Whenever PSN, Xbox Live or any other major online game or service goes down, these become some of the most heavily searched topics on IGN. So, we wanted to see how various services, platforms and individual games fared throughout 2018 when it came to staying online. To do so, we asked Downdetector, a website that collects data on online service outages, who experienced the most downtime in 2018.
To determine which games and services go down and for how long, Downdetector “collects status reports from a series of sources. Through a realtime analysis of this data, our system is able to automatically determine outages and service interruptions at a very early stage.” Downtime analyzes reports from sources like Twitter, and detects outages when the number of reports jumps above a relative baseline level.
All of the data used for this article was based on the January – November 2018 period. For these lists, the higher the rank, the worse the game or service did at consistently staying online. For franchises like Call of Duty, Destiny and Rainbow Six, Downdetector analyzes and lists them as a whole rather than as specific games. No information on Nintendo Switch Online was provided.
The games and services with the most downtime in 2018:
Games:
- Fortnite
- PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds
- Rainbow Six
- Pokémon Go
- Call of Duty
- Dead by Daylight
- Overwatch
- For Honor
- Destiny
- Roblox
Consoles:
- PSN
- Xbox Live
Platforms:
- Battle.net
- Uplay
- Steam
- Origin
Of course, while using these parameters to get an idea of how often and how long games and services go down, there are certain factors that contribute to these specific games and services making the list. All of these games include heavy multiplayer or socially focused gameplay options, naturally allowing them to experience more downtime than many other games. And most of these go through consistent and periodic updates, which often forces periods of downtime that wouldn’t happen otherwise.
While a game or service making this list is indicative of its downtime performance, it isn’t a measure of overall quality. When they do go down, IGN’s audience naturally likes to search and see what’s going on during these outages. Outages on online services like PSN or Xbox Live also impact when specific games experience downtime.
It’s also worth noting that these are some of the biggest online games and services around, and because Downdetector uses popular sources to gather its data, games with smaller followings will naturally get less information to go off of. There are almost certainly smaller, lower-budget games that experience more downtime than many of these titles.
For more gaming-related lists, check out the best-selling games of each of the last 23 years, the top 10 best-selling exclusives of since 1995, and Amazon’s best-selling games of 2018.
Disclosure: Downdetector is owned and operated by Ookla, LLC, a part of IGN’s parent company Ziff Davis.
Colin Stevens is a news writer for IGN. Follow him on Twitter.