I spent some time noodling around looking at what games are really popular (I wouldn't know firsthand, I don't play much). There's some data at http://www.amazon.com/gp/bestsellers/videogames (click on PC Games). I tried to cross-check titles with Google Trends to see which ones seem enduringly popular, but I haven't found any that beat World of Warcraft yet: http://www.google.com/trends?q=world+of+warcraft%2C+guild+wars%2C+tomb+raide...
Is Google search popularity a bad measure, or does it reflect the public's mood well? - Dan
No other single game has the market penetration and staying power of WoW as things stand.
XFire collects statistics[1] from their (large) network, if you're interested in "minutes played" as opposed to "copies sold." Be aware that it's not a random sample, though; some game communities (like Call of Duty) have a proportionally large XFire presence compared to others. As far as subscriber-driven MMORPGs go, MMOGCharts[2] is another reasonable source of statistics (note that Guild Wars and certain other MMOGs are not subscriber driven, so they won't show up on their lists).
[1] http://www.xfire.com/cms/stats/ [2] http://www.mmogchart.com/Chart7.html
--Daniel Remenak
On 10/1/07, Dan Kegel dank06@kegel.com wrote:
I spent some time noodling around looking at what games are really popular (I wouldn't know firsthand, I don't play much). There's some data at http://www.amazon.com/gp/bestsellers/videogames (click on PC Games). I tried to cross-check titles with Google Trends to see which ones seem enduringly popular, but I haven't found any that beat World of Warcraft yet: http://www.google.com/trends?q=world+of+warcraft%2C+guild+wars%2C+tomb+raide...
Is Google search popularity a bad measure, or does it reflect the public's mood well?
- Dan
On 10/1/07, Daniel Remenak dtremenak@gmail.com wrote:
No other single game has the market penetration and staying power of WoW as things stand.
I think starcraft has it beat for penetration and staying power, actually. But WoW is the current money maker.
On 10/1/07, Jesse Allen the3dfxdude@gmail.com wrote:
On 10/1/07, Daniel Remenak dtremenak@gmail.com wrote:
No other single game has the market penetration and staying power of WoW as things stand.
I think starcraft has it beat for penetration and staying power, actually. But WoW is the current money maker.
Call of Duty and Starcraft do show up pretty well, thanks.
Here's the best graph I was able to put together so far: http://www.google.com/trends?q=world+of+warcraft%2C+guild+wars%2C+tomb+raide...
On 10/1/07, Jesse Allen the3dfxdude@gmail.com wrote:
On 10/1/07, Daniel Remenak dtremenak@gmail.com wrote:
No other single game has the market penetration and staying power of WoW as things stand.
I think starcraft has it beat for penetration and staying power, actually. But WoW is the current money maker.
Call of Duty and Starcraft do show up pretty well, thanks.
Here's the best graph I was able to put together so far:
Call of Duty is popular but I would say that CounterStrike (+ CounsterStrike Source, the port to the Source engine) are way more popular.
More and more games these days are distributed using Steam. That's something to watch too.
Roderick
Am Montag, 1. Oktober 2007 21:36:26 schrieb Roderick Colenbrander:
Call of Duty is popular but I would say that CounterStrike (+ CounsterStrike Source, the port to the Source engine) are way more popular.
More and more games these days are distributed using Steam. That's something to watch too.
There are very few cash cow games, the ones I know were mentioned already. However, from a Wine point of view, the engines are more interesting. When looking at the engines, there are a few popular ones: ID Software engines(quake, doon), Unreal, Source, and a few others. Many of the new high end games released in the last months were Unreal 3 based. Bioshock, Medal of Honor: Airborne, Rainbow Six: Vegas, and others. Also note that while most engines are cross platform in their nature and have an opengl renderer, many games ship only the D3D backend, or the opengl backend is not functional.
The games which cause the buzz on the graphics market are usually single player games(TES Oblivion, Bioshock). Those are usually used by users to talk about how good or crappy Wine is, but the games that are long term interesting and block Windows to Linux switches are always Multiplayer or Online games, or sometimes Kids games. Those games are usually rather simple in their graphics requirements.
