Editor’s Note: [a]list daily is happy to introduce a new regular feature from social media trends tracker Starcount, looking at top games by month based on online buzz.  For information on their methodology, refer to the description and link at the end of the article.

By Starcount

September was a golden month for games. The latest Grand Theft Auto dropped to universal acclaim, with some suggesting that Rockstar’s latest release in their open-world crime series may just be the best game of all time.

The issue of best football games also continued to rage on with the release of the latest edition of both the FIFA and Pro Evolution Soccer series. EA’s FIFA was received better by the critics, as the popular trend for realism in video games seemingly winning out when it comes to the beautiful game.

But how did the games perform on social media Well, as ever, the web has been a buzz of gaming activity, with trailers for new games hitting YouTube, Instagram videos of shenanigans on some of the month’s top releases and helpful gamers giving out walkthroughs and tips on Twitter. Starcount rounded up the top 10 most popular games using their unique social media stats, and we’ve given them to you in a handy countdown chart.

10. NEED FOR SPEED 

Need For Speed had 200,000 YouTube views and was talked about nearly 50,000 times this month. Screenshots of upcoming Need For Speed: Rivals got fans of racing games everywhere excited about the November release which sees the franchise make it’s debut on the Xbox One.

 

9. HITMAN

Hitman has gained 130,000 new Facebook fans and more and 45,000 YouTube views in September as rumours continued to surface surrounding the next instalment of the series, Hitman 6.

 

8. RESIDENT EVIL

Cap com’s acclaimed survival horror franchise, Resident Evil, is the eighth most popular game in the world this month after more than 300,000 people were talking about the series on Facebook.

 

7. MINECRAFT

September saw the immensely popular building block game, Minecraft, gain 200,000 fans on Facebook after the Ordnance Survey created an accurate map of the United Kingdom into the game! One spokesperson said “we think we may have created the largest Minecraft world ever built based on real-world data.”

 

6. ASSASSIN’S CREED

The gaming community is gearing up for another scintillating instalment in the Assassin’s Creed series — this time with a pirate theme. This month the franchise has gained 50,000 new fans on Facebook and had it’s new Multiplayer Gameplay Trailer viewed more than 80,000 times.

 

5. BATTLEFIELD 

Just as FIFA has competition, so does Call of Duty. Battlefield provides a more realistic, gritty experience, and is clearly very popular with you guys — you watched Battlefield videos more than 7 million times!

 

4. PRO EVOLUTION SOCCER

While FIFA may still be the most popular, Pro Evo is hot on its heels. The game’s YouTube channel was viewed over 2.4 million times in September, and should provide very real competition for FIFA 14 over the next few weeks.

 

3. FIFA

The world’s no.1 football game is in at 3. The series is talked about almost constantly on Facebook, with over 270,000 engaging with the game, from screenshots of victories to punishments for losses, FIFA is still your favourite when it comes to the beautiful game.

 

2. CALL OF DUTY

The Call of Duty franchise continues to be incredibly popular, and with next addition “Ghosts” recently unveiled and set to be released in November, the series is your second most popular game this month, with over 11.5 million views on YouTube.

 

1. GRAND THEFT AUTO V

Controversial series GTA is the most popular game across social media at the moment, with over a million of you talking about it on Facebook. The fifth instalment in the series was released last month to rave reviews with the game achieving a rating of 9.9 on IMDB.

 

How will things look next month Will Grand Theft Auto be able to hold onto its crown as the most socially popular video game in the world, or will it be replaced by the winner of the latest shoot-em-up shoot-out as Call of Duty: Ghosts goes up against Battlefield 4 in the battle of the autumn FPS releases.

Or will the landscape change entirely as the latest generation of consoles are unleashed, with both the Xbox One and PlayStation 4 expected out in November? We’ll check back in next month with the results.

For methodology, Starcount uses 12 global networks including Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, and Chinese networks Sina Weibo and Tencent Weibo, analyzing the behavior of 1.5 billion users. The firm has a unique algorithm that creates a “Starscore” for each game, which it then uses to rank the most popular games on social media in a given period of time. 

For more information, check out how Starcount tallies their “Starscore.”