I see a lot of content creators using Google Trends to look at the rising or declining popularity of video games. I decided to try doing so with EVE Online in 2022.
Interest remained fairly consistent throughout the year. We can see the highest interest was at the beginning of the year with the Dr. Who crossover. Interest then peaked again in the beginning of May as the price increase approached. The final peak of interest coincides with the run-up to the Uprising expansion.
The first low point occurred in the week after the Russian invasion of Ukraine in February. The interest by region view explains why.
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| Google trends by region in 2022 |
Setting aside Iceland, the top 6 countries interested in EVE Online were either involved in, or bordered the conflict zone. Not shown on the first page of the view is #6 Ukraine and #7 Moldova.
The second low point occurred the week after the announcement of the Uprising expansion. After that, the Alliance Tournament began and then interest began to rise again.
How did Google Trends do compared to player counts? Fairly well.
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| Chart from Jester's Trek |
We see that player counts were the highest at the beginning of the year with the Dr. Who crossover event. We also see the big drop caused by the war and the beginning of financial sanctions on Russia. The news of the price hikes peaked interest in EVE on Google but decreased player counts on Tranquility. Still, Google does show the long term downward trend until a rise for the expansion. The increased interest in EVE due to the expansion didn't show up for a month, however. The delay could have occurred due to the Alliance Tournament not really bringing people into the game.
After playing around for a little, I might try using Google Trends more. While the application doesn't exactly correlate with popularity, the data displayed does point out events of interest. For my purposes in writing about video games, I think that serves well enough.
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