FACT? WoW was more popular in his day than modern mass played games

I think thats because LoL and Fortnite weren’t out yet.

Well this just shows search interest. Subscription numbers aren't public, but the highest I recall Blizz announcing was 12 million.

I approve of the spirit here though, as LoL and Fortnite can fuck right off.

But there were others, there was Everquest, Lineage II, etc. So there was competition.

There may be more games nowadays than back then, therefore a spreader public. But still I think it's quite interesting that WoW peak is higher than those modern games.

teebling wrote: ↑

6 years ago

I think thats because LoL and Fortnite weren’t out yet.

With peak, I mean this:

Keep in mind as well that games are far more ubiquitous now than they were in 2004. Most people had no idea what an MMORPG was and probably hadn't heard of Everquest, Asheron's Call, Dark Age of Camelot, etc. Then suddenly everyone's niece or nephew is playing this game, and South Park did an episode on it. So people were curious and went to Google. In fact, I'd be willing to bet a beer that one of those peek search spikes correlates with the airing of that episode.

Popular indicates a positive perception. At least from my personal experience that wasnt the case. Playing WoW was the incarnation of being a nerd, and nerds were considered weird. I certainly wouldnt go around and ask people if they played WoW, despite the games existence being common knowledge. Maybe your experience differs though. But from mine I can say that popular is not the right word for the attention the game got.

Samaraner wrote: ↑

6 years ago

Popular indicates a positive perception. At least from my personal experience that wasnt the case. Playing WoW was the incarnation of being a nerd, and nerds were considered weird. I certainly wouldnt go around and ask people if they played WoW, despite the games existence being common knowledge. Maybe your experience differs though. But from mine I can say that popular is not the right word for the attention the game got.

I totally agree. I remember living in Jacksonville during BC, and going to a new bar. I started chatting up the bartender and somehow it came up that I played WoW, and some of the other patrons started making fun of me. "You got a 12th level paladin or something hyuck hyuck!" I straight face responded with "Level 65 warrior. " and they just laughed.

Jokes on them, I took the bartender home that night and we dated for almost a year.

Like I was saying above, now videogames are practically an every day part of life. Back in the Vanilla-WotLK it was still viewed as an exclusively nerdy hobby.

I do love the spirit of this post, but I'm not quite convinced by these metrics. I think the nature of wow my have inflated the number of searches around the topic. Constantly checking the armory, downloading/updating addons, and using sites like thottbot to look up quest info and loot tables/percentages could have dramatically increased the number of search for the topic "World of Warcraft". I don't know about everyone else, but I would check thottbot and/or the armory almost every play session. That's not really something people do as part of playing MOBAs and BRs.

To be fair, I am inclined to think that no game is significantly more inflated by player online activity. For LoL this isnt stuff like addons or the armory, but rather streamers, esports etc. People like to spend time on a game beyond playing it.

I would say that people were more interested in it because it was something totally new, the internet was new for most people (at least here in Germany) so yeah it had more people looking into it then new games.