Diablo III Pulling Players Away From WoW and SWTOR

It doesn’t surprise me to hear that a hotly anticipated video game is drawing players away from whatever else they’ve playing, but this article on Forbes quotes some surprising numbers from the Xfire gaming service that suggest that a staggering number of World of Warcraft, Star Wars: The Old Republic, and League of Legends players have changed their tune over to Diablo III… at least for the time being.

According to statistics from Xfire, World of Warcraft has seen the biggest decrease in players since the launch of Diablo III. World of Warcraft has eroded to one-quarter of the player base that it once had on Xfire before Diablo III launched and currently occupies the #5 spot.

While most of the top RPGs (role-playing games) on Xfire, including Riot Games’ League of Legends and Electronic Arts’ Star Wars the Old Republic, saw noticeable declines in play time and players right around the launch of Diablo III; League of Legends seems to be holding strong against Diablo III, seeing only a minor drop in users/hours played per day. BioWare’s The Old Republic MMO continues to show a steady downward trend since launch, according to Mark Donovan, president of Xfire.

(We were surprised by just how quickly Diablo III shot up and how many minutes people are playing it,) said Donovan. (35,000 Xfire players are playing 10 million minutes per day. We haven’t had that since World of Warcraft launched. We’re seeing our users uploading 3,000 to 3,500 screenshots a day from Diablo III, primarily from the US.)

On a monthly basis, Xfire has approximately 1 million unique viewers on the client and around 4 to 5 million unique visitors to the website. Xfire has approximately 21.5 million registered users.

(World of Warcraft has been the game that has taken the biggest hit over the past year,) said Donovan. (League of Legends took a lot of WoW players and now Diablo III is taking even more.)

Donovan said these statistics stand out because Blizzard hasn’t even shipped the PvP (player versus player) element for Diablo IIII, which is the real litmus test to having a long-term MMO game. (It will be interesting to see if PvP drives the numbers even higher,) said Donovan.