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Analyst: Mass Effect 2 outsold everything else 6-to-1 in Jan.
If you bought Mass Effect 2 and you like being on the winning "team" when it comes to game trends, high five. According to DFC Intelligence, BioWare's latest spacefaring adventure sold an estimated 1.1 million copies (of the Xbox 360 version) in January -- six times the sales of any other game. Estimating game sales based on GamerDNA activity, DFC also believes that there was a significant uptick in play of Mass Effect as well, "likely supported by the ability to transfer a save file from a completed Mass Effect game into Mass Effect 2 where several key player decisions in the first game could be carried over into the second game." The other leading Xbox 360 sellers in DFC's estimate include Darksiders (150,000), Bayonetta (170,000) and Army of Two: The 40th Day (175,000) -- with Dark Void somewhat of a surprise bomb (22,000).
Crispy Gamer editorial staff laid off, CEO resigns in protest
Just one month after purchasing GamerDNA, the promising stat-driven video game community site, Crispy Gamer has laid off its entire editorial staff, on the authority of the company's board of directors. We're told Chris Heldman, the CEO, former head of media entertainment at Google and co-founder of Crispy Gamer, has resigned in protest. Last September, Crispy's other co-founder, John Keefer, left to join the editorial staff of the influential GamePolitics blog. The staff was told that they'll be paid for the month, but their termination is effective immediately, leading us to believe the site is going on a similarly immediate hiatus. Editorial staff affected include former Joystiq writer Kyle Orland, along with Scott Jones, John Teti, Evan Narcisse, James Fudge, Ryan Kuo, Managing Editor Elise Vogel, and Chief Marketing Officer Anne Mischler. Writing about his sale of the company to Crispy Gamer just last month, GamerDNA CEO Jon Radoff said that the site "has very ambitious plans to build a media company around the gaming market." Today's news would seem to indicate that however ambitious those plans are, they no longer include an editorial component. We've reached out to both Radoff and Heldman and will update this post when we learn more. Update: Jon Radoff told us, "I just heard it for the first time from you. And just got another call from another journalist a minute ago. I'm afraid I don't know anything about the situation -- if true, it's surprising and unfortunate." Indeed. Update 2: Mr. Keefer wrote in to clarify some of the editorial positions and to let us know that Mr. James Fudge was also laid off. He also had this personal response to add: "It's hard to see a dream die, especially one you put your heart and soul into. The site was created for the readers and to give them an alternative voice, to dig deeper than many of the sites out there and to make readers think about what they play and why they play. Personally, I had a lot of fun in the process. Thanks to all the people that read the site and became part of the growing community."
Crispy Gamer buys GamerDNA
It looks like Crispy Gamer's review of GamerDNA -- following the partnership announced back in February, known as the "Try It" period -- has come back and the verdict is: Buy It. Mass High Tech Business News reports that the Cambridge-based GamerDNA has "found a buyer" in NY-based game site, Crispy Gamer, but will "continue to exist as a separate entity." GamerDNA CEO Jon Radoff writes that the social-networking-slash-data-driven gaming site he founded two and a half years ago has "merged" with Crispy Gamer and the serial entrepreneur won't be sticking around long. "I'll help out Chris Heldman (the CEO of Crispy Gamer) for a little bit to make sure things go smoothly -- but I'm an entrepreneur, and I'll start something new in 2010," Radoff says. This follows last week's news that GameSpot would partner with GamerDNA-competitor Raptr. If that sounds like a partnership that may have forced Radoff's hand in selling the company, we'd be inclined to agree; GamerDNA cut its staff nearly in half back in October, and Radoff writes that "it didn't make sense for us to 'go it alone' in the market any longer." While Crispy Gamer is no GameSpot, Radoff says that the site "has very ambitious plans to build a media company around the gaming market." We're hoping to finally get used to that name by the time those plans come to fruition. [Via @eliciab35]
Modern Warfare 2 dominates November gameplay on 360
Using GamerDNA results as a guideline, DFC Intelligence charted the popularity of 360 games last month, and there are some interesting revelations. For one: Every person alive or dead, including the author of this post, is playing Modern Warfare 2 as we speak. Okay, so that's a slight exaggeration but it was very popular, with somewhere between 22 and 17 percent of GamerDNA's Xbox 360-playing subjects playing the game throughout all of November. Also somewhat surprising is just how well Borderlands – which, let's be honest, didn't have the biggest marketing push – did, handily holding on to second place until the release of Left 4 Dead 2 and Assassin's Creed 2. Admittedly this list doesn't reflect the time spent by those who aren't online, but do you seriously care about those commoners anyway?
