The gigantenormous launch of Modern Warfare 2 may have spurred a staggering 2 million concurrent Xbox Live users, but it looks like none of them were buying XBLA titles.
Are you tired of hearing about Modern Warfare 2 yet? Good, so are we. And so, one would surmise, are the makers of all the smaller titles available on Xbox Live Arcade. In studying the impact of what is unquestionably the biggest launch of the year – and possibly the largest entertainment launch of all time – GamerBytes’ Ryan Langley looked at the stats for Xbox Live Arcade games and found a rather staggering change from Nov. 2nd to Nov. 9th – the day before MW2 came out.
Judging by these stats, XBLA activity dropped about 40% as gamers readied their terrorist-shooting trigger fingers. Trials HD, which had just shy of 15,000 players on its leaderboard Nov. 2nd, dropped to slightly under 9,000 a week later, a change that we see pretty much across all the most popular titles. This, of course, was despite Xbox Live reaching a peak of activity shortly after MW2‘s release with 2 million concurrent users.
So, recap of numbers on Xbox Live: One million banned, two million play, 40% fewer on XBLA.
Hey, that rhymed.
