Interest in WoW declining over time - Google Trends

[Hargema]

Google trends says nothing about player retention. I can't remember when i had to google "wow" for anything. All i need is wowhead and mmo-c.

Plus there will never be a WoW 2, would just not be reasonable.

I agree with all you said except denying wow2. At some point we will have to get over with wow since the level cap is getting too high and the voidlords are approaching. I want to play the new mmo they're gonna be making in +8 years

[Flaks]

We're still doing "WoW is dying" threads 14 years into the game's lifespan...?

[kamuimac]

Now this is not a very accurate indicator of how many subscribers there are in game but since Blizzard has stopped providing us data, we have to make do with what we have.

https://trends.google.co.uk/trends/e...date=all&q=WoW
https://trends.google.co.uk/trends/e...all&q=Warcraft
https://trends.google.co.uk/trends/e...0of%20Warcraft

Each of these charts shows a steep downwards slope. Right now there's less interest in "WoW" than there was during the lowest point of WoD, despite Legion being a (mostly) better expansion. Why do expansions lately have such horrible player retention to compared to classics like Vanilla, TBC and WotLK? It looks like interest in WoW had peaked in 2008-2009 and now it's just waning slowly over time and there's nothing that can be done about it. Even if the next expansion is as good as WotLK was, it's doubtful that it would reignite the same excitement people had for WoW a decade ago.

Do you think Blizzard keep making WoW for the remaining playerbase or focus on a WoW 2 project to get to those crazy high sub numbers again?

legion better then WoD ? what a joke .

unless you are part of organized guild which raids and do mythic + together legion is as garbage expansion as WoD if not worse so its not surprising at all.

[Christan]

Correlation isn't evidence. You haven't factored for things like:

1 - Players are better and more informed, leading to less need to look anything up
2 - Players have shortcuts and favorites to specific sites (they don't google MMOC, they just go to it)

I don't think anyone could claim that WoW is still at its peak, it's not. We know this, however, google web trends is unrelated to player retention. The only people who can tell us how many people still play is Blizzard, and they don't do that anymore.

Interestingly enough wowhead search is powered by google, but i guess no one uses the handy search box and uses the drop down menus instead? (Stating it to be fair)

One thing you forgot to mention though is that more people are also using assist addons (dbm pet battles quests etc) there are even minor forms of dbm and questhelper in game.

As an aside from everything else there is less of a need to even GO to mmo-c / wowhead at all, other than looking up a specific piece of info (ethereal crystals / abandoned snowfeather——other 3, pets that turn into mounts)
Even then there are discords dedicated to achievement hunters, /way tomtom macros etc.

So we have a partial truth with what had been said by the OP,.
While website searches are down, there is less need to even search for things because of in game features and addons

Wow isnt dying until it drops to the point of aion tor rift eso etc.

I would actually say wow’s only competitor right now is ffxiv, which id quit playing, for a better game(wow) though i do delve into eso still, and single player games on the ps4, if wow was on the ps4 also (with addon support) i would be all over it.

Sometimes its relaxing to sit back with a controller rather than hovering over a mouse/keyboard(i actually like d3 on ps4 more than pc, sucks its not cross-save couldnt even import char data then have it separate after

[SwislocK]

That is not how this works, do not attempt to look intelligent and then mess everything up.

[Deleted]

Context is for kings. In this case, the context you are avoiding is the most relevant one yet. Companies (i.e. on the side of the folks who know their user-base) use this to gauge trends for marketing, behavior, and a suite of analytics in addition to the one you're using. However, the salient point which you keep missing is that the piece they have is what we do not: Their subscriber numbers. They can track behavior far better than we can. At best, we have a small piece of a very large puzzle. And that piece is not enough to extrapolate what the entire puzzle looks like.

