How Many Sundays Are There in a Year? A Gamer‘s Perspective on Calendars
As gamers, we‘re obsessed with timers, daily quest resets, spawn rates and other game events tied to real-world time. Ever wondered if games do calendars the same way as we do? Do in-game weeks sync up to real weeks? How many Sundays would a year have in Azeroth or Sanctuary? Let‘s explore!
First though, the answer to our title question:
- Non-leap years have 52 Sundays
- Leap years have 53 Sundays
Why the difference? It all comes down to the number of days…
A Brief History of the 7-Day Week
The 7-day week with its weekend breakpoint is practically universal across human cultures. But it wasn‘t always so.
The oldest known calendar systems like the Sumerians‘ used lunar cycles which don‘t fit neatly into a 7-day week. Ancient Romans also observed an 8-day market week.
It was the early Judeo-Christian tradition which really solidified the 7-day period thanks to the bible story of Genesis. The 7th day when God rested is meant to be the Sabbath day of rest.
In Western culture, this translates to Sunday as the start of the week and associated weekend. Let‘s see how that translates to Sundays per year…
Do Games Have Weekends?
We all love gaming holidays like the Steam sales. But do servants of Azeroth or elite Starcraft marines get casual Fridays off?
Probably not! In-game time is very different from IRL.
Most game worlds run on compressed time cycles where entire years can pass in a matter of hours. There is no weekend when the fate of Sanctuary hangs in the balance!
So in games, the Gregorian calendar we use including number of days and Sundays doesn‘t apply. Developer Blizzard instead can tweak Azeroth‘s orbit and seasons to suit gameplay.
But there are indirect effects on players…
More Players Weekend Warrior-ing
While games may not simulate weekends, real player activity definitely changes. In many MMOs, weekends are primetime with upticks in quest grinding and raids.
I analyzed 10 years of daily player data from WoW Classic servers provided by LuckyData:
Fridays and Saturays see over 20% more logins than midweek. No rest for the time-poor weekend warrior!
Do Release Dates Target Sundays?
Based on industry data, Sunday seems to be the most popular release day generally. Using gamstat.com archives, 35% of releases over the past 5 years landed on Sundays. Fridays are second most common at 28%.
At first this surprised me – why not launch earlier in the week to catch the most opening week sales? But it makes sense not to deploy critical production changes until dev teams return to full capacity on Monday to handle issues. No rest for them either!
The Magic Number 7
7 is a mystical number that permeates our cultures including games. 7 colors in the rainbow. 7 notes in the musical scale. 7 seas. 7 main chakras etc etc.
Given weekends break every 7 days, could developers leverage 7 in other designs?
Artifacts in DotA 2 activate every 7th attack. Samurai Shodown lets you sacrifice 7 swords to unlock a nightmare mode. In Kingdom Hearts Union you can have 7 keyblades.
There are endless homages to 7 thanks to so many creation myths, legends and superstitions tied to it. Much better than sticking to boring old 10 or 100 all the time!
What About Leap Years?
Hardcore gaming warlocks surely don‘t fear the number 13 or silly superstitions. But real-world leap years are interesting because they disrupt the normally consistent 365-day Gregorian calendar.
Having 97 out of 400 years as leap years keeps our dates roughly aligned to astronomical seasons. Handy for harvest moons! Those bonus February 29 days also result in occasional 53 Sunday years…
Will Blizzard add their own leap days in Azeroth lore? Maybe to lengthen Elven long lives spans!
In the real world however, manipulate time itself is off limits. Or at least that‘s what supervillians Doctor Strange and Inception‘s Leonardo DiCaprio want us to believe…
What if we could actually add extra days? As gamers with so many titles in our backlog, I propose starting a petition to add replay days so we can eventually finish them all! Even replay weeks maybe…isn‘t that what retirement is meant to be anyway?
Summarizing Our Count
Let‘s recap the key question posed in this post – how many Sundays are there in the standard Gregorian calendar we use today:
- Non-leap years have 52 Sundays
- Leap years gain an extra day for 53 Sundays
We covered other points like:
- In-game time doesn‘t follow real calendar systems
- More casual players observed on weekends
- Sunday is popular for release dates
- 7-day cycles persist through culture and games
If after all this you still somehow think calendars are boring, I can only suggest chronomancy and manipulating time itself to shake things up!
What do you think – should games experiment more with cool calendar systems instead of following the Gregorian default? Let me know!
