I checked raptr.com, a gameplay time tracking website whose ten million plus members are mostly 360 and PC players and Fable III has had a significant boost in activity.
Before it wasn’t even in the top one hundred most played games of any period but now after having been free for just one whole day it’s now one of the most played games of this week totaling in at over twenty four thousand hours.
To give you some perspective, this is more gameplay time this week than that achieved by Gears of War: Judgement, Injustice: Gods Among Us, Assassin’s Creed III and Forza Motorsport 4 just to name a few newer and more popular game titles.
Fable III is currently the fifteenth most played xbox 360 title on raptr for this week and this is only after being free for a little over a single day of this week.
While raptr doesn’t have the entire xbox 360 player base I feel it’s still a pretty reliable reference of the activity of the general 360 player base sense there are millions of 360 gamers signed up on raptr.
It should also be considered that Halo 3 has also been played by many gamers already. It’s cheap and it’s been around for a long time so it’s entirely possible that being free wont generate the same sort of interest that Fable III has.
On the other hand Halo 3 is a more accessible game that’s much easier to get into and more recognizable so it’s possible that Halo 3 might see a bigger boost.
If Halo 3 can just see a similar boost to Fable III though then we can hope see a brief period of activity Halo 3 hasn’t seen in years.
Halo 3 population is still quite good to be honest, I can easily ind games during the week. And its even better during the weekend 
But yes! I hope the population does go up, it’d be nice to see <3
Fable III now has over ninety seven thousand hours for this week on raptr, making it the fourth most played 360 game of the week only behind Call of Duty: Black Ops II, State of Decay and Minecraft.
It would be amazing if Halo 3 got this sort of play time. Here’s hoping.
> Fable III now has over ninety seven thousand hours for this week on raptr, making it the fourth most played 360 game of the week only behind Call of Duty: Black Ops II, State of Decay and Minecraft.
>
> It would be amazing if Halo 3 got this sort of play time. Here’s hoping.
More than Halo 4?
> > Fable III now has over ninety seven thousand hours for this week on raptr, making it the fourth most played 360 game of the week only behind Call of Duty: Black Ops II, State of Decay and Minecraft.
> >
> > It would be amazing if Halo 3 got this sort of play time. Here’s hoping.
>
> More than Halo 4?
Well yeah, easily.
As I type this Fable III has since become the second most played 360 game on raptr for the past week at 169,174 hours. By comparison Halo 4 only racked up 62,158 hours being the 8th most played 360 game. of this week.
Keep in mind that raptr only provides gameplay time stats and does not reveal the amount of unique users that play a game in a given week, like majornelson does.
The best source for stats on the amount of players that actually play in a given time(at least for comparison by proportion rather than hard numbers) to my knowledge is 360voice.gamerdna.com. But that website has a significantly smaller pool of players to pull stats from than raptr.
But on 360voice this week Fable III had the second highest population with over sixteen thousand of it’s users playing it while Halo 4 had the sixth highest population with over twelve thousand players.
> Halo 3 population is still quite good to be honest, I can easily ind games during the week. And its even better during the weekend
>
> But yes! I hope the population does go up, it’d be nice to see <3
I mostly play Slayer and never have trouble finding games at any given time I play.
Team snipers is my second fav playlist. Unfortunately its a bit harder to find games.
this is why I am super excited for Halo 3 to be free. I already own 3 copies so it’s not about it being free but many new people will get on to try it and possibly more Halo fans but also playlists that were not as full will have more players. This also mean less lag, and some old veterans will return since the boost.
Either way this will only help Halo 3. I’m going to play a crap ton of Halo 3 in July.
I never stopped playing Halo 3 and this might be the final last hurrah before it all goes down and the Xbox One comes out and this generation console becomes old news. But until that day and the population counter in Halo 3 is literally 0 I’ll be playing it.
highly doubt it will exceed a 20,000 population
> highly doubt it will exceed a 20,000 population
I disagree. There are about 6-7,000 people playing on the weekdays on average and even more on weekends. So 15,00 new people playing a free game wouldn’t be THAT hard to imagine, especially if it’s such a esteemed game like Halo 3.