JaggedSac on 13 March 2009
Selnor, what you should realize is that those Major Nelson lists do not imply the most played online game. Just the rankings of games in terms of how many unique users have played. Yearly figures for that kind of statistic is pretty much worthless.
The weekly data tells a bit more. Notice how Gears 2 had the most UU(Unique Users) the week it came out and then dropped down steadily in the subsequent weeks. This shows us that it did not have the staying power to keep people coming back that CoD4 and Halo 3 had.
CoD4 is definitely played more on Live than Gears 2.
