What can Google Trends tell us about D&D?

[Noumenon]

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.

 

[Noumenon]

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.

 

[Aus_Snow]

Hm. I'll try some then. . .

"roleplaying game", "forgotten realms", eberron, AD&D, "wizards of the coast". . .

Just a few that came to mind.

 

[Beginning of the End]

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.

 

[MortalPlague]

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.

 

[Solodan]

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.

But that's just me.

 

[BradfordFerguson]

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.

 

[Noumenon]

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.

 

[Mercule]

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.

 

[Sir Brennen]

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.