Five Most Popular Game Communities

ActionTrip has published a new feature that takes a closer look at the world’s five largest video game communities. Seeing World of Warcraft on the list isn’t that big of a surprise, but I had no idea RuneScape was so popular:

The game currently encompasses over 9 million active free accounts and more than 1 million paid member accounts. Now, within the hardcore gaming community, World of Warcraft is pretty much the top dog. However, with a little help from Google Trends, we’ve discovered that the search volume for RuneScape exceeded both World of Warcraft and the once phenomenally popular EverQuest. At present, more than 5 million unique players are accessing their RuneScape accounts to play the game at least once per month. From what we could gather, RuneScape’s content is really easy to access, plus it can run in a common web browser without burdening your rig. So, why is the game so damn popular? Well, mainly because of its simplicity and intuitiveness. Players can easily create and customize their avatars and complete a huge amount of quests. In addition, the game features a non-linear path and players fight other players as well as against random monsters. The game’s community is thriving as players interact via trading, chatting or co-op mini-games. Certain studies have shown that playing RuneScape, in particular, benefits players in some way. BBC reported a while back that achieving specific goals in RuneScape is a challenge and can teach teenagers vital skills as they enter the labor market (hey, it’s never too late to start, should you wish to hone your business skills).