Fall Guys, Among Us, and Wordle: The Popularity of Pandemic Trend Games
Over the course of the COVID-19 pandemic, video games have kept people entertained and given them something to do during periods of lockdown. Amid all the releases from major companies such as Nintendo and Capcom, three simpler, smaller-scale games stand out for their meteoric rise to popularity over the past few years: Fall Guys: Ultimate Knockout, Among Us, and Wordle. While the first two have had their peak come and go, Wordle’s popularity has just begun, but will it last? What can we learn from the other two games’ time in the spotlight?
Fall Guys saw a sharp uptick in searches in August 2020, with the game releasing August 4 and reaching the peak amount of searches from August 16 to 22. After that peak, it saw a steep decline from September to October, and since October of 2020 has seen the same low rate of searches. Fall Guys is a game styled after game shows like Wipeout, where players maneuver their characters through obstacle courses and physical challenges in successive elimination rounds until one player is left standing. While the search trends don’t tell us how many people are still playing the game, it’s certainly declined in relevance, and the most recent update has received criticism for requiring an Epic Games account to play. Fall Guy’s sudden rise and fall is likely due to Among Us growing popular around the same time.
Among Us was initially released in 2018, but didn’t gain widespread attention until Fall of 2020, coinciding with the developers planning a sequel and YouTubers playing the game in videos. Its peak search period was from September to October 2020, but unlike Fall Guy’s shorter-lived popularity and swift drop, it slowed down over the remainder of 2020 and early 2021, with a few brief, lower peaks, before petering out after April 2021 and maintaining a low but still present search presence. The game of social deduction has players complete tasks in a facility as astronauts while multiple impostors kill them off over the course of the match, and they must either complete a number of tasks or vote out the impostors before they’ve taken out too many of the innocent crew members. While having a simpler gameplay loop than Fall Guys with its array of mini-games, the social aspect likely played a role in Among Us pulling ahead, and its status as a source of internet memes keeps it relevant even as actual play has decreased.
The latest of these games to release is Wordle, initially saw public release in October 2021, but took until January 2022 to start getting popular. It’s only gone up since, its current peak listed as February 13–19, and while incomplete data shows a slight decline over the following week, it’s currently at its height. Wordle is perhaps the simplest of the three games: players have to guess a five-letter word, have six tries to do so, and gray, yellow, and green tiles rule out letters, confirm correct letters in the wrong position, or overall correct letters, respectively. Unlike Fall Guys, which only saw a console and PC release and has a $20 price tag, Among Us and Wordle are both accessible on mobile and free, though Among Us’s PC releases cost $5. Simplicity, accessibility, and freeness are Wordle’s three advantages over other games, though there are concerns that this might change with the New York Times acquiring it, despite stating the game is currently intended to remain free. It’s likely to stay popular for some time based on the current trends, but whether this holds after the initial hype remains to be seen, and any changes in the game’s release state might change this.
