Despite a fulfilling start to the year for the games industry, none of the top played games during 2022’s Q1 were released this year.
Today, NPD’s Executive Director and Video Game Industry Advisor Mat Piscatella shared stats from The NPD Group’s PlayerPulse. The list, which chronologically ranks the top 10 most played games during 2022’s Q1, sees games as old as 2009’s Minecraft and 2013’s Grand Theft Auto V still standing as player favorites.
Here are the top 10 most played games of Q1 2022 in the U.S. ranked by year of initial release. (Source: The NPD Group’s PlayerPulse)
Half of the top 10 weren’t launched this decade. Elden Ring ranked 20th. Ahead of it were games like Rocket League, World of Warcraft and Skyrim. pic.twitter.com/eWXKVMFHZj
— Mat Piscatella (@MatPiscatella) May 24, 2022
Piscatella pointed out that half of the games that made the list were launched before the 2020s. Most notably, Elden Ring, which we gave a 10 and quickly became the best-selling game of the past year, ranked 20th and fell short to older games like Rocket League and World of Warcraft.
Piscatella accredited the game’s surprisingly low placement to the success of evergreen and live service games, calling them “gravity wells for player attention, time and spending.” Q1 is typically defined as the period from January to the end of March, so Elden Ring would also have only been released for one month.
Piscatella expanded on this thread by stating that more AAA games should seek the help of services like Game Pass and the new PlayStation Plus, saying he believes these plans can help “get games funded, released, and to help them break through the barriers of the big evergreen titles.”
While this list doesn’t feature any 2022 games, the year is still looking to be a great year for gaming, with plenty of releases already receiving excellent ratings from IGN and many more titles on their way.
Amelia Zollner is a freelance writer at IGN. Find them on Twitter: @ameliazollner.