I Know How Well Mass Effect 2 (and Several Other Games) Will Sell

Take the picture above. I compared the terms "New Super Mario," "Assassin's Creed 2,"  "Uncharted 2," and "Demon's Souls" to the term "Modern Warfare 2". Notice that Modern Warfare 2 is labeled in blue, and is considered by this chart to be 1.00 units. That means that — according to this specific chart — Modern Warfare 2's average amount of searches-per-day is considered to be 1.00 units. The Y-axis of the chart is labeled 0, 2.50, 5.00, and 7.50. That means that 2.50 would be 2.5 times the average amount of queries Modern Warfare 2 received each day, 5.00 would be five times, and so on. I hope this is making sense.

That brings us to the numbers by the rest of the search terms. You can see that there is a 0.10 by New Super Mario Bros. That is the ratio compared to Modern Warfare 2, so we can see by this that in 2009 New Super Mario was searched one time for every ten times that Modern Warfare 2 was searched. For me, it is easiest to look at Modern Warfare 2 — or in other charts whatever the first search term may be — as 100% and New Super Mario as 10%.

Now that we know how the charts work let's do some analysis. Modern Warfare 2 was the best selling game of last year, and was also the most searched game title. It has sold a total of 9.54 million copies to date, and was searched ten times as much as New Super Mario and Uncharted 2, and 7.5 times as much as Assassin's Creed 2. When compared to Modern Warfare 2 the game Demon's Souls doesn't even register for the year of 2009, which means the ratio is less than 0.01. For the sake of this analysis we will give Demon's Souls the 0.01 ratio. Here are the sales to date figures for each of the games that we have charted so far:

Modern Warfare 2 (PS3 and 360) — 9,543,000  — 1.00
New Super Mario Bros. — 4,907,000  — 0.10
Assassin's Creed 2 (PS3 and 360) — 2,995,000 — 0.15
Uncarted 2: Among Thieves — 1,322,00 — 0.10
Demon's Souls — 444,593 — 0.01

Before we go any further I should point out that I realize that the validity of sales numbers off of the Internet are always shaky. What is important, though;  is I got all of the sales figures from the SAME site, and that they apply to North America just like the Google Trend numbers. With the information I've gathered, coupled with the knowledge we have of the console landscape, we can begin to analyze this information and come to some conclusions that will help us make predictions about the current crop of games.

First, we have to acknowledge that Modern Warfare 2 is a freak, but we also have to begin to expect at least one game a year to be "the yearly freaks." Halo 3 and the first Modern Warfare are a pair of freaks from 2007. 

There are two games that have the same ratio. Both NSMB and Uncharted 2 have a .10 compared to MW2, but NSMB has sold nearly four times more than U2. We can account for most of that disparity if we take into account the gap in the install bases. There are about three times as many Wiis as there are PS3s. Three times 1.3M gets us to 3.9M, which is still a million short of NSMB. The rest of that gap can probably be explained by the "First-Party effect" on the Wii. The First-Party effect is the boost any Nintendo/Mario labeled game gets on a Nintendo console. Not only that, but NSMB didn't face competition from Assassin's Creed 2 and Modern Warfare 2 like U