Skyrim is 2011's most-played game, according to Raptr

by Griffin McElroy on Dec 9th 2011 11:20AM

Popular game-tracking service Raptr recently published its list of top-performing games of 2011, a roster entirely decided by the amount of man hours (and woman hours) its gaming community poured into them. The list isn't terribly surprising: Skyrim was the most-played RPG (beating out Dragon Age 2 by a factor of six), Modern Warfare 3 was the most-played shooter and FIFA Soccer 12 was the most-played sports game, because, you know, Europe.

Here's a surprise, though: According to Raptr, the most played game of the year was Skyrim. Crazy, right? We thought for sure that Modern Warfare 3 and the siren call of its quintuple prestiges would take the cake. We admit this tendency could have possibly been surpassed by infinite dragons and somehow-even-more-infinite adventure.

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RAPTR REVEALS MOST PLAYED GAMES IN FIRST ANNUAL PLAYTIME AWARDS

Raptr Recognizes the Most Popular Games of 2011 Based On Actual Gameplay Data,
Bethesda's The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim Leads with Two Wins for "Most Played RPG" and
"Overall Most Played Game" Categories

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. – Dec. 8, 2011 – Leading gamer network Raptr today revealed their inaugural "Most Played" Awards, recognizing the year's blockbuster videogame releases. The awards reveal exactly how gamers are spending their time with the biggest releases of 2011 based on gamer behavior and activities, including average individual playtime, average session length and total playtime share.

The recipients of Raptr's "Most Played Awards of 2011" are as follows:
· Most Played Game – The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim (Bethesda Softworks)
· Most Played Shooter – Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 (Activision)
· Most Played RPG – The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim (Bethesda Softworks)
· Most Played Open-World Game – Batman: Arkham City (Warner Bros. Interactive Entertainment)
· Most Played Sports Game – FIFA Soccer 12 (EA Sports)
· Most Played Social Game – The Sims Social (EA Play)
· Most Played New IP – L.A. Noire (Rockstar)
· Most Successful Paid to Free-to-Play Game – DC Universe Online (Sony Online Entertainment)

Highlights from the report include:
· Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 earned double the amount of playtime in its opening month than Battlefield 3 did in its opening month.
· The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim dominated the RPG category with six times more total playtime than the closest competitor, Dragon Age 2.
· DC Universe Online experienced a 2500% increase in total playtime per day after switching from a subscription business model to free-to-play.
· The Sims Social accumulated more total playtime in its opening month than all other social games released in 2011 in their respective opening months.

"2011 is turning out to be a boon for gamers, and our awards highlight how gamers are investing the most amount of their precious time playing every day," said Dennis Fong, CEO of Raptr. "We want to congratulate all the people involved in creating the hit games that won in their respective categories."

To view the full Raptr Report on the "Most Played Games of 2011," please visit: http://blog.raptr.com/2011/12/08/raptrs-most-played-games-of-2011/.

Tags: Bethesda-Game-Studios, Bethesda-Softworks, elder-scrolls-5, microsoft, pc, playstation, ps3, raptr, skyrim, the-elder-scrolls-v-skyrim, xbox

Reader Comments (89)

Really? Already?
Surely not?!

@PSBuckshot what?

@PSBuckshot If you're having math problems I feel bad for you son. I got 99 problems and counting aint one.

@Jay Z

Some one say something about counting? Ninety Nine... Ah ha ha ha!

Time to quickly insert myself into this novelty account reply thread!

You'd think this would be a wakeup call for Bethesda to fix Skyrim's many console bugs. o_o

@JakeAuditore
So total victory means you need to change something? If you're already #1, there's not much more to gain by fixing anything.

@JakeAuditore Right, because game development is just as simple as you think it is. Oh there's a bug? Let's just squash that right quick and get Sony and Microsoft's instant approval on that!

@sigma8 I guess some people enjoy not being able to finish quests?

@JakeAuditore
It's harder for them to do this, as there are two things in their way. First is patch certification. PC already has most everything patched up and fixed, the patch is waiting for approval on XBL and PSN. Second, and more importantly, the bigger issues are the fault of the consoles themselves.

The new patch fixes the screwy stuff like backward dragons, but the game slowdown is because of the restrictive amount of memory in both consoles and how much stuff the save file needs to track.

