Every month Kotaku tracks the games that get the most love, per user, on the Wii, but the stats are frozen this month. Not our fault!
You'll see the normal strong performance of Fire Emblem, the continued rise of Call of Duty and the crushing dominance of Super Smash Bros.
The problem is that the stats tracked by the Nintendo Channel haven't been updated by the company in a couple of weeks, possibly since the introduction of the revised version of the Channel. I'm contacting Nintendo about this issue, which appears to be a bug, since the stats are still included on the revised Channel's game listings.
For now, consider this a snapshot of maybe half of September's play time.
I'll refrain for deeper analysis on the numbers until Nintendo fixes them. I will have a more personal take on the numbers tomorrow.
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 78 million sessions of that game have been played by Nintendo Channel users as of September 1 (up 1 million in the last month), for an average of 29.6 sessions per player. That divides to more than 2.6 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 2.6 million people are contributing stats. That is flat with the 2.6 million people when these numbers were run for September 1.