There is a couple of great multiplayer-focused games on Xbox 360 (e.g. Dark Souls, Armored Core, etc.), but the eternal problem with such titles is that they are pretty much dead and less fun to play if there is no active online community playing it. This makes it difficult to decide whether is it still worth to jump in even if the game is already several months/years old.
Is there any service, public statistics or site that shows the activity of online gamers playing specific games on Xbox Live online (similar to PC-specific ways, like Xfire, GameRanger, or formerly GameSpy)? If not, what do you do to track health of online population for games you are insterested in?
Best Answer
Sadly, while Microsoft seems to track this data, they don't really publish many of the statistics publicly. The best you can do is visit Major Nelson's blog, where he publishes posts tagged "Top Live."
These posts give the top 20 titles played on Xbox LIVE for the week in which they are released, and are published roughly once a month. However, at the time of writing, the last update was over four months ago.
Other sites will report on LIVE usage, but if you read the articles closely, they're usually copying and pasting the Major Nelson blog post data verbatim. I've yet to find another site that lists unique stats for LIVE.