Modern Warfare 2 Players Flocking to Battlefield Bad Company 2

For the past several months DFC Intelligence has been reporting on the usage of Xbox 360 games through monitoring plays registered by the GamerDNA audience on Xbox Live. In November we charted the overwhelming dominance of Activision-Blizzard’s Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2. In early February we charted Electronic Arts’ January launch of Mass Effect 2 and how it cast a large shadow over all other January releases. Later that month in an article in the DFC Dossier, we noted how Modern Warfare 2 was still the leading game played on Xbox Live through its third month in release, showing little to no cannibalization by February launches such as Bioshock 2, Dante’s Inferno or Aliens vs. Predator.

On March 2, Electronic Arts released Battlefield: Bad Company 2, the latest installment in the long running and successful series originally launched on PC in 2002 with Battlefield 1942. While a different game than Modern Warfare 2, with its own nuances and gameplay mechanics rooted in the Battlefield brand, Bad Company 2 is widely considered the closest match to Modern Warfare 2 in setting, concept, art style and general game design in both single and multiplayer components. With that in mind DFC has explored how these games compare on Xbox Live among the GamerDNA audience.

The chart above shows the daily reach of key titles from Jan 1 to Mar 17, 2010. Modern Warfare 2 continues to be the most played game since it launched on Nov 10, 2009. Mass Effect 2, released Jan 26, appears to have had a permanent impact on Modern Warfare 2 and a week after it launched, the Activision blockbuster returned to roughly its previous rate of slow decline. Dante’s Inferno and Bioshock 2, both released on February 8, appear to have slightly diminished the following weekend of Modern Warfare 2 play but otherwise had no significant impact. Borderlands, the popular co-op FPS-RPG hybrid released in October 2009, received a large boost in play after its Feb 23 downloadable content expansion released; however, it also appears to have had little to no impact on Modern Warfare 2. Finally, Bad Company 2 released on March 2 and — as with Mass Effect 2 – appears to have permanently impacted Modern Warfare 2 play.

It should be noted that no game, even with a robust multiplayer component, is played at its maximum historic reach levels indefinitely, as all games decline over time, though not at the same rates. Obviously new releases capture the gamers’ attention and even if they are primarily single player experiences limited replay value, not all gamers return to their previous favorite games. And while these play rates do not provide definite proof of the exact impact of a particular game’s release on another established game, they do provide directional indicators about audience overlap.

Because Modern Warfare 2 and Bad Company 2 are much closer to one another than either are to games like Mass Effect 2 or Borderlands, it is worth exploring their respective audiences’ overlap at a deeper level. To do so we have examined some specific crossplay rates between them. Recalling DFC’s November piece on IndustryGamers about Modern Warfare 2, crossplay is the percentage of gamers who played one game and also played another.

Examining all U.S. GamerDNA users who ever played either Modern Warfare 2 or Bad Company 2 up through March 17, 2010, we found that 21% of Modern Warfare 2 users played Bad Company 2. Conversely, 81% of Bad Company 2 users played Modern Warfare 2 during the same period.

These crossplay rates should not be terribly surprising given Modern Warfare 2’s huge sales numbers and the fact that Bad Company 2 is still a relatively new game. The 81% crossplay of Bad Company 2 to Modern Warfare 2 is similar to many other games , as MW2 has achieved sales and multiplayer usage that have exceeded all other games including Halo 3 back when the Xbox 360 installed base was smaller.