tl;dr: i was bored and look at this BADSD8v8XxblazeItxX420 but not only.
Just going by the total all-time numbers of
http://replays.springrts.com/ can be deceiving.
To me any question regarding popularity implies "what is popular
in recent times."
If there was recorded data of the old "Absolute Annhilation" it might well be first or second most-played game, but the relevance to today's players is low.
Another thing is that of course not every match has the same number of players, should be obvious. So I tried to look at that too.
(currently without access to proper stats/scripting tools, so roughly using the count function of text edior instead of actually summing it up etc, which is ofc prone to messing up)
So I limited the time to last three months and also made some notes about things that seemd interessting.
(date range: 2014-12-01 to 2015-02-08)
Balanced Annihilation
total 3072
Duel 921 (30% of total)
420 8v8 (14% of total)
165 7v7
151 6v6
151 5v5
176 4v4
281 3v3
354 2v2
map DeltaSiegeDry 668 (22% of total)
map DeltaSiegeDry 8v8 269 (9% of total)
By far BA has the most played matches.
Somewhere between 30-60 matches are played every day. There is no week or even day without played matches.
Games as large as 8v8 are common but every game-type can be found. (too lazy to count all FFA variants)
The 1v1 or small-teams matches alone easily reach or surpass the total-games of other mods.
A game can be found at 'almost' any time no matter day or clock, without actively searching.
DSD remains popular.
BA Chicken
333 total
part of BA basically.
Tech Annihilation
481 total (16% of BA's total)
142 Duel (30% of total)
104 2v2
62 3v3
24 4v4
11 5v5
229 map blue_fields (47% of total)
The second most played game is already MUCH smaller than BA.
Matches are smaller & fewer than BA but still can go up as high as 5v5 or large FFA 3v3v3v3. (too lazy to count all FFA variants)
Interesstingly this game is the sole reason why the map "blue_fields" is in the top-10 of played maps:
Half the matches took place on this map and no other mod touches it. This is for the real heavy eco.
XTA
331 total
121 Duel (36% of total)
65 2v2
32 3v3
6 4v4
31 map duck (9% of total)
Small game. At this size sometimes there can be days where simply none of the players is online.
Evolution RTS
241 total
207 Duel (86% of total)
22 2v2
3 3v3
147 games by same player (spec+play) (61%)
NOTA
119 total
83 Duel
map stats:
map TitanDuel 32
map Valles_Marineris_v2 20
map Nuclear_Winter 16
Small game.
3 maps make up 57% of total, maybe because map pack.
Imperial Winter
28 total
Rest
There probally were more games played, whose autohosts do not upload or privately hosted.
But no way to check that and I doubt it was relevant numbers.
Facit:
BA is the most popular game, especially in its BADSD8v8 variante. However, that is not the only way it is played.
One should note that the playerbase of every mod is quite small. If five common players do not play for a few weeks it can well have large effect on the number of played matches during that time.
Similiar if there is a problem with replay-uploading for some time it can have large-ish effect, "losing" 50 recorded matches is quite much for some mods.
In a larger playerbase the exotic preferences of a very small number of people would be "lost in an average" but here they matter much more:
"blue_fields" is by no means a normal map, and one would not expect it to be that popular to reach third most played map. That this happend is basically the archivement of 20 or maybe even as low as just 5 people.
The same players play multiple mods.
I did not look at data of this, just something to remember. I assume even the people who do consider BA their "main game" play it from time to time.
zero-K
...is not included because it is not recorded on
http://replays.springrts.com/
Maybe in future worth a look but its replay site is harder to look at.
I would expect similiar numbers as BA, with a more diverse mapselection for big team games but a large amount of these maps would be "exotic nonsense" fun maps like Trololo, FinnishFlag, too small maps etc.
Fun fact:
Most downloaded maps according to zero-K
IsisDelta_v02
DeltaSiegeDry
Fields_Of_Isis
Small_Divide-Remake-v04
Small Supreme Battlefield V2
Red Comet
Comet Catcher Redux
Chicken_Nuggets_v4
Archers_Valley_v5
TitanDuel
Nuclear_Winter_v1
Throne v1
TheColdPlace
SuperSpeedMetal
TheRockFinal
There is no way IsisDelta should be such a popular map, it is too controversial for that and not even "featured."
Compared to TitanDuel, which by my perception is a popular map:
IsisDelta Downloads: 45831
Fields_Of_Isis Downloads: 34066
TitanDuel Downloads: 22113
Ofc dl numbers does not played matches.
I think the dl numbers of IsisDelta, Fields_Of_Isis (but also of TitanDuel and some others) are so high because those maps are used in some tutorial/mission/sandbox things.
A quote from
http://zero-k.info/Maps/Detail/7521 :
This is basically the first map I saw from ZK (maybe after "Running Start"'s Fields of Isis).
Just one quote but it seems realistic to me that the same is true for many players or that existing players tried these missions, too.
(And probally people used zeroKlobby to play non-zK games, which also makes thing fuzzy.)
If one takes away the maps used in missions: look at the list again and see who climbs to the top spot of the most downloaded map.
Behold the King.