Can you try? Absolutely. The likelihood of success while not zero, is substantially much tinier than a fraction of a percent. You'd have better luck at winning the jackpot in a lottery, but it is certainly within your power to guess until you either expire of old age, people laugh at your error prone analysis enough to stop paying attention to you, or, by some miracle of freak mathematics, you manage to hit that target when nobody else, even those internal to the company could do so.

Agreeing or disagreeing is irrelevant. Your speculation is precisely that: speculation. It is not fact nor is it something we should use as a data point beyond "oh great, another doomsayer."

Do I think WoW will end some day? Yes. I've also seen threads for many, many years on various forums ALL saying the same thing. It has yet to happen. But as I said in a previous post, someone will be right one day if only because the aphorism that a broken clock is right twice a day holds true. They'll be right, by accident, not by design only because the inevitable happens, just not when it is usually expected.

So you consider it just a coincidence that there's spikes on the graph that correspond with releases of expansion packs?
I strongly suspect you would be on here drawing conclusions if the graph was heading in the other direction.

[BlueRemedy]

legion better then WoD ? what a joke .

unless you are part of organized guild which raids and do mythic + together legion is as garbage expansion as WoD if not worse so its not surprising at all.

Everything Blizzard has ever made is better than WoD

WoD was a joke, not his post.

[Christan]

Also youtube is down by about 40% over its alltime high
https://trends.google.co.uk/trends/e...=all&q=Youtube

I guess it is dying also
Google itself is down by about the same over its high
https://trends.google.co.uk/trends/e...e=all&q=Google
Which means all other results are irrevelant since a 40% decrease of the service itself means no other data is completely valid anymore.

To put it in another way
Lets say your a vending company (google)who buys bags of candies, you traditionally get 100 bags of varrying things, skittles(wow) are popular so its generally 10 bags to replace whats in the machines.
Over time business has become hard less people are using your machines so you only need to buy 50 bags to replace your machines stocks, skittles are still popular so keeping the ratio you buy 5 bags.

Now some (insert non-trivial word that isnt against ToU) OP on some random forums gets wind you used to buy 10 bags of skittles, but now only buy 5.
Goes on a rampage about how terrible skittles are, how theyre less popular, etc.

Because they dont understand context.
Hope i’ve helped.

Just to keep some context, amazon which has grown in stock value, and business consistantly, breaking some records tbh, does still show a growth https://trends.google.co.uk/trends/e...e=all&q=Amazon
But wow which has lost some/ remained somewhat stable, as well as being at the end of an xpack, will of course show less searches

[Cosmic Janitor]

There can be plenty of reasons. Overall the game obviously isn't going as strong as in it's hey day, but that should surprise no one besides the usual blue knights here. A bit of anecdotal evidence: In the past when I needed to look up a quick guide I used to type "wow <class> guide" or something like this. I haven't done that in a long while, simply because wow is one of the very few relevant mmorpgs out there and even with privacy modes enabled the first result is usually a wow related one. I doubt it teethered out that much though, there is little to no reason to google the obvious anymore - especially after 14 years.

[tru]

When all the old toasters and OS systems get phased out we might get a new engine that's up to date with early 2010 lol they will never do another massive MMORPG unless they just take the risk to end wow and bank on their cash crop moving to another subscription based game.

[Deleted]

I changed my mind. It doesnt mean anything and is hard to take conclusions.
If Facebook is at 30%
Youtube is at 40%

WoW is at 14%
GW2 is at 13%
FFIV is at 19%
Black Desert Online is at 21%
League of Legends is at 22%

Seems to me everything is in order. The older game has less searches on google. It doesnt mean anything...i guess.

IDK take your own conclusions...

[schwarzkopf]

Fun fact - if you google trends the word 'internet', you will see that the internet is also declining in popularity, and has been since around 2010.

[Deleted]

i.imgur com/H7qK0zN.png
You can see the sub count flatlining during woltk when the trend first starts to go down. The trend also fits really well everything after Cataclysm
I'm sorry i can't insert the pic i made an account just for this thread