CoD4 interest takes off!

We have often used Google Trends to assess the relative interest (or lack thereof) in CoD2. Many times we've used this fascinating tool, which assesses trends by checking Google search logs, to compare CoD2 versus Battlefield 2142 - up to now, a major competitor to CoD2.

With the announcement of CoD4: Modern Warfare, we thought we would plot all three on one graph and see who is winning the gaming popularity contest.

And holy mackeral! In the short span that CoD4 has been announced it has spiked to the same interest levels of both established games and the trend looks hyperbolic!

Certainly great news for everyone associated with this new IW offering!

Trends: February

Just a little while ago I was beginning to think that Call of Duty was starting to look tired.

Its biggest threat, the future war game Battlefield 2142, was beginning to outpace it in net sales.

Even members of our Devil-Dogz clan started to leave COD2 and head towards the Battlefield series. I was starting to think that COD was long in the tooth and heading for a slow fade to black.

Well, I may have been a little premature - at least when it comes to comparing COD to Battlefield 2142.

Here are some reasons for being optimistic.

Call of Duty 2 is still 447th on Amazon.com's most popular video game.
Battlefield polled 14,946th, while Call of Duty 3 is selling as the 54th most popular item.

But one of the more telling figures is this one below. The photo shows a side by side comparison of COD2 versus BF2142 in Google's Trend History. Trend History is a total of the searches done on a particular topic on Google, worldwide, over time and is a good indication of popularity.

Well, Trends quite clearly shows that while BF2142 may have had a very good Christmas season, it peaked quickly and has faded just as quickly. Especially worrying for BF2142 players is the narrow spike in popularity, it had just after Christmas. Look at that spike versus the sustained, wide plateau for COD2. What goes up must come down and Battlefield's descent has been quite rapid.

What this means is that we should see the number of users of Battlefield and COD2 even out and possibly, if Battlefield continues to drop in popularity, some users might actually return to COD - especially in the face of the pre-release hype of COD4.

Trends in COD2

Hello again everyone.

Here are some statistics from ServerSpy.net that tell you how popular COD2 still is!
The data was taken tonight. Click to enlarge.

Title Popularity: COD2 is #5 on ServerSpy.


This next slide is a breakdown by game type. TDM (Team death match) is by far the most favorite, followed by Search and Destroy and Capture the flag. Interestingly, server owners haven't figured this out. There seems to be a huge S&D capacity (54.2% of all servers are set up for S&D) yet only 26% of players are playing it.


This next chart shows you the popularity of COD2 maps. Railyard (Russia) blows them all away.


Interestingly, XFIRE did a poll that suggests that a very large majority, over 50% of COD2 gamers think that the game will last for another 5 years. 7% thought it had another year left.

reference:
http://www.xfire.com/xf/modules.php?name=Forums&file=viewtopic&t=102223