14 DAY TRIAL // A report coming from Raptr, which tracks the online gaming habits on modern gaming consoles, says that the newly launched and record breaking Call of Duty: Black Ops has seen an average play time of about six hours daily on the Xbox Live service from Microsoft, about the same levels as other big name online shooters like Halo: Reach, which launched in September, and Modern Warfare 2, a game that arrived in November 2009.
Black Ops sits at 6.04 hours, with Modern Warfare 2 at 6.17 and Reach coming in at 6.19 hours.
Allen Wang, who is the community manager at Raptr, which offers a social network for online gamers, has commented, “Call of Duty: Black Ops ultimately performed no better than either its predecessor Modern Warfare 2 or Halo: Reach.”
He added, “This is a bit surprising, due to the record levels of sales and hype for Black Ops. In fact, when it came down to it, play patterns all three games exhibited very similar stats.”
The theory coming from Raptr is that there's actually a limit on how much time the gamer population can spend, on average, engaged with a first person shooter, with Wang saying “there are people who do nothing but game or skip work to play, but on average, it seems the threshold for how much the general gaming populace can play in a week does appear to have a limit.”
Black Ops is no doubt a bigger game in terms of sales than Modern Warfare 2 and Halo: Reach but it seems that this dominance cannot be translated into a similar domination when it comes to time spent on Xbox Live.
Much of the success of the Call of Duty games is linked to the way the developers evolve the multiplayer side of the game, with Black Ops tweaking the balance of weapons and introducing a new way of acquiring perks.