According to the weekly list of most played games on Xbox Live, (posted at Major Nelson) Gears of War tops the list for the Xbox 360 this past week. More importantly, it is also named as the number one most played game when you combine the numbers for the games on either system. This marks the first time since the launch of Halo 2 that any game has overtaken it for rank of top contender on the list. Although this may seem to be a two year milestone on the surface, this is a less than significant award given out by a system that could not be more misrepresented/flawed.

First of all, lets look at how this list is advertised. It has often been referred to as the list of 'Top games played on Xbox Live.' Some common misconceptions are that this list has something to do with Xbox Live play. No surprise here given the title of the list. In most cases, people derive that this list tallies up the most popular games being played over Xbox Live (online multiplayer) during a given week. This is until they find that single player games somehow make this list. Interesting isn't it?

Xbox Live has almost no relevance to this list and multiplayer has absolutely zero relevance. Xbox Live should not even be in the title of this list since it has no baring. This is a very simple and unsophisticated list generated by a 10-line computer subroutine. When you find out just what the numbers reflect, you will probably ask yourself the same question I have been for the last few years. Does this list really even determine much about the popularity of the games in question?

The way the list works is simple. You insert the game, log onto Xbox Live via the menus (or on the 360, you are logged in automatically) and you have now been successfully counted for the week. Play five minutes, five hours or not at all. It does not matter, your gametag has already been counted for this week and that is all that matters to this seemingly well respected list. All this metric seems to do is gauge how much replay value a given game has.

Watch this list and you will soon notice that 360 games when they come out make a huge splash because the Xbox 360 auto logs you into Xbox Live where as Xbox games do not auto log you in. Everybody wants to play them when they are new and the counter racks up hundreds of thousands of gamertags for that specific game on launch week. If the auto login of the 360 was not enough to deviate the numbers from Xbox enough, the 360 also counts the gamer tags of non paying Silver members where as on the original, you have to be a paying Gold member to participate in this exclusive 'list.' I am sure there are many Silver members who play Gears and every one of their accounts gets counted. Guess how many non Gold subscribers were counted when playing Halo 2? A big zero. The numbers Xbox games post versus the numbers that Xbox 360 games post are not able to be compared logically. The Xbox 360 has so many unfair advantages that comparing these numbers should be a crime.

I am not arguing that Gears of War is just an average game with a ton of hype behind it resulting in boosted numbers, however I am saying that just because a game appears at the top of the list the week of its launch does not mean a whole lot. Plenty of mediocre games that have been hyped make it up this list the first week and drop like a rock thereafter. And for these overhyped mediocre games, the average player probably does not spend very long playing them not that this list takes that into consideration.

This list is very flawed. Something Major Nelson can do to remedy the situation is explain to his audience how the list works. Either that or rename it to something that is actually descriptive of what it stands for. 'Most played games on Xbox Live' is very misleading and one reason there are so many comments every time he posts this list is because 15% of the comments are from people who see that there is something fishy and want an explanation of how this list even works. For all we know, Halo 2 could very well still be more popular than Gears of War. If Gears falls behind Halo 2 come new years, then we will know for sure that Gears never should have been above Halo 2 in the first place. Gears is a very popular game but it may not have been enough to best Halo 2.