Updated: When this article was first posted Halo 3 was scored a lot lower due to a mistaken release date, which has now been corrected.
Every week over at Major Nelson’s blog, he posts up a list of the top twenty most played games on Xbox Live that week. I always find this interesting, and it’s the one post of his I read religiously. Partly it’s down to my GTA-mania, and I keep checking in desperate fear that one day GTA IV will fall off the top twenty. So far it’s still top ten so I don’t quite know exactly why I keep checking so often.
Anyway, as with any “most played” or “most watched” charts, it is often biased in favour of whatever that week’s hot new release is, and I got to wondering if I could actually quantify which games really offer the best value for money long term.
Here is the chart when I last looked:
Top of the pops - but is it the best value long term?
It occurred to me that a key element to filtering out how good value a game is in the long run, is time. If a game has been around for a long time, and is still riding high in the charts, that game must be good value. You also won’t struggle to find someone to play online with or against. So, with that in mind, I headed off to Wikipedia to collect a hatful of release dates for all of the titles. I left Madden NFL 11 out, as it’s only a demo, and will never be seen in the chart again after this week anyway.
The oldest game in the chart is Halo 3, at an enormously elderly 1,064 days old. The whippersnapper of the group is Limbo, being only about 34 days old. Pah, it doesn’t know it’s born.
To calculate a value score for each game, I decided to invert the chart and call that the game’s chart multiplier. So the game in 20th place scores a 1x multiplier, and the game in first place scores a 20x multiplier. Capiche?
Multiplying the age of the game in months by this chart multiplier gives us a value score, and we can see what is and isn’t popular. Using a game’s age eliminates any flash in the pan games that are number one for two weeks and then are never seen again, and gives you a more long term impression of what is actually being played.
Here are the results:
Halo 3 predictably storms into the lead, given it is the oldest title and still right up there, but it is interesting to see some of the other titles. Modern Warfare 2, although currently top of the most played chart drops down to 6th because of its relative immaturity. Grizzled old codgers like GTA IV and World at War jump a few places up in the chart, using this comparison. Trials HD does incredibly well for an XBLA title, and in fact if I had factored in the cost, would be ahead of Red Dead Redemption, as it was a lot cheaper.
And don’t complain if your favourite game lost out because of the way I did the maths – I know there are a lot of differing ways I could have worked it out, but let’s face it – if I was fixing it GTA IV would have won!
So there you have it – value by numbers – and I’m not talking Achievement points, or obviously Avatar would be top of the pops.
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August 24th, 2010 at 9:51 am
On another point entirely, I think its says something about society when seven of the top eight games in the chart give the user the chance to kill or maim others, albeit virtually.
It does fight back against the old thinking of £40 for a game being too much. You can play these far longer than the seven or eight hours entertainment you would get from spending the same dosh on DVD (or significantly less if you own one of them new fangled Blu-Ray things.)
August 24th, 2010 at 1:49 pm
Seems biased towards older releases. We don’t know if LIMBO will overtake GTAIV once they’re both another 2 years old.
August 25th, 2010 at 7:26 pm
Good idea Tony, it goes to show how much quality there is throughout the Xbox’s life. A game released 3 years ago holds up well after all this time.