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I read a post gauging the popularity of homeopathy using Google Trend search. The interesting thing was all the other searches he tried to verify that the trend search could be trusted. For example, if there's no Glastonbury festival one year, there's no spike in the graph that year. Led Zeppelin searches are steady except when they did their reunion tour.
So naturally I searched on "Dungeons & Dragons" and "D&D". "Dungeons & Dragons" has shown quite a trail off since early 2006. It didn't even peak when 4E came out. "D&D" may be more representative. That did peak in May when KotS came out, but the baseline is still clearly lower than it was up till the beginning of 2006.
So what happened in the beginning of 2006 that made people stop searching for D&D? It's not "World of Warcraft", whose searches have been declining since January of 2007. "Magic the Gathering" is declining too. Was there some kind of change in the population of Google searchers, or is this a real trend? What else could we search on to see what's happening here? "Naruto"?"xkcd"? At least some things I like are still going up.
Since I posted this I played with it some more and learned that you can compare two or more searches against each other with a comma. So I can tell that "D&D" is way more popular than "Dungeons & Dragons," so that's the one we should be looking at.
"D&D" and "Magic: the gathering" are the same size on Google Trends, even though they're not in real life. But "Naruto" absolutely dwarfs them both.
So what happened in the beginning of 2006 that made people stop searching for D&D? It's not "World of Warcraft", whose searches have been declining since January of 2007. "Magic the Gathering" is declining too. Was there some kind of change in the population of Google searchers, or is this a real trend? What else could we search on to see what's happening here? "Naruto"?"xkcd"? At least some things I like are still going up.
If I had to make a guess, I'd probably point at the D&D video games. Dungeons & Dragons Online and Neverwinter Nights 2 both came out in 2006. Both fell relatively flat in the marketplace. No notable D&D video games have been announced since then.
I'd also suggest that D&D is something most people don't look for on the internet. They're brought into it by their friends, or at a hobby shop. Usually someone will point them to the wizards boards or EN world or some similar message board, making it pointless to do a search for D&D.
The lack of a 4E spike supports the trend... remember that it's Wizard's intention to hold off on the push for new players until the new year. 4E has been marketed towards existing gamers for the moment.
__________________ 4th Ed Chars Fallen:
Spoiler:
Gavin Ward - Male Human Warlord 1 - The party started a bar fight. The fellow who escaped brought his bandit buddies back and they killed Gavin (and nearly three other party members). He bled out while lying on the floor.
4th Ed Kills:
Spoiler:
Cornell Butterworth - Male Human Wizard 1 - Knocked unconscious by a kobold dragonshield the fighter ignored, then done in by the kobold wyrmpriest's acid breath.
Lithia - Female Elven Ranger 11 - Contracted mummy rot, which eventually did her in.
Brendan Stetlan - Male Human Fighter 4 - Knocked unconscious in combat, then thrown to the wolves.
Vindicator Mindartis Valenae - Eladrin Paladin 5 - Dropped by a githzerai monk (L6 elite), and killed when the rogue threw him off the balcony to try and get his body to safety.
Vongar - Male Dwarf Paladin 1 - Fell in battle after defeating Irontooth, but not his bodyguard.
Straef - Male Elf Ranger 1 - Fell in battle to Irontooth's Wyrmpriest.
Whenever I do searches for D&D products, I use 4E and probably don't even do the D&D. For example, before the character builder beta, I'd search "4E character sheets"
I feel just typing "D&D" is far too vague to get anything useful. I'll just end up with a bunch of out of date stuff.
I would say be careful using that tool. I tried using it for video games and trying to determine which would be a commercial smash hit (and not just a success) and it seems to be a indicator of interest/hype but not necessarily of people making final purchases.
it seems to be a indicator of interest/hype but not necessarily of people making final purchases.
Yeah, like I tried "Neverwinter Nights" and it has more people searching for it in 2004, two years before it came out, than in 2008, two years after. It's too bad because I actually thought that might be it -- video games displacing D&D.
Interestingly enough, GURPS seems to have dropped even more. The World of Darkness seems to have remained steady or taken a slight uptick. Varients of "role-playing game" have steadily declined, but Google Trends: rpg (which probably gets a few hits from rocket propelled grenades) has started to recover from a mild decline.
Whenever I do searches for D&D products, I use 4E and probably don't even do the D&D. For example, before the character builder beta, I'd search "4E character sheets".
This. I always use 4E (or previously, 3E or 3.5) plus other keywords of what I'm specifically searching for (like "programs" or "traps" or "manual planes reviews"). I think most people searching for D&D related stuff do something similar. Also, many sites reference the material they have as 4E more prominently (header tags, meta data or material closer to the top of the page) than "Dungeons & Dragons" or "D&D". Plus, the "&" doesn't always play nice with search engines.
Add into the mix that forum posts (such as those on ENWorld) account for a good portion of the Google hits, and posters will often shorthand game systems names. If I start a thread about 4E here, most people will assume I mean D&D 4E, even though GURPS (for instance) recently published their fourth edition as well.
