New World has been released for just a week. It is way, way too early to start forecasting any sort of trends from this.
Like, that’s ever stopped me before.
I repeat this whenever I talk about Google Trends. Google Trends is based solely on what people are searching for, and does not correlate with the actual popularity of the game, the number of players, or anything. It’s just the number of searches on a specific topic in a certain amount of time. I would assume that search terms are connected to a specific topic by the searcher clicking on a relevant link in the search results, but that’s just a guess. That said…
I pitted four popular MMOs — World of Warcraft, Final Fantasy XIV, The Elder Scrolls Online and Old School Runescape — against New World in a worldwide search. Limiting the results to the USA didn’t provide good results, as USA is and continues to be dominated by FFXIV. (In this map, WoW only has a dominating presence in India, Indonesia, South Korea, Romania and Czechia). Japan is so overwhelmingly for FFXIV that no other game on this list rises above 1% of the search terms.
The fascinating areas are those where searches for New World dominate — largely Europe and South America. Diving into the data, it looks like these are areas where FFXIV hasn’t caught on enough to retain the top spot.
Australia is an outlier, a troika where New World, WoW and FFXIV are neck and neck in the top three, with New World slightly ahead, for now.
Looking at the Trends data for the past seven days, New World’s launch date is obvious. But what’s more interesting are the peaks, which correspond to interest sorted by time zone. The peaks for New World and WoW correspond exactly, implying that the same or similar people are playing both. TESO and Old School Runescape have broader peaks, implying more general interest across time zones.
FFXIV, though is just out there. My assumption is that it’s Japan pulling the trend forward, as none of the other MMOs is even on the Japanese radar there. But there’s an interesting first peak before the larger second peak for FFXIV, and that, I believe, is the US coming online and playing until Japan brings it home.
New World’s trend lines currently are still in flux. Interest was always going to be highest right at launch, and it’s difficult to predict where it will end up. My rough guess is somewhere at Elder Scrolls level, which isn’t bad for a new MMO with no established IP — all the others had existing name recognition to draw people in, and have been around for years and years.
Lots of MMOs have tried to replicate Dark Age of Camelot’s mix of three-sided PvP faction war and PvE theme park. New World could be the MMO that finally succeeds.
