Most active mmo based on most likely unreliable data!

 

As the title says, I was bored so I did some research to see where mmos stack up with each other, now I would like to point out before sharing anything that none of these mmos give consistent player numbers aside from what you can find on something like Steamcharts, which for most of these games, is the vast minority of their playerbase. With that disclaimer, I begin

Starting with

GOOGLE TRENDSThis is average search interest in the last 90 days

USA

1. World of Warcraft
2. Final Fantasy XIV Online
3. Elder Scrolls Online
4. Lost Ark
5. Guild Wars 2
6. New World
7. Black Desert

GLOBAL

1. World of Warcraft
2. Final Fantasy XIV Online
3. Lost Ark
4. Elder Scrolls Online
5. Guild Wars 2
6. Black Desert Online
7. New World

Fun fact regarding google trends global, when not including WoW and FFXIV, ESO dominates North America whereas GW2 dominates Europe. Also Lost Ark and ESO are still fairly close in global but mainly Lost Arks complete dominance in Asia and South America pushes it over the edge.

But that is google trends, which while fun to use (and many many people use it completely wrong becuase they dont understand what the umbrella search terms are and just do things like "gw2" or "ffxiv") It is not all that useful, so moving on to

SIMILARWEB ESTIMATED WEBSITE TRAFFICWorth noting that games like New World/Lost Ark basically use Steam as their website, as that is the only platform you can find it on, and World of warcraft has its Battle.net launcher service

These will be estimations of total website visits in the month of August

1. Final Fantasy XIV Online - 16.2 million
2. Guild Wars 2 - 10 million
3. Black Desert - 6.4 million
4. World of Warcraft - 6.3 million
5. Lost Ark - 4 million
6. Elder Scrolls Online - 3.8 million
7. New World - 1.9 million

According to what I can find online, while Similarweb may not be 100% accurate, it is fairly reliable as a source for website traffic, as it's not easy to get that info, is nice to see gw2 hit that double digit though.

This last one is my least favorite as it can be so wildly different depending on day

CONCURRENT REDDIT USERSAs I said, not a fan of this as tomorrow it could be entirely different, but total subs is even more useless when dealing with older games like most of these, THIS IS TAKEN from Friday night roughly 10pm

1. Final Fantasy XIV Online - 4.3 thousand
2. World of Warcraft - 3.2 thousand
3. Lost Ark - 2.2 thousand
4. Guild Wars 2 - 1.2 thousand
5. Elder Scrolls Online - 860
6. New World - 712
7. Black Desert Online - 651

and that just about does it, I assume you are now wondering, what does this mean? What does it say? How does it matter?

The answers my friends are:

Nothing, Nothing important, and it doesn't

At the end of the day we have no way of knowing total populations and you should just be happy with what you enjoy to play :)

If I had to sort a top 5 based on the information I found I would say

1. World of Warcraft (can be swapped with FF really)
2. FFXIV
3. Lost Ark
4. ESO
5. Guild Wars 2

EDIT: adding MOAR

REDDIT POSTS PER DAY

1. WoW: 2206
2. Lost Ark: 1914
3. FFXIV: 1619
4. Guild Wars 2: 1096
5. New World: 1054
6. ESO: 642
7. Black Desert: 334

As a final message, looking at game population and stuff is fun, no need to be toxic about any of it, but can some of you guys who still confuse concurrent players with total daily or monthly players please...stop doing that. Concurrent=players playing at that given time, avg concurrent means players playing at any given time. It DOES NOT mean "X game has this many players because Steamcharts says"

Editing again:
Websites used in this

Google Trends |
Website Traffic - Check and Analyze Any Website | Similarweb