@Faceless Troll
I'm not saying I don't want to fix stuff. I'm just saying that making them the top-selling game--despite showstopping bugs--is not very incentivizing. I _really_ want them to fix stuff, of course. I haven't gotten the game yet, but I expect to be contributing to its "most played game of the year" title significantly during the holidays.

@Jennacide
"The new patch fixes the screwy stuff like backward dragons, but the game slowdown is because of the restrictive amount of memory in both consoles and how much stuff the save file needs to track."

I agree that the bug fixes are taking so long because of MS and Sony. However, the slowdown is not because of MS and Sony, it's because Bethseda didn't optimize their code properly on the respective consoles. It's not as though they didn't know the specs of the consoles.

@JakeAuditore

Bethesda apologists are really starting to rustle my jimmies. Yes, the game is incredible. Yes, we understand how hard it is to fix these problems.

No, they are not acceptable.

@Haizeus And people who make the game out to be a completely unplayable mess are starting to get to me.

@Faceless Troll

There's only about a couple hundred quests though, so give or take say, 20 that can't be completed, that's not a big deal, right?

@Raquor

Why is it that consoles haven't already incorporated some optional way to boost memory? Having one slot like an iMac couldn't hurt. Just design the game for a lower spec without the addition, and then make use of it if the extra happens to be available.

Anybody have a rough figure of how much that can possibly add to the console cost?

@kentuckyfried Then maybe Bethesda shouldn't have focused on making sure all of their quests worked instead of making so many?

@TehPeanut

Except for a lot of people it is just that.

Look at the size of that schlong on the horse.

Oh....wait...that's the Dovakhiin's foot

@ItchyBarracuda Why is the first thing you noticed horse schlong?

@Faceless Troll

Can't you read? Because it was so large.

@copa
you've never seen a horse dick

"... when you tug on his winky!"
"Oooh, that's dirty!"
"Shut up woman, get on mah horse!"

I'm not sure how many hours I logged on my first playthrough but its gotta be close to 100.

So I see the headline first, and then I scroll down, and see the horse, and I mentally hear a victorious "neighhhh!!" from the horse. Seemed like an appropriate combo.

how do they get these numbers? I would have to imagine Black ops having a full year would be the most played

@eat it
Well, depends on who is playing what. Sure, FPS players can easily plunk down a couple hours at a time. But I bet Skyrim is mostly sapping the WoW audience, who tend to play for 8-hour blocks at a time. Consecutively.

@eat it: Yea I don't believe Skyrim has more hours logged in than Black Ops.

@eat it

I looked through the Raptr site. You actually have to log in playtimes for them to count - so this is far from any sort of accurate measurement. They have a bit over 11 million users at the moment - which isn't even close to the total userbase - and the majority of the users are in the West.

So yeah - Skyrim is the most played game of 2011 - according to a small minority of people that likes to report their playtimes. Nice try.

@Kagiroi
Huh. Now that you mentioned it, I did that too. And I think I stopped playing when stuff starting disappearing from my containers in my house (which I got post-storyline completion, iirc). I think I gave it a second chance, where I cast some ultra-high lock spell on a chest.. and stuff still disappeared. I was not happy.

@sigma8 oops, replied to wrong person ._.

@eat it

That's what I was thinking too. Blops has an entire year of "most played game" time. I find it had to believe that even steams 250,000 concurrent playerbase managed to top that (is that even the right phrase?).

@eat it

Xbox Live and PSN track unique playing hours for titles. Whenever you play a game, it updates your status to "playing XYZ", both services can track exactly how many minutes you play a game. Even if you aren't online all the time, just logging in once will update this information to a server. It's a simple code and number, nothing complicated.

Same thing goes for Steam which also tracks your playing time, even when offline.

The only variable not included is the people who never come online for whatever reason, but these individuals are probably few in number thus the +/- error percentage in their figures are quite low.

Hope that clears things.

@Kagiroi

I think this is more of a case of Joystiq trying to reach their Skyrim quota for the day

@BoBsS

but we've seen charts direct from xbl and the CoD games are always on top. I"m sure the numbers favor skyrim on the PC but more than codblops? that sounds absurd.

@BoBsS This is Raptr though, not XBL or PSN. This is a website with a few million members which can only track those people, so it's probably pretty damn far from accurate.

@eat it

"I think this is more of a case of Joystiq trying to reach their Skyrim quota for the day"

i LOL'd

I was going to say "among people who have Raptr installed", but that's even better, if it doesn't auto-record play hours.