World of Warcraft trends big on Twitter video games
TweetMyGaming is a site started up by our friends over at gamerDNA (they routinely contribute to our sister site Massively, including sharing some great information on WoW's demographics), and while the site is designed to track all mentions of video games on Twitter, one game has more or less dominated the discussion since the site debuted about a month ago. Well, actually, it was The Sims 3 -- apparently as big as World of Warcraft is, it still can't stop EA's Sims series for sheer popularity (or top the series in sales). But still, WoW is sitting at a respectable number two in tweets, and watching the feed go by over on the game's page lets you in on all the different slices of the game's community, from the hardcore raiders to the folks just trying to grab some time to play.Of course, all of the values on the site are constantly changing, and we're sure they're still tweaking the formula of how games move up and down the list -- The Sims 3 is coming hot off of its release a few weeks ago, and while WoW has a vibrant twitter community for sure, the news about mounts and the new patch 3.2 information last week probably helped keep it up on the radar (just wait and see what happens over BlizzCon -- I wouldn't be surprised to see WoW-related topics trending over Twitter at large).But WoW is definitely a game that people talk about no matter what's in the news lately. Interesting, but not surprising, that it's holding its own even among the trendiest games on Twitter.
GamerDNA: A brief look at free to play games
By Sanya Weathers for GamerDNAWhen you're the market leader in MMO games, you can afford to do a little innovating – though not so much as to disturb or ruffle the customers you've already acquired. When you're making a top drawer MMO with thirty million dollars of other people's money, you can't afford to innovate. Refinements, sure. But no big risks.So where's the innovation? These days, you see it in the free to play genre, and its close cousin, the "freemium" game. Both of these games make their money from microtransactions. In order to get a customer to fork over a microtransaction, these games require customers that are vested into the world.But free to play means the player has invested nothing but the time spent downloading the product. And there's a perception among some industry professionals that "easy come, easy go."%Gallery-65681%
Tweetmygaming.com tracks the Twitterverse of gaming
Last week GamerDNA launched TweetMyGaming.com, a Twitter stat tracking site covering games. Using fancy mathematicals and internet juice, TweetMyGaming follows the 140-character conversations in the Twitterverse in real-time.Tweets and play patterns are graphed by the site, with the percentages on the homepage displaying the daily increase or decrease of tweets for that particular game. The "attention numbers" found on specific game pages are based off gamerDNA data. We're definitely curious to see how the site evolves, not to mention that we love statisticals.
GamerDNA's Left 4 Dead stats reveal power of Steam sales, promotions
Left 4 Dead on PC appears to receive a shot of zombie reanimation every time Valve's Steam service does a promotion, according to proprietary Xbox Live and PC GamerDNA statistics. The chart above, which is calculated based on "equal percentages of Xbox and PC users," shows that engagement on both platforms was almost equal for three months after release. The PC receives its first major bump during Steam's 50 percent off sale in February. Both platforms received a boost with the release of the free Survival Pack, but then engagement spiked dramatically during Steam's "Freaky Free Friday" promotion and stayed strong.Sam Houston, community manager at GamerDNA, tells us that typically the engagement graphs for games "start high and just drop off." He notes that Steam sales and promotions can obviously give a shot of adrenaline to a game's engagement. He questions, "Could Microsoft do something like that? Then it would appeal to both platforms pretty highly. But, you know, Valve owns Steam and the game, so they have more flexibility."
GamerDNA honored in AlwaysOn East 100
When it comes to communities where you can track your online gaming, there are tons to choose from. You can chat, message, list characters, post screenshots... sure. That said, one of our favorites has to be GamerDNA. Not only is the site run by a bunch of gamers who are absolutely passionate about what they do, but they aren't just working on their site and leaving it at that as so many other sites seem content to do. The people over at GamerDNA reach out into the community, using the information they've gathered from members to point out really interesting and enlightening things about how and why we're playing too - not just what we're playing. That's why when we heard they'd been honored this year as part of the AlwaysOn East 100, we were thrilled. The AlwaysOn East 100 award is a way to reward "private, emerging technology companies creating new business opportunities in high-growth markets." Essentially, what that means to those of you who aren't keeping an eye on tech startups is that they kick butt and take names - and people from gamers to investors - are taking notice. Frankly, it's a richly-deserved award for an awesome bunch of people we've been lucky enough to work with from time to time. We can't wait to see what the next 12 months holds for them as they continue building their site, and their community. Grats!
