No other single game has the market penetration and staying power of WoW as things stand.
XFire collects statistics[1] from their (large) network, if you're interested in "minutes played" as opposed to "copies sold." Be aware that it's not a random sample, though; some game communities (like Call of Duty) have a proportionally large XFire presence compared to others. As far as subscriber-driven MMORPGs go, MMOGCharts[2] is another reasonable source of statistics (note that Guild Wars and certain other MMOGs are not subscriber driven, so they won't show up on their lists).
[1] http://www.xfire.com/cms/stats/ [2] http://www.mmogchart.com/Chart7.html
--Daniel Remenak
On 10/1/07, Dan Kegel dank06@kegel.com wrote:
I spent some time noodling around looking at what games are really popular (I wouldn't know firsthand, I don't play much). There's some data at http://www.amazon.com/gp/bestsellers/videogames (click on PC Games). I tried to cross-check titles with Google Trends to see which ones seem enduringly popular, but I haven't found any that beat World of Warcraft yet: http://www.google.com/trends?q=world+of+warcraft%2C+guild+wars%2C+tomb+raide...
Is Google search popularity a bad measure, or does it reflect the public's mood well?
- Dan