I work at a game related company and its funny to see the player count drift back and forth from game to web site to forums. Its like watching a swarm of locusts that drift en-masse from site to site devouring resources.
First the game is up and then suddenly drops 20k people. 20k people show up at once on the titles web status page and pound it to death. Then the forums are raped and dragged out back and shot. Then the game comes back up and the login server is lynched and set on fire. If you graph the traffic, its fairly predictable.