The five most popular game communities

[THIS POST ORIGINALLY APPEARED ON ADRIAN CROOK’S FREETOPLAY.BIZ SITE.]

Actiontrip has just posted a 2 pager on what it believes are the five most popular game communities, presumably in the world. Although the list isn’t ranked and doesn’t include any of the bigger Asian success stories, it has some interesting numbers.

Here are some highlights.

On CounterStrike:

Last we checked, the CS community had just over 174,665 active servers, with approximately 276,552 gamers playing online at the time we did our research (so just over 2 players per server, eh? – Ed). If the statistics on Steam are to be believed, this should translate into roughly 9.423 billion (yes, that’s the correct amount) minutes of play time per month.

On Runescape:

Recent research indicated that 13.1% of all PC gamers have played Runescape at some point throughout June 2007, with the average RuneScape player spending 673 minutes per week within the game. After this RuneScape became the 5th most played PC game just behind Blizzard’s World of Warcraft and games like Halo: Combat Evolved, Halo 2 and, of course, The Sims.

On Halo:

The most recent update showed that almost 12,706 players were online in Halo 2 at the time when we checked. Also, around 261,820 unique players were registered, with 688,136 matches logged (data from the last 24 Hours).

The lack of Asian representation likely stems from the all-North American sources used for the article: NPD, Steam, Bungie.net, Google Trends and Nielsen Media Research.