I think the main blockers for Wine as a gaming Platform isn't D3D any more. A few months back sound used to be a blocker, but Maarten has done a great job on that. Most issues seem to be located in the copy protection area, and in input handling. Sadly, there are some copy protection / anti cheat rootkits which are technically almost impossible to support(namely GameGuard), and in the Input area we have another OpenGL child window like problem. Also the network sometimes makes troubles, but this has improved with the recent wintrust / crypt work done for iTunes.
On Tuesday 02 October 2007 11:12:41 Stefan Dösinger wrote:
I think the main blockers for Wine as a gaming Platform isn't D3D any more. A few months back sound used to be a blocker, but Maarten has done a great job on that. Most issues seem to be located in the copy protection area, and in input handling. Sadly, there are some copy protection / anti cheat rootkits which are technically almost impossible to support(namely GameGuard), and in the Input area we have another OpenGL child window like problem. Also the network sometimes makes troubles, but this has improved with the recent wintrust / crypt work done for iTunes.
Smells like a WineConf BOF topic. I'd especially be interested in the current status of copy protection support.
Cheers, Kai
Because this is my solution to everything, here's a wikipedia link:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_best-selling_video_games#PC
The Sims belongs on that list based on google trends.
On 10/1/07, Dan Kegel dank@kegel.com wrote:
On 10/1/07, Jesse Allen the3dfxdude@gmail.com wrote:
On 10/1/07, Daniel Remenak dtremenak@gmail.com wrote:
No other single game has the market penetration and staying power of WoW as things stand.
I think starcraft has it beat for penetration and staying power, actually. But WoW is the current money maker.
Call of Duty and Starcraft do show up pretty well, thanks.
Here's the best graph I was able to put together so far: http://www.google.com/trends?q=world+of+warcraft%2C+guild+wars%2C+tomb+raide...
On 01/10/2007, Jesse Allen the3dfxdude@gmail.com wrote:
On 10/1/07, Daniel Remenak dtremenak@gmail.com wrote:
No other single game has the market penetration and staying power of WoW as things stand.
I think starcraft has it beat for penetration and staying power, actually. But WoW is the current money maker.
Until Starcraft II :) (Interestingly, these are all Blizzard games.)
There are different things to consider when deciding the popularity of a game.
Searching Google is only really useful around the time of release (with a suitable time window either side). That is because there will be a media buildup to, say, Halo 3 and people will get excited about it. After release, you will get reviews from magazines and the like published on the internet, as well as user reviews from blogs. There will also be activity on game forums that may be hard to judge by Google alone.
In time, as bugs and issues get resolved; as the excitement dies down, this activity will fade. Does this mean that the game is no longer popular? No. It may be that you are still making your way through Oblivion or its extensions, or that you are playing Starcraft, Warcraft III, Counterstike and others at LAN parties with friends.
You may have dusted off your copy of Settlers II or Lemmings, installed DOSBox and are enjoying revisiting classic games.
The online multiplayer facilities of games like Starcraft, and the MMORPG games like World of Warcraft and Guild Wars, have more visibility because of their online nature and visibility there.
- Reece
On 10/1/07, Reece Dunn msclrhd@googlemail.com wrote:
Searching Google is only really useful around the time of release (with a suitable time window either side).
If that were true, I would expect World of Warcraft's google search curve to have flatlined long ago, but instead it's still going strong. What's driving all those queries if not user interest?
I certainly agree that other sources of data will show things that Google query history doesn't, but that huge signal for WoW has to mean something.
On 01/10/2007, Dan Kegel dank@kegel.com wrote:
On 10/1/07, Reece Dunn msclrhd@googlemail.com wrote:
Searching Google is only really useful around the time of release (with a suitable time window either side).
If that were true, I would expect World of Warcraft's google search curve to have flatlined long ago, but instead it's still going strong. What's driving all those queries if not user interest?
Sure. My comments were generalisations that apply to most games.
I certainly agree that other sources of data will show things that Google query history doesn't, but that huge signal for WoW has to mean something.
Definitely. I have had a look at the search trend you gave a link to and WoW is consistently (abnormally?) high. I'm sure that the number of hours played (per user, per day, per week) is high as well... and the number of breakups as a result of this!
- Reece
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Vincent Povirk