Report: Six-Hour Per Day 'Ceiling' On Daily Playtime For Leading FPSes

A new report from online game tracking firm Raptr found that Halo Reach, Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 and Call of Duty: Black Ops all hit initial daily average playtime ceilings of about six hours on Xbox Live, a surprising correlation that could be more than coincidence, the firm said. Raptr's FPS Shootout report, released late last week, found that first-day average total playtime per user for Black Ops, Modern Warfare 2 and Halo Reach were 6.04 hours, 6.17 hours and 6.19 hours, respectively. A Raptr rep told Gamasutra that playtime hours in the report reflected both single player and multiplayer gaming. First-week average total playtime per users was respectively 22.15, 23.37 and 23.07 between the three leading shooters, again showing closely-aligned playing habits. "Call of Duty: Black Ops ultimately performed no better than either its predecessor Modern Warfare 2 or Halo: Reach," wrote Allen Wang, community manager for Raptr, which also operates a social platform for online games. "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," Wang added. Activision said last week that the shooter, released November 9, generated $650 million in sales in its first five days, amid heavy marketing. He said that the similar stats could be attributed to a "ceiling for play time." He explained, "On average, the most any 360 game could achieve is roughly six hours on the first day and 23 hours in the first week. All the top performing games on Raptr haven’t been able to pass this ceiling." Having a job and school leaves only a certain amount of time for online gaming, he said. "Of course, 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," Wang said. "It doesn’t matter much extra content is stuffed into a game, there are only so many hours in any given day that you can play." Wang also theorized that Black Ops could have taken the average play time crown if it had broken through the 90 percent average Metacritic review score, as did Halo Reach and Modern Warfare 2. "There's been much debate lately about much a review score affects sales and interest in a game. Overall Raptr does believe there is a correlation based on the stats we track," said Wang. He wouldn't declare a victor in terms of playtime, stating that it'll take a year to find out just how well 2010's Black Ops and Halo Reach hold interest in relation to 2009's Modern Warfare 2. (Image courtesy Raptr.)