How to check whether a game is popular and/or actively played on Xbox Live online?

Solution 1:

Sadly, while Microsoft seems to track this data, they don't really publish many of the statistics publicly. The best you can do is visit Major Nelson's blog, where he publishes posts tagged "Top Live."

These posts give the top 20 titles played on Xbox LIVE for the week in which they are released, and are published roughly once a month. However, at the time of writing, the last update was over four months ago.

Other sites will report on LIVE usage, but if you read the articles closely, they're usually copying and pasting the Major Nelson blog post data verbatim. I've yet to find another site that lists unique stats for LIVE.