MMORPG Search Trends

Posted by Stropp on August 11, 2008

I was looking at my blog stats this morning. When I came to the search terms that people use to find my blog, it occurred to me to have a look at the search trends for the big three games of this year.

Google provides a handy little tool called Google Trends that uses their historical search data to produce a series of graphs showing where different search terms stand in relation to each other. BTW, a search term is the text that you type into Google when doing a search. That’s all there is to it.

Anyhoo. I thought it would be interesting to have a look at the numbers and scales of people performing searches for the big three games of 2008: World of Warcraft, Age of Conan, and Warhammer Online.

The Google Trends tool allows you to select a time frame for the graphs. I picked on three: All Time, 2008, and the last 30 days.

On all three graphs, The blue line is Warhammer Online, the orange line is Age of Conan, and the red line is, of course, World of Warcraft.

Trends for All Time (since 2004)

 

Trends for 2008

 

Trends for the Last 30 Days

As you can see, World of Warcraft remains the eight thousand pound gorilla for searches. In terms of search volume, there’s only one time when they weren’t the most searched for in the MMORPG world, and that was when Age of Conan was released.

Unfortunately for Age of Conan, the spike in search terms appears to resemble the stats that XFire put out for their members who were playing the game. Shortly after launch, when everybody was keen and interested in the game, searches for info on the game skyrocketed. But when players started leaving, interest waned and  the search volume plummeted. It’s now almost to the point where it was before the game was released. Not good.

You can see a similar pattern starting to happen with Warhammer Online in the 2008 trends graph. With the announcement of a release date interest in the game is starting to rise. I expect a rise similar to Age of Conan around the time when the game is released. I reckon it will then settle down at about 50 percent of the peak search volume… more or less. Providing the game is in a good release state.

One interesting thing, if you like graphs and statistics I suppose, is that the search volume for each game is remarkably consistent and low level until the game is released. There is a small amount of increase in the last year, but then at release, boom, everybody’s searching. It seems to be true for all three games charted here.

The final trend I’ll comment on is that it appears that the search volume for World of Warcraft is waning somewhat. This could be due to a number of factors.

• WoW Players are getting bored with the game and leaving. I don’t think this is the case. It doesn’t gel with the fact that World of Warcraft has 10 - 11 million players.
• WoW Players no longer need to search for information. This is more likely. After four years and few expansions, most players know a lot about the game, and have their sources like Wowhead, Wowwiki, and various other sites and blogs bookmarked. No need to search.

If the trend of players searching on release continues, I expect we’ll see a rise in World of Warcraft searches at that time.

What does the data tell you?

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