@Kagiroi

I thought it was pretty obvious that the press release was reporting on the most played games as logged by users of Raptr. Where is the claim that they have usage data for ever console and PC on the planet?

It is impossible to track what the most played game of the year is. That would require all consoles and PC running games to be constantly online. Which they aren't. And that's just the start of the problems with trying to gather that information...

@Odog4ever

You're telling me you got that from just the headline, even if you didn't know what Raptr is in the first place? Don't be so pompous.

I find it a little scary that they know how much people are playing a single player game. Are we going to see statistics on how many people sit on top of disrobed, vanquished corpses next? (not sure if you can do that, like in Morrowind...still need to get the game)

@sigma8

I find it a little scary that anyone ever teabagged an npc in Morrowind.

@The Tim
I can only speculate. Based on the types of screenshots you can find from WoW--which are made public--I don't even want to imagine what's happening in what is thought to be a private world, like Skyrim. My big vice in Morrowind was that I spent a disproportionate amount of time in-game doing something I completely hate in real life: shopping for clothes.

@sigma8

I spent more time arranging the things in my house than I ever did in real life. And the realistic physics make setting up your house a nightmare in both Oblivion and Skyrim.

@The Tim
I did that too and then decided to tell you about it in the thread above this one, replying to Kagirol by mistake.

@sigma8 Well that particular part of Kinect marketing got shot down, but just wait. Someone will bring it back.

@sigma8 I have spent an inordinate amount of time making armor and weapons trying to get my skill level to 100. I'm at 90, so close I can taste it.

@The Tim

I find it creepier that people spent time in Fallout 3 re-arranging corpses and body parts into a ritualistic pattern like the Ice Truck Killer on Dexter. O_o OK, some of you seriously have too much time on your hands...

Maybe they meant 2011's most (re)booted game.

@omf

exactly!!!!

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The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim

Skyrim is 2011's most-played game, according to Raptr

Reader Comments (89)

Posted: Dec 9th 2011 11:22AM PSBuckshot said

Posted: Dec 9th 2011 11:24AM takahami said

Posted: Dec 9th 2011 2:05PM Jay Z said

Posted: Dec 9th 2011 3:47PM Omnistatic said

Posted: Dec 9th 2011 6:26PM Premature ejaculation man said

Posted: Dec 9th 2011 11:22AM JakeAuditore said

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Posted: Dec 9th 2011 12:05PM Jennacide said

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Posted: Dec 9th 2011 1:00PM Raquor said

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Posted: Dec 9th 2011 1:41PM TehPeanut said

Posted: Dec 9th 2011 1:59PM kentuckyfried said

Posted: Dec 9th 2011 2:01PM kentuckyfried said

Posted: Dec 9th 2011 2:44PM Faceless Troll said

Posted: Dec 9th 2011 3:27PM Haizeus said

Posted: Dec 9th 2011 11:24AM ItchyBarracuda said

Posted: Dec 9th 2011 11:37AM Faceless Troll said

Posted: Dec 9th 2011 11:55AM copa said

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Posted: Dec 9th 2011 1:50PM StClair said

Posted: Dec 9th 2011 11:25AM Cap Morgan said

Posted: Dec 9th 2011 11:26AM sigma8 said

Posted: Dec 9th 2011 11:26AM eat it said

Posted: Dec 9th 2011 11:28AM sigma8 said

Posted: Dec 9th 2011 11:34AM 216 said

Posted: Dec 9th 2011 11:42AM Kagiroi said

Posted: Dec 9th 2011 12:09PM sigma8 said

Posted: Dec 9th 2011 12:10PM sigma8 said

Posted: Dec 9th 2011 12:13PM liquidsoap89 said

Posted: Dec 9th 2011 12:22PM BoBsS said

Posted: Dec 9th 2011 12:25PM eat it said

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Posted: Dec 9th 2011 12:41PM SuperMike861 said

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Posted: Dec 9th 2011 1:42PM StClair said

Posted: Dec 9th 2011 4:23PM Odog4ever said

Posted: Dec 9th 2011 5:58PM Kagiroi said

Posted: Dec 9th 2011 11:31AM sigma8 said

Posted: Dec 9th 2011 11:42AM The Tim said

Posted: Dec 9th 2011 12:01PM sigma8 said

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