A trail off in search for the words "Dungeons & Dragons" and "D&D" might indicate more savvy searchers, who know these facts and tricks to narrow things down by edition.
Also, as more established portals gain popularity, people may tend to use these rather than random Google searches to find out information, such as the WotC site itself, EnWorld, DriveThru RPG. I'd also suggest that a good percentage of searches for published game material are done on Amazon, not Google.
When you get down to it, all Google Trends tells you is how popular Google is for searching for specific things.
__________________ "Sometimes we buy books because we think we're buying the time to read them." - Warren Zevon
Personally, I'm always checking out D&D stuff on the internet... and I never use Google for it. I can't even remember the last time I googled "D&D".
Why?
Because I already know where to go to find the best D&D news. I come to ENWorld.org. I go to dndinsider.com. Sometimes I go to RPG.net. I find links to cool D&D stuff through those community websites, which I have bookmarked.
I imagine that at least a portion of D&Ders are similar in this respect. It's not that D&D isn't being searched for on the internet, it's just that many of us bypass the search engine, because we've already found the websites we're looking for.
Personally, I'm always checking out D&D stuff on the internet... and I never use Google for it. I can't even remember the last time I googled "D&D".
Why?
Because I already know where to go to find the best D&D news. I come to ENWorld.org. I go to dndinsider.com. Sometimes I go to RPG.net. I find links to cool D&D stuff through those community websites, which I have bookmarked.
I imagine that at least a portion of D&Ders are similar in this respect. It's not that D&D isn't being searched for on the internet, it's just that many of us bypass the search engine, because we've already found the websites we're looking for.
This is definitely a factor, and so is what Sir Brennan mentions. Key words are essential to finding relevant sites, so experienced "googlers" will use more key words to correctly direct search engines to precisely what we want to find.
__________________ It is the spirit of the game, not the letter of the rules, which is important. NEVER hold to the letter written, nor allow some barracks room lawyer to force quotations from the rule book upon you, IF it goes against the obvious intent of the game. As you hew the line with respect to conformity to major systems and uniformity of play in general, also be certain the game is mastered by you and not by your players. Within the broad parameters give in the Advanced Dungeons and Dragons Volumes, YOU are creator and final arbiter. By ordering things as they should be, the game as a WHOLE first, your CAMPAIGN next, and your participants thereafter, you will be playing Advanced Dungeons and Dragons as it was meant to be. May you find as much pleasure in so doing as the rest of us do.
If D&D searches are down because people who used to search for "D&D" are now searching for "greyhawk skill challenge DCs", that still means there were more new people entering the hobby before than now. There should be a steady supply of unsophisticated searchers.
Besides, if you look at how high "britney spears" ranks in the search trends every single year, you can tell that sophisticated searchers are somewhat rare. Who would google "Britney spears" when they could google "Britney spears sexy" or "Britney spears pregnant baby statue"? But they do.
Quote:
Personally, I'm always checking out D&D stuff on the internet... and I never use Google for it. I can't even remember the last time I googled "D&D".
I bookmarked this Google search in Firefox and I gave it the keyword "en." So now all I have to do is type "en bloodseeker" or "en monte cook grapple" in the taskbar and it gives me the search results automatically. Saves a lot of clicks and typing.
So google trends is a "mostly for fun" analysis. It's a portion of searches and it calculates a relative volume based on some sort of location based sampling.
I'd say it "very selective" in what portions it uses for producing calculations, on "roleplaying" a big item was "guild wars" in 2005.
Salt lake city UTAH seems to be the #1 location for web searches for "dungeons and dragons".
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FWIW, I'm on the design team and I pretty much find WoW as fun and interesting as banging my head against a brick wall. -- Mike Mearls
you happen to say that 4E reminds you of the reasons you decided against a career as a special-Ed teacher--noted rpg author Darrin Drader
Yeah, like I tried "Neverwinter Nights" and it has more people searching for it in 2004, two years before it came out, than in 2008, two years after. It's too bad because I actually thought that might be it -- video games displacing D&D.
Neverwinter Nights came out in mid-year 2002. The spike you're seeing is probably related to NW2. Compare the two and there's a fairly strong correlation, IMO.
I'm figuring the results have a lot more to do with the pop of the city being 180,000 or so and as such 10 searches there holds more weight then 100 would in NYC.
EnWorld seems to have attracted a lot of attention leading up to 4E but a steady decline afterwards. I blame the lack of interesting controversy in 4E. In all editions we could argue about alignmnent, paladins and broken elves but nowadays we quibble over whether D&D is fun at all.
In 3e, the OGL meant that locating 3pp doing interesting work was rewarded. And there were a lot of fan sites doing conversions. And statting things was more work, so it was often worthwhile to skim around and pick up bits and pieces of other's adventures.
IMHO, anyway.
RC
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