Gamer DNA: Plenty of market opportunity in MMOs [part 2]
Another good measure of player engagement is by the average number of hours in a particular play session. Remember what I said about EQ2 being a success by any rational standard? The number of hours the EQ2 player spends in his game is illustrative of that point.
Gamer DNA: Plenty of market opportunity in MMOs
Today, we have another in a continuing series of articles written by the highly talented Sanya Weathers for GamerDNA. In this, her latest column, Sanya looks into the numbers and just what the breakdown for MMO players means.When you compare groups of MMO consumers, grouped by game title, it's easy to be overwhelmed by World of Warcraft's market dominance. Indeed, many developers have learned the wrong lessons from Blizzard's success, and copied/are copying WoW features – without copying WoW's reasoning, methodology, or execution. The results are products that feel derivative and incomplete, with features that the consumers identify as being less than organically developed. Furthermore, WoW's market reach is so extensive that the most influential players in a social network sense will identify a borrowed feature as being WoW's (even if WoW itself borrowed the feature), and cost the new product credibility as innovators.Still, when you just look at the data, it's hard to avoid the desire to copy WoW. As we saw last week, WoW players log in more often, and play for longer sessions.
How much do guilds matter?
Today, we have another in a continuing series of articles written by the highly talented Sanya Weathers for GamerDNA. In this, her latest column, Sanya runs down some interesting and illuminating statistics about players and guilds, and just how they fit in to the macrocosm of MMOs. A long time ago, in a fantasy world far far away, I wrangled guilds as part of my job. At first, I wrangled them because it was terribly efficient for one person struggling with a beta. Why deal with thousands of individuals when I could deal with fifty, and put them in charge of their own groups? Guild leaders will always be more informed, more tuned in, and better suited to herding their own cats than a studio representative could ever be.But what started as expediency turned in to more.As a community weenie, I had my dearly beloved "frequent flyers" – people who sent in feedback, usually through email no matter how many systems I built for them to use, with a regularity previously reserved for clocks, robots, and dripping faucets. If it was 3 PM on a Thursday, it was time to get mail from him, him, her, and what I was pretty sure was a him but hadn't ever asked.
Can your other favorite games be predicted based on your most played?
GamerDNA regularly likes to data mine their own site and look for possible correlations between games and the gamers that play them. What ends up surfacing is almost always intriguing and thought-provoking.This time GamerDNA has put your second favorite game to the test as they look at what players of online free-to-play games like to play in their spare time in their second round of "Also Played." Does playing Shaiya mean that you'll be more likely to try and enjoy World of Warcraft? Do MapleStory users really enjoy Counter-Strike? Is playing Runescape akin to playing Solitare or Minesweeper?These questions and more are probed inside of Also Played, and trust us, the answers can be pretty surprising. For the full story, check out the article over at GamerDNA, complete with handy charts.
The race to 80 in Wrath of the Lich King analyzed
The dust has had time to settle over Azeroth since the launch of World of Warcraft's latest expansion Wrath of the Lich King, and most semi-active players who stick to a main character will probably have hit the new level cap of 80. That's the lazy way to summarize the expansion-leveling situation, but for a bit (well, a heck of a lot) more depth, it's worth checking out gamerDNA's study of how their users went once WotLK's starter pistol fired. To fit the nature of the study, the sample of 3000 users was limited to people who had a level 70 character at the expansion's launch, had picked up the expansion within 10 days of launch, and did not take on the new Death Knight class as their main.The picture above shows one of the resulting pie charts from gamerDNA's study. From the sample, the biggest group (44%) took between 16 and 30 days to reach level 80, but quite a large percentage (18%) managed to finish up their leveling in just 5 to 15 days. Only a very small group from the sample (2%) took longer than 60 days. Interestingly, further pie charts show that there wasn't one particular class that was favored in the race to 80 -- in fact, in the quickest group, where you'd expect class to matter more, the class make-up was probably at its most even across the board.If these sorts of facts and figures get your pulse racing, perhaps you could help us do a quick poll of our own: in which group would you fit on the above chart?
