Xfire hits 8 million users

Community and data collection tool, Xfire, has now passed the 8 million subscriber mark, GamesIndustry.biz reports.

What's more, the latest information on the top 20 most-played titles indicates that World of Warcraft's popularity is holding steady - despite eight months having now passed since The Burning Crusade expansion's release.

Over 60 per cent of Xfire users are based in Europe, with around 40 per cent in North America, and the company has logged over 120,000 man-years of data since launch, with multiplayer games outperforming traditional offline games by a long way.

According to the details based on activity across the month of August, taken almost entirely from PC game-playing data, World of Warcraft logged over 440,000 hours of gameplay on average per day.

This was followed by Call of Duty 2 Multiplayer and Counter-Strike: Source, on 173,355 and 158,714 average hours respectively.

The second most popular MMO was Guild Wars, logging 59,199 average hours per day, while Eve Online was sixth most popular MMO, and Lord of the Rings Online came 8th.

Interestingly, both of those last two titles were outperformed in Xfire user data by Asian games Silkroad Online and MapleStory, and Korean free-to-play titles occupied five of the MMO top ten.

Warcraft III: The Frozen Throne was the most popular strategy game, with 41,242 hours per day, and Diablo 2: Lord of Destruction was top of the miscellaneous category with 12,502 hours.

In comparison, traditional offline games were much lower down on the list. Oblivion and Football Manager 2007, although much older titles now, were still among the highest non-multiplayer performers, yet notched up fewer than 10,000 users between them.