Ha! I’ll bet you thought I’d forgotten to post a game of the year article this year. I mean, January is halfway over already. Well, after I spent so much verbiage defending review aggregation, it’d be disingenuous to just leave those descriptive statistics just lying there. So get ready to hedge and prepare to evade personal responsibility, because it’s time to bow to the wisdom of crowds.

So World of Warcraft recently hit 11 million subscribers–big freakin’ deal. It turns out that Call of Duty 4 has 14 million (though in all fairness, it’s not terribly surprising that more people are playing a 5 minute multiplayer action game than a 300 hour MMORPG). In apparent celebration of this fact, Robert Bowling, Infinitum Ward community manager posted some basic descriptive statistics about the popular FPS on his blog.

Probably the most interesting factoid is that, of all the people kicking your butt when you log on, only about half have bothered to complete the game. It’s certainly true that fighting humans demands a different skill set than fighting scripted AI, but this means that most players have missed Call of Duty 4′s succinct and generally excellent campaign mode. Hell, after listening to the chatter, I’m pretty sure that half of them don’t even know what a ghillie suit is.

The new year is upon us and so it’s time to take a look back. For gaming websites like this one, that usually means some sort of game of the year award where the editors of the publication get together and vote/argue for their personal picks.

How myopic. It’s a new year; some perspective is in order.