long enough for the average to kick in. It’s been well over a week hasn’t it?
January 31st, 2008 at 5:10 am
Since the problem? No. That was on Jan 24th. The average player and server values read that day are around 10% lower than the values on previous and following days, which makes me believe it has missed 10% of the records.
February 1st, 2008 at 4:16 am
Hm, I might’ve been wrong. There’s something else involved in this drop.
February 4th, 2008 at 12:26 am
The interpolation seems to keep shifting the drop-off point. For some reason I can’t wrap my head around why that would be.
February 4th, 2008 at 9:04 am
Ah. I get it now.
I’ts because I’ve changed the time the graph was generated. It was generated at 23:00hs before, now it’s at 00:00hs.
The problem is, it’s generated after the first update of the day is done. This means the data of the current day is taken into account, but only with one record (instead of the full 24 hours). This puts the average down for the last 7 days plotted in the graph.
I’ll fix it by changing the time the graph is generated.
February 5th, 2008 at 5:05 am
Heh. Good bug huntin’!
Looks like COD4 didn’t recover … are people getting bored or is this something else?
February 5th, 2008 at 5:34 am
Nice. Apparently it’s “fixed” (for the game graphs), although I have to fix the time the mod graphs are generated too.
Cod4: I’m not sure. Strange. Although GS stats seem to show CoD4 with numbers lower than game-monitor and serverspy, so I’m not sure if it’s very accurate.
February 5th, 2008 at 9:48 am
The thought occurred to me that Infinity Ward finally banned all the pirated copies that they were complaining about. In any case, it seems v1.5 was released recently so that’s probably the culprit in one way or another.
February 27th, 2008 at 8:01 am
Er…you do know there’s a big problem with the charts, right? The top-played games don’t show up on the charts, they just go up off the top of the image and can’t be identified. Have you been working on a fix?
February 27th, 2008 at 8:54 am
Yeah. I saw it. Goddamned CS players! *shakes fist*
I’ll increase the maximum number.
February 27th, 2008 at 9:08 pm
Hehe. Ya, this was a problem before when CS was counted in HL.. I guess you can’t escape it! So much for round numbers.
On the other side of the coin, do we really need to know by exactly how much CS is beating the snot out of every other FPS game? Hah.
March 3rd, 2008 at 6:27 am
Yes. Yes we do.
March 6th, 2008 at 5:28 pm
I’d actually like to talk about the decline of TF2. This is a game almost everyone loves, but it’s popularity is dropping faster than I’ve seen most games drop, especially of this calibre. Is it too casual for core players? I had dropped my time playing it, but for life reasons. It once had more players than W:ET. Now it has it’s worse player count on record and is about to have less players than ET:QW.
July 6th, 2008 at 2:28 pm
Wow. Now the stats are really borked. What’s going on over at Gamespy? We’re they fixing things (with a couple screwups) or are they still broken?
July 6th, 2008 at 2:41 pm
@PseudoKnight: it was a reading error. This happens from time to time on GS’s page. It’s actually pretty rare, but the problem is that reading a wrong value for one single day fucks up the lines for that specific game for 13 days (since it’s averaged by 7 days; a single, huge number, or an invalid number, sends the average too high or too low).
I just have to find the offending data entries later on the database and invalidate them. This forces the graphic to interpolate between two known valid values. It’s not 100% accurate as some data for like day IS lost in the process, but it looks right later.
I haven’t done that yet because I’ve been really busy with college+work.
It’s also the reason why some graphics aren’t being generated anymore; dreamhost has changed the way cronjobs are ran and while it’s better now, I still have to set a bunch of them to run properly.
Most importantly, all data is still being read as it should. I just have to flag what’s wrong later, and regenerate the graphics.