Gears of War 2: Players' gaming habits get statistical
Gamasutra with data compiled from GamerDNA's 150,000 Xbox Live members have focused their analytical powers on Gears of War 2, gamers' playing habits and how much DLC affects gameplay. Their analysis of the gaming data shows that more gamers (74%) tried the original Gears after the first two months post launch than Gears 2 (43.4%) during the same period. We also learn that DLC has what they call a "diminishing return", meaning that the spike in player activity after DLC releases slowly trickles back to normal levels. Make the jump to view even more Gears 2 stats and figures (including a pie chart!) all while pondering whether or not the recent title update will get you back into the mix or if you've permanently shelved Gears.
GamerDNA and Massively explore Death Knight demographics
Our friends at Massively and GamerDNA are at it again -- they're digging into their database of players, this time to determine some Death Knight demographics. They want to know what kinds of players are picking up the new Hero class. Unfortunately, their sample size is super small -- only 500, according to Sanya Weathers, which seems way too tiny to determine anything about the Death Knight class at large. But we'll go with it anyway, and see what we can get.As you can see above, Blood Elves and Humans dominate the race choice in our little group, which seems about right, considering that those are the two most popular races overall. Death Knight players in this study generally tend to have reported themselves as male in real life. And GamerDNA also lays their Death Knights up against the Bartle test and while WoW players trend pretty well to the norm, Death Knights go way more towards the "Killer" and to a lesser extent the "Explorer" end of the scales.So according to this little survey (and we'll remind you that this is 500 people, so there are plenty of exceptions out there), the average Death Knight is male, chooses whatever race is most familiar to them, and wants to go kill and do damage rather than worry about socializing or achieving. In other words, lots and lots of former Ret Paladins. It'll be interesting to see how this changes over time -- lots of these players are interested in the newest thing, obviously, since they've switched their mains to a new class at the first chance, but as things settle down and more people head back to get new alts, maybe we'll see a different crowd coming out of Acherus.
Fun with Death Knight data pt. 2
This pie shows the gender of the player, not the character. In WOW as a whole the ratio of men to women is still around 4.5 to 1, so the DK (at least as a main character) is definitely skewing to the manly players. Again, not really a shock to anyone. Each column represents the average number of points spent in each tree by players with a DK as a main. I made the mistake of asking some DKs of my acquaintance to tell me a little more about the different builds. My head exploded. One of the people I spoke with, a former reporter who understands the perils of too much information, suggested I check out an uberguild's DK forum and provide a link, rather than try to regurgitate it all here.
GamerDNA and Massively offer up Death Knight data goodness
By Sanya Weathers for GamerDNA Back in October, we ran a couple of articles that gave you a snapshot of the kind of person who played the various classes in World of Warcraft. Now that the Death Knight class has been out for nearly three whole months, we figure the flavor of the month kids have had their turn at bat, and the real fans of the new class are settled in. The sample for today's column is a little more than 500 people, all of whom were active WOW players before the launch, and now continue to actively play their Death Knight. "Actively" as measured by playing sessions – just having one of the new class in the character list isn't enough to count here. Read on to see how the Arthas' legions stack up!
A nearly complete list of MMO companies on Twitter
Not surprisingly, when a complete list of videogame companies and developers on Twitter is compiled, MMO devs and companies take up a large chunk of the list. We would expect nothing less from such online socially-orientated companies.The list -- created by Sam "QforQ" Houston, community manager GamerDNA -- is a great resource for anyone looking to keep up to date with companies like SOE, BioWare, NCsoft, 38 Studios, ArenaNet, Blizzard, Carbine Studios, FunCom, CCP Games, Flying Lab Software, Mythic Entertainment and many more. It's an impressive list, although being Massively meant we had to double-check it for missing links. As such, we found that there was no Cryptic Studios love in there. So, for the sake of completion, we've gone ahead and provided the link for any fans of Champions Online or Star Trek Online.
Bolster your Twitter followers with the video game industry directory
Sam Houston knows more about social networking in gaming communities than the rest of us combined. After all, he is the community manager for GamerDNA, a sort of ludological Facebook (only without the near-constant application invitations). So when Houston called out the gaming industry last summer for failing to use common social networking tools to keep in touch with their customers, they took it to heart, and joined the Twitter ranks en masse.Earlier today, Houston compiled a directory of gaming industry moguls who tweet with alarming frequency. If you've ever wondered about the daily exploits of folks like @djaffe and @fourzerotwo, but never been interested to read more than 140 characters about said exploits, you might want to check it out. Then again, you may just use this new information to further stalk @majornelson. We can't really condone that type of behavior.
