Video Games: Popularity and Longevity Over Time
Video games are a cornerstone in many kids’ lives growing up, including mine. Some give them up after a few years, some keep playing, others never stop playing. With phases and generations of people moving in and out of the gaming industry, the popularity of certain games and franchises change. In this article, we’ll take a look at some of the most popular video games of all time, and see where they are today.
Wikipedia is the largest body of work referenced today, with over 62 million articles according to Wikipedia. People use their platform to answer questions or settle an argument, but it can also be used to analyze the population’s interest in certain topics over time. For this analysis, I’d like to break down 12 video games into 4 groups: Retro, Survival, FPS, Adventure. Each video game will be measured on page views over time and will compare individual games, and the categories as a whole.
Let’s take a look at the categories first, there are some interesting events and patterns here. Starting with the Adventure and Retro chart, there are two very visible spikes in the data. There are good explanations for these events and it was caused by 1 game in each category. Nevertheless looking at the general trends, Retro games fall the lowest in terms of page views over time, which is to be expected. Retro games can no longer compare to modern games and are relics at this point, fortunately there still is some interest.
Taking a look at FPS and Survival games, there seems to be a much steadier trend. These games are typically unchanged and have repetitive gameplay, therefore are less searched. Interestingly the Survival category contains Minecraft, the largest selling video game ever made, yet we still see a very steady trend over the last few years.
Regardless of the Survival categories average page views, looking at the games individually shows Minecraft still reigns supreme. They have the highest and most consistent views over time and still outperform new games like Valorant. Additionally, Call of Duty surprisingly still ranks high in viewership and longevity. There is a common misconception that Call of Duty is dying game, but since it’s a console game it’s more accessible than a PC game like Valorant.
Looking just at the last year, the lowest viewed video games on Wikipedia were unsurprisingly 40% Retro games, 40% Survival games, and 20% FPS. Interestingly, Super Mario Bros remained the least searched video game listed. With the Mario movie coming out, I would’ve expected to see some spike in popularity. Valorant was also surprising to see here
Let’s take a look at some spikes of searches and what potentially could’ve caused them. Tetris falls under the Retro category, so we should have expected it to fall lower in views, and for the most part it does, but with the release of the Tetris movie it caused the 3rd largest spike in searches. Additionally we can see Grand Theft Auto had the largest spike in page views, this may be due to the massive leak of Grand Theft Auto 6. This event was a major news event and probably spiked searches.
I would like to point out some big picture trends. There are 3 major spikes in viewers: 2019, 2020, and 2024. The recent spike is caused by the Tetris movie and Grand Theft Auto incident mentioned earlier, but the spike in 2019–2020 were caused by the pandemic. It’s an interesting trend since the views aren’t maintained during the pandemic, but rather at the beginning and end of the pandemic. I’m not sure why this happened, maybe because people were searching for games, found one, and played it during the pandemic.
The video game industry is a fast moving and long lasting industry, with games still being searched almost 5 decades later. The findings here show that virality can play a major part in what games people search for. Another interesting finding is how long legendary games last. Call of Duty and Minecraft remain the most popular games of all time and their page views over time show that well. Not only do they rank the highest in total pageviews, but they also have maintained views for decades, outperforming new games.
