Xbox Live activity reports raw data analysis

Almost every week, Microsoft’s Major Nelson posts Xbox Live activity  charts, ranking the most popular games on the service, based on ‘unique users’.  Depending on how you interpret that term, the methodology may differ than the peak concurrent users counts that Steam uses for its charts, but either way, Microsoft doesn’t share absolute numbers. Their data is also based on the presence data coming from being connected to Xbox Live, regardless of whether or not the game features online play or not, which explains games like Mass Effect 2 in the list.

I’ve begun tracking this data in a spread sheet for my own research, and am sharing it via Google Docs as well now, in an automatically republished version, whenever I update the master spread sheet. The data is available as both an HTML page and a raw CSV download. Originally, the list was a top ten, but as of 1/25/10, it encompasses the top twenty titles.

I’m up to date from July 2009 to March 2010 right now and there’s already some interesting factoids that struck me:

• Modern Warfare 2 took the immediately stole the #1 spot from Halo 3 when it launched, and Halo 3 has been able to recapture it, remaining at #2 ever since, except for a week at #3 right as MW2 launched. Seems like Call of Duty 4 got a small bump when its sequel came out. Either people waned to finish or replay the previous game, or those that didn’t pick up the new one got nostalgic and played COD4 again.
• Battlefield: Bad Company 2 quickly jumped to #3 within two weeks, but hasn’t managed to beat out MW2 and Halo 3 yet.
• Halo ODST debuted at the #2 spot, but quickly dropped out of the top 10 within 6 weeks and has been barely able to stay within the top 20 in the past month.
• Call of Duty: World at War took the #1 spot from Halo 3 for a whole month in August 2009, just as its third map pack came out. Since then it’s dropped to #3-4 consistently and only just dropped again to #5 this past week.
• Gears of War 2 held a solid #4-6 spot for months late last year, but the release of MW2 caused it to drop to around #10 immediately. An indication of where MW2 was also getting its player base from?
• Only a handful of single player games made it into the chart (Batman: Arkham’s Asylum, Bioshock 2, Mass Effect 1 & 2, Fallout 3 and the Just Cause 3 demo among them), and Mass Effect 2 came out the highest at #6 for its launch week, but then quickly fell down to #19 within a few weeks. Proof that games with online play tend to dominate the charts longer.
• The most popular sports games were FIFA 99/10 and Madden 10 respectively, with FIFA 10′s international appeal actually beating out Madden by coming in at the #4 spot on 4 separate weeks. That marked the only time a non shooter title had broken the top four.
• Grand Theft Auto IV has enjoyed a very stable run between #5 and #9 for the past 9 months, no doubt aided by 2 sets of time exclusive expansion packs and a lot of side missions.
• Only occasionally did an Xbox Live Arcade title manage to crack the overall charts. MajorNelson began to post a separate chart for just XBLA titles eventually, but only 6 titles (Battlefield 1943, Trials HD, Perfect Dark Toy Soldiers and South Park Let’s Go Tower Defense Play, Shadow Complex) in the past 6 months cracked the overall chart. Battlefield 1943 came in the highest at #5.
• Music games have barely made a blip in the past 9 months. Rock Band 2 reared its head a couple of times at the bottom of the charts, but no other titles from the genre turned up at all.
• 9 out of 46 games in this first analysis were demos.

Notice anything else interesting? Post in the comments! Feel free to post your own mashups with this data and link back here if it came in handy. Keep an eye out for updated versions linked above every week.