According to our research, Super Smash Brothers Brawl is the Wii game that collects the least amount of dust. But two other games are surging toward top status.
Since September of last year I've been tracking the usage stats for top Wii games. Earlier reporters are at MTV Multiplayer. Today, I bring the concept to Kotaku, with some tweaks.
The chart shows Super Smash Brothers Brawl on top, commanding about 66 hours and 32 minutes per person who has owned or rented the game since they first popped it into their Wii.
Guitar Hero III is second but trailing off as its successor picks up steam. (Just off this top 10 list is Rock Band 2).
The games to watch, though, are Animal Crossing City Folk and Call of Duty: World at War, which are both on the rise. Also, note the time sinks of some of the more hardcore games here like Fire Emblem which sell a fraction of Lego games or Wii Ft.
But can anything catch Smash?
I tracked these numbers for the first of the month since September of 2008 and will continue to here for Kotaku. These stats are through May 1. Look for another report in early June and maybe some other slices of the data I've been pulling sooner than that.
Where's all this from? (AKA an explanation of the above chart for stat junkies only): In a move somewhat surprising for the generally secretive company, Nintendo makes all of this data public. Any Wii owner can download the Nintendo Channel to their Wii and begin browsing for games. Any game that has been played enough times has usage stats listed for it, contributed by anyone who chose to share their data with the channel. The sample size that the channel tracks is pretty good. We calculate it by looking at Wii Sports usage numbers, which show that more than 62 million sessions of that game have been played by Nintendo Channel users, for an average of 27.84 sessions per player. That divides to more than 2.2 million Wii Sports users whose gaming has been tracked by the channel. Since almost all Wii Sports owners would be Wii users, we will venture that as many as 2.2 million people are contributing stats. That is up from 2.1 million people when these numbers were ran for April 1.