Larry Hryb, Xbox Live Director of Programming at Microsoft, has posted a list of the top 10 most-played games over Xbox Live to his personal blog. As with the last instance of Hryb's chart, it must come with a caveat that all Xbox 360 games are "Live Aware", and apparently count as logged onto Live even when in single-player mode, which helps account for their proliferation through the top 10.
Despite the technical bias toward 360 games, #1 on the list, is still the
Halo 2, one of only two original Xbox games still making the charts. Despite its status as an Xbox game, it still has one of the most complete Live implantations, and its enhanced backward-compatible play on the 360 means it's a game that can easily make the transition between consoles. The other standard Xbox title to make the list is
Battlefield 2: Modern Combat at #7, whose players flock to Live for huge multiplayer skirmishes.
In second place is
Call of Duty 2, followed by
Perfect Dark Zero: both of which are, like
Halo 2 first-person shooters, a genre whose emphasis on multiplayer commands a lot of time spent online in deathmatch and other more exotic game types.
Dead or Alive 4 at #4 has been building up a strong tournament scene taking advantage of the game's Live play, while
Project Gotham Racing 3, a fairly realistic racing simulator, takes fifth place on the XBL list. The somewhat less realistic racer
Need for Speed: Most Wanted comes in sixth on the chart.
The Xbox 360 version of
Madden NFL 06 comes in at a #8 showing, and the #9 game on the list is the chart debut of
Geometry Wars: Retro Evolved, the first Xbox Live Arcade title to crack the most-played list. Finally, EA's
NBA 2K6 makes up the 10th and last game on the list.
