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Modern Warfare 2: How many players?
Tom’s Hardware has a post in which one Ryan Bowling (Edit: His name is Robert. Tom’s reported his name incorrectly) at IW claims that MW2 has 25 million unique users. Yes folks, 25 million. The subtitle for this little gem of a mini-article is “Modern Warfare 2 is the major game for online gamers.” First off, don’t lump all online gamers into one group. MW2 is so far from being a twinkle in my eye that I’d even hesitate to let you call me an online gamer just to get out of being associated with many of those. Second, how are we counting these players? ModernWarfare2.com has an article dated February 11, 2010 claiming that 12 million copies have been sold. I have a hard time believing that they sold another 13 million copies in the past few weeks to reach that 25 million mark (also note that the article in question claims Activision lost $286 million in the last 3 months of last year. Nice job, Bobby). So, if you’ve only moved half as many units as you have users, I think there’s something wrong with the way you’re counting them.
Besides that, how many of these 25 million alleged users are actually playing the game at this point? Well, let’s look at the PC chart, shall we? I’ll post the entire screen shot I took literally moments ago from Steam:
Today’s peak on the PC was just shy of 92,000 players. This is doubly significant because, not only are there relatively few, but unlike 4th place Bad Company 2, MW2 on the PC requires Steam to play. Even more impressive? Counter Strike still had 74,826 players today! That’s not Source, folks (which had only about 4,300 fewer players than MW2). A quick peek onto the PS3 forums indicates that MW2 players usually number around 100,000 . Let’s assume, for the sake of argument, that XBox gamers average around 150,000 on a given day. We’re still talking about fewer than 400,000 gamers per day out of those “alleged” 25 million. Pretty sad, if you ask me.
Also of note is that Bad Company 2 supposedly has more players on the PC than either the Xbox or the PS3. Of course, we have no idea what the sales figures are for BC2 (even retail numbers would tell us little, since they don’t include Steam and EA Downloader numbers), so it’s hard to say how well it’s done so far. But we can say one thing for certain. There are over 250,000 soldiers created thus far on the PC. How do I know this? Well, the leaderboards tell the story. I have a few people on my friends list that are co-ranked at 250,001, despite the fact that they have different scores. So the leaderboard doesn’t tally your place precisely any lower than that. At least a quarter million soldiers (I realize that is not unique accounts) exist after about a week. Until EA tells us how many copies have been sold, we’ll be in the dark for how many of these are unique, though I’m willing to speculate that it’s much higher than the quarter million I can actually see on the PC. Gamasutra is showing BC2 at the top of both the XBox and PC sales charts and ahead of MW2 in PS3 in both Britain and North America.
There is no doubt that MW2 is still selling strong. The problem is keeping the user base, and I’m not sure it’s keeping up (no really, I have no clue). However, if it’s true that only about 100,000 are playing at a time on PS3, which seems to be the biggest platform consumer of the game, they’re not keeping all that many people involved. With a blowful story that’s full of holes, people won’t be coming back for that. If you can’t keep the multiplayer base going strong, Activision’s next iteration could fall flat. Bad Company 2 might be on course for a better multiplayer success, largely because of the dedicated servers (the clan that Squid and I are involved in, and that Mack also associates with, have 3 servers). With communities cropping up around favorite playing locations, I think BC2 will have more staying power. But that’s entirely speculation at this point. BC2 doesn’t have a terribly strong story either, so it too will depend on multiplayer strength to keep it going. All in all though, MW2 might be on the ropes.
Get your facts right,both the PS3 version and 360 version get 400,000 daily little less little more in certain part of the day,i play it on PS3 daily and there is always more than 290,000.
Perhaps you didn’t actually check the links that were provided in the article itself. Since Sony and Microsoft don’t allow outsiders to access their numbers (like Steam does), I’m forced to work on 3rd party sources for this information. I don’t have a PS3 or an Xbox, and if I did, I wouldn’t buy MW2 anyway, but it would be nice if, like the guy who started the thread I linked to asked, there was some way to see what the gamer population was in order to justify multiplayer-centered purchases.
So next time you accuse us of having facts WRONG, please be sure to actually see where we’re sourcing our information from. We don’t have access the way an established media outlet like Kotaku or PC Gamer have to acquire this kind of data. If you want to send me a screen shot that shows the player population (or, even better, a series of shots from the course of a week or so), then I will happily amend my article. Until then, I’m forced to rely on the information I can access on my own, which I’ll admit is severely limited.