A 'Trendy' topic

January 17, 2012

Right now I’m figuring out in what other ways I can expand this research. I’m considering doing something with review sites like metacritic, but I’m having trouble deciding on a good method to determine something useful out of the huge amount of marks and reviews. It’s quite the opposite problem of what I did with the revenue analysis. While that was very objective, but hard to find numbers, this is very subjective but also easy to find.

In the meantime I try to do other things. Today I took a little bit of time to see what google trends is saying about users’ search results about a few topics.

[caption id=”” align=”alignnone” width=”580” caption=”Click through to go the the actual google trends page.”][/caption]

In google trends I entered a query for the following topics:

• pc games
• console games
• casual games
• social games
• mobile games

I Decided to separate both categories into the most commonly used terms. PC games seems to be the most often used search term, followed by mobile games. The others seem insignificant in comparison.

I believe the console games trend is lower for two reasons. First is very likely the fact that the console market is very fragmented, with various different devices and platforms. Gamers are more likely to search for games on their specific console than the general category. This is not the case for the PC category, where almost all games are developed exclusively for Windows, though this is slowly changing. The second reason might be that console gamers are perhaps more likely to walk into a store and buy games on impulse, though that is only my personal guess.

On the other end of the spectrum, mobile is doing very well while casual games and social games receive almost no hits at all. This is again probably an issue of fragmentation. Casual gamers these days can search for a mobile game and in a lot of cases discover it is available on both the iOS and Android app stores. There is some fragmentation but it is nowhere near the social gaming market, which has to deal with exclusives and lock-in caused by the fact that it is hard for users to switch social networks because all their friends would have to switch with them.

Another interesting trend is the yearly spike around the winter season for PC games. This is obviously the holiday season. Game publishers take special care to try and release their games in this period to maximise exposure and revenue in a period where a lot of people are looking to buy presents for themselves or others. This is also visible on mobile to a lesser extend.

Perhaps the most interesting trend that jumps out at me is the permanent jump of mobile games around winter 2009. I immediately got a hunch about this one. After double checking it seems that my suspicions were probably right. December 11, 2009 was the release that of what is probably the most popular mobile game to date: Angry Birds. I remember there was a lot of hype about this game both online and offline. This probably introduced a lot of new people to mobile games for the first time. Since then it has been steadily growing. At the time of this writing it has reached almost half the amount of queries for pc games. Mobile gaming at least, is here to stay.

Next post in this series: Good news and bad news