You might expect overall gameplay hours to fall in the middle of summer, but they haven’t, at least not among Raptr members: Total monthly play time was up 30.19% from June And while Counter-Strike: Global Offensive, Hearthstone: Heroes of Warcraft, Smite, and Payday 2 all had big gains, Diablo III, Wildstar, and Watch Dogs headed in the other direction.
Highlights
June’s top four games, League of Legends, DOTA 2, World of Warcraft, and Counter-Strike: Global Offensive, retained their respective rankings in July, and all enjoyed month-on-month play time increases of over 30%.
League of Legends’ highest peak in July was on the 27th, the final day of the featured game mode Doom Bots of Doom, where the AI bots were set to an extreme difficulty level. LoL was relatively quiet on the eSports front.
DOTA 2’s premier tournament, The International, took place mid-month and led to a significant play time increase.
Despite Blizzard’s announcement of a decline in WoW players, Raptr members showed no signs of slowing down. We’ll be watching to see what kind of impact WoW’s 10-year anniversary events have in the run-up to, and through, November.
CS:GO’s new Operation Breakout DLC introduced new missions, weapon balancing, skins, map fixes, and various other tweaks to the game at the beginning of the month, and had a significant impact. CS:GO gameplay time was up a staggering 65.19% versus June.
The news wasn’t so good for Diablo III, which slipped just one spot despite losing 20.66% play time compared to last month.
Hearthstone’s Curse of Naxxramas DLC started rolling out in July and had a very strong impact; the game was up two ranks and play time climbed 53.33% over June. The weekly content roll-out schedule seems to be working very well for retention.
Battlefield 4 also climbed two ranks, thanks in part to its Dragon’s Teeth DLC that went live in mid-July for premium members, with everyone else getting the extra content at the end of the month. EA also kicked off Battlefest — a series of community contests and activities, including Raptr’s own Instant Replay contest — in July.
Payday 2 rose five places, riding the tail end of a big sale and a big boost from the Gage Shotgun Pack DLC, which included new weapons, masks, ammo, and achievements.
Smite was the biggest gainer of the month, shooting up eight spots and 128.27% over June, although a series of rewards in Raptr’s Rewards Store was certainly a significant factor there.
Final Fantasy XIV Online also had a big month, gaining five spots thanks in large part to a free login weekend in the latter half of the month as well as the Defenders of Eorzea content update.
The new MMO WildStar lost seven spots in its second month of release — but more worryingly, gameplay was down 45.63%. We’ll see if its latest PvP game mode, Sabotage, launched on July 31, can help spur a rebound, though initial signs point towards probably not.
Though we predicted last month that both The Elder Scrolls games likely wouldn’t chart in July, a major Quakecon-related sale proved us wrong — at least about Skyrim, which jumped five places. The Elder Scrolls Online, however, dropped six ranks to 26.
Throwback RPG Divinity: Original Sin missed the top 20, coming in at the 25 spot, while Watch Dogs tumbled 25 ranks to #33, with gameplay down 67.72%.
Note: The Share number by each game represents that title’s gameplay time as a percentage of the total time spent on all the PC games played by Raptr members, and is useful for comparing the relative amount of playtime between particular games.
