Guild Wars Still #2 MMO (in Google searches)

I was reading the latest issue of PC Gamer in which they awarded WOW MMO of the Year (congrats), however there is a chart of GOOGLE Search Results in millions which lists Guild Wars as #2. Here is the breakdown:

WOW - 65.7
Guild Wars - 13.0
Warhammer Online - 12.2
Age of Conan - 9.5
Lord of the Rings Online - 9.5
Lineage II - 8.6
Eve Online - 6.8
City of Heroes - 3.1
Everquest 2 - 2.5

Not bad for a game that has not had a major update since EOTN and is constantly pronounced dead.

Looks like there is still a large amount of interest out there or maybe....

Post should have stopped here. Remember what I told you about finishing your stories one sentence earlier?

Still, this is an interesting find. I think our opinions of the popularity and general approval of GW are tainted by the flood of tears constantly sweeping over Guru.

If you look at xfire.com, Guild Wars has consistently been in the top 10; it's #8 right now, and all the other games ahead of it are strong contenders. GW is well ahead of Warhammer Online. You can also plot how popular games have been over time (going back years), which is interesting to see.

Bear in mind you are only looking at the results of a random sampling of the subset of people who use xfire. However, this is actually a fair number of people (xfire is getting popular these days), and you can use this sampling to compare the relative fortunes of games of a similar genre, unless you have special reason to believe that one such game is being vastly over- or under- represented on xfire compared with the others. If you look at the top games sorted by popularity, they are pretty much what you would expect, so it doesn't seem particularly out of whack.

Did you notice that all the successful on-lines are either very old or have a large fan base from older games or movies, EXCEPT for Guild Wars. Which has no history and is only (almost) 4 yrs old.

Great job ArenaNet.

Guild Wars is really still popular. In my country, they are still in demand at game stores. Hell, I and my 4 other friends just joined early last year and we were able to pull a few more people who are playing now. It really is still a competitive game compared to the other MMO's.

But do you think it is for Guild Wars or Guild Wars 2 and they just omitted the 2?

Here is the Google Trends plot showing queries for:

World of Warcraft
Guild Wars
Warhammer Online
Age of Conan

since 2004:

http://www.google.com/trends?q=guild...e=all &sort=0

I'd guess a combination, but primary GW1. The reason: with so little information released on GW2, who but the upper-tier fans on sites like Guru are keeping track of GW2 updates?

I think these Google results, apart from showing how strong the GW IP is, also demonstrates that Guild Wars has a huge player base beyond those posting on the fan site forums or the wiki.

Social research shows that in any community, whether it is online or offline, people can be grouped into two participation styles. You have a small group of dedicated folks who are active, influential, and super passionate that drive community activity, and you have a much, much larger group of people who may be as passionate as the smaller group, but maybe they don't have time or inclination to participate as much as the smaller, core group. For better or worse, the small group tends to drive community discussion and draw attention to their needs, simply because they are more vocal, more passionate, and more involved.

Over the past few months, a significant part of my work has involved research into social media (and I include games in the category of social media) and community. This research is going to help us with making decisions on the kinds of community tools and the activities we can get integrated into our GW2 activities. I don't just mean specifically game activities -- we're looking at this holistically and broadly.

@op wut suprises me the most really is aoc being ranked #4
i dun think google numbers have an accurate indication on the # of players playing online
aoc is/was pretty much jus all hype

gw at #2 doesnt surprise me at all
considering it will get hits for 4 seperate games


@gigashadow
first time lookin at xfire rankings
lol @ gw being ~310,000 hrs behind wow
and only ~1000 hrs above silkroad
hell its only ~13,000 hrs ahead of flyff and maplestory lol

tbh i dun think those numbers dun really mean much
especially since the popular online steam games (cs, tf2, l4d, etc) have built-in steam messaging already

That's hilarious. Both AoC and Warhammer had a huge spike but died almost immediately

Correct me if I'm wrong, but its also the only game on that list with no monthly. Not to mention that list cannot be accurate, because as stated earlier AoC and Warhammer are already dying.

If there were other high-quality free 2 play games at bestbuy I'm sure they would do well also.

This really supports my belief that anet is just making gw2 like WoW, to get a piece of that action.

Squeaky Wheel gets the grease

What, in my view, you should be doing is deciding which group you intend to cater towards primarily, and devote attention to them. There's no way the game can be run by listening to anyone who makes enough noise - a problem with GW in that the focus of the game was very wavering.

After all, there will be vocal members of the community from all groups (competitive, casual, etc). This isn't to say you can't make a game for everyone, but that there should be direction - ie: a competitive game can accommodate casual players in lower tiers, while comments from the upper tiers are what is listened to. This was somewhat lacking in the current game, and has been brought up for years.

What I still wonder is why nobody I know in real life actually knows what Guild Wars is
I hope that GW2 can gain the attention of more people in the future

Don't forget to look at the age of some of the titles. Guild Wars has been around for almost 4 years, so will have hits for a longer time than new games like Conan. And as mentioned, Guild Wars encompasses multiple titles, while some of the other games don't. Someone searching for Factions will still look under Guild Wars, as would Nightfall, Eye of the North, Bonus Mission Pack, etc.

Interesting, but hardly indicative of player numbers. Only Anet could give info on the number of players, and I doubt they would do that. Closest they have come is announcing the number of copies sold. And if you add in the large numbers of bots they claim to ban (100s per week, 1000s per week?) how many of those accounts ever actually played? And how many accounts are counted more than once? I have 2 accounts, but have purchased 6 copies of the game, so am I counted 2 times or 6 times?

Interesting info, but nothing more can be done that speculate and postulate.

People need to stop treating games like some big economic contest and just play the games they enjoy. So long as the servers aren't completely dead (and by that I mean, like less then 100 people online at a given time) an online game can work.

Don't fret about sales figures or number of people playing. That's for A.net's marketing people to do (and they get paid to worry about that stuff).

And very good to hear from Regina that A.net isn't just looking into the small minority of players that is guru, but trying to figure out what casual fan x wants (his $50 is worth the same as my $50).

You've got a potential contradiction in there. Listening to the casual fan is often exactly what an economic contest is, because casual fans have no specific direction or goal. ANet has a history of trying to please everyone rather than listening to a specific playerbase, and as a result milk their game for profit instead of focusing purely on gameplay quality.

Either that or GW players are considerably more in touch and in communication with fellow players. Either way, this and the Google searches mean we're still an active community, even if we don't have the "zomg population".

Intresting find. I prefer Yahoo! over Google though. Makes me wonder if Yahoo's results are the same.

*Also a lil off topic but I noticed that guildwars.com is now offering free trials. Nice way to spark more intrests.