Game Trends: Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 spells doom for XBLA titles

If you sign into your Xbox Live account and take a look at your Friends list, chances are at least half of your friends are playing Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2. This shouldn’t be surprising as Activision said MW2 sold 4.7 million copies in its first day of release in North America and the UK. We’re sure Activison is rolling around in all the profits while laughing manically but XBLA games are paying a steep price to exist in a post MW2 world.

GamerBytes has been taking a look at leaderboard activity for XBLA games for some weeks and found a very interesting trend.

It seems since everybody is playing MW2, new leaderboard entries for other popular XBLA games have taken a nosedive. A prime example of this is Trials HD which as of two weeks ago had nearly 15,000 new entries in its leaderboards. When MW2 came out last week, Trials HD leaderboard entries dropped to almost 9,000. That is a decrease of about 40% in activity. Likewise, leaderboard activity for games including Defense Grid, South Park: Let’s Go Tower Defense Play!, and Zombie Apocalypse were just about cut in half.

This would definitely explain why so many games were pushed to the first quarter of 2009. There also aren’t many high profile XBLA games coming out for the rest of 2009 either. That is a very smart move for publishers who don’t want to be crushed under MW2‘s massive following.

Read [GamerBytes] Via [Gamasutra]