As if there were any question on the matter, it’s pretty clear what you gamers are playing these days. Activision released the most recent string of online stats for Call of Duty: Black Ops, and they’re pretty impressive to say the least. According to the publisher, more than 20 million Black Ops players have logged more than 600 million man-hours in the month and a half since its release.

To put that number into perspective, you’d have to…scratch that, you can’t put that number in perspective, its 600 million hours. For comparison’s sake at least, Halo Reach got more than 50 million man-hours in its first week, which amounts to 326 million if it were to keep it up for 45 days (still only slightly more than half of Black Ops’ numbers).
Precise numbers weren’t made available by Activision, but they did coyly say that the number of registered users “exceeds the audience for the series finale of ABC’s Lost” (Nielsen data puts that number at 20.5 million people), and the users “would be the third largest state in the U.S.”, behind Texas’s roughly 25 million.

“Media is evolving and today the social aspects of technology are more important to the overall entertainment experience than ever before,” said Bobby Kotick, CEO of Activision Blizzard, shortly before diving into a giant bin filled with gold coins, a la Scrooge McDuck. “Call of Duty creates a shared sense of identity for its community and is as integral to their social lives as any other form of digital communication.”

via Gamasutra