Via Kotaku comes a new report that Google put together which gives us a look at the search habits of gamers–because Google keeps track of nearly everything, see. Like, actually everything. It's kind of scary!
But anyway: the results are, for the most part, predictable. For instance, most searches happen within a certain window of a game's launch, and we're increasingly using mobile to search. The most interesting tidbit here, though, has to do with game searches correlating with game sales–that's no small thing. Google explains:
More importantly, our data demonstrates that 84% of sales can be predicted by all clicks during the 10 month launch cycle. We used the regression coefficient from our analysis to create a predictive model and found that if a game accrues 250,000 clicks in the 10 months around launch, it will likely sell between 2 and 4 million units in the first four months after release.
This is surely information that publishers will start paying attention to gauge marketing efforts, if not, yikes, calculate future development decisions. Title X isn't generating enough searches, that's indicative that it might not sell well! Oh no!
Google itself acknowledges that there are other factors which might influence how much a title sells, which it aims to look into. It wants to create a better prediction model, after all. To know how well a title will do before it's released: ah, the joys of the quantified life.
And if you'd like to try your hand at predicting game sales based on this information, Google Trends might be your go-to.
If you'd like to read the study in its entirety, you can find it here.
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