"Call of Duty: Black Ops," an online combat global multiplayer video game, recently shattered a worldwide record—it sold more than $650 million copies in five days.

Surprised? Don't be. More than 50 percent of American adults and 97 percent of teenagers play video games, according to a 2008 Pew Research Center study. That's a lot of gamers whose playing habits can provide a wealth of information to game developers, console manufacturers and even advertisers.

This is where the online gaming social networking company Raptr comes into play.

"The gaming industry is very secretive about a lot of data," said John Lee, senior director of marketing at Raptr. "We are helping the industry to change the way it shares information by filling in a lot of gaps. Like [market research company] NPD tracks sales, we track gameplay times."

To gather this information, Raptr offers a free software application for Windows that aggregates real-time gaming activity across video games and online platforms like Xbox Live, PlayStation 3 and PC.

In addition to tracking the hours that the user plays any particular game—gameplay in gamer terminology—Raptr is also a social platform that automatically updates a people's gaming status and helps them connect with friends to see what they're playing. On a PC, it also supports Steam, Xfire and IM clients like Yahoo!, MSN, AIM, ICQ, GTalk and Facebook. Raptr also recently launched an iPhone application.

"We can tell instantly as a game launches, how it is holding up in the market place," said Lee.

Founded by Dennis "Thresh" Fong in 2007 after he sold Xfire, his previous start-up, to Viacom for more than $100 million, Raptr today is a 30-employee company headquartered on Shoreline Boulevard in Mountain View. Raptr, which adds users at the rate of half a million a month, has raised $12 million in venture capital from investors such as Accel Partners and The Founders Fund, said Lee.

Raptr now competes with Xfire in the PC domain.

"I think Raptr has iterated the Xfire concept and has truly become a gaming social network," said Michael Pachter, managing director of equity research at Wedbush Securities. "They are usable across platforms, and membership is far more viral than the other players."

Pachter appeared bullish about the future of Raptr.

"Ultimately, I think that Raptr will be the glue binding the PC, Xbox 360 and PS3 online communities," he said. "I could see them becoming more robust as these communities grow."

Raptr does not yet have the ability to automatically track gameplay on Nintendo systems, though users can manually input their totals, according to the "frequently asked questions" page on their site.

"Gamers have very different habits," said Lee. "Our goal is to build it out in a way such that the system is much more intelligent around profiling information," he said and emphasized the importance of the user experience.

However, even with Raptr's data reports, a lot of questions still remain about games—and gamers.

With an average of 23 hours of gameplay per week and with a third of those gamers clocking 30 hours or more weekly, it is hard to tell whether a particular game is "under performing or [if we] have actually reached the ceiling of what the human threshold limit is, in terms of how much you can play in a week," said Lee.

One game that isn't under-performing is "Call of Duty: Black Ops," which has continued to dominate the charts since launch. Its first-day figures—5.9 million multiplayer hours of gameplay with more than 2.6 million unique gamers—are impressive. As these numbers grow, gaming companies will turn to the likes of Raptr to better understand—and reach—their audience.

"The industry is clearly headed online," said Pachter. "As gaming heads into the cloud with services like OnLive and Gaikai, I think we'll see publisher-sponsored premium subscription models that don't require consoles, and I could see Raptr becoming even more important a tool to find and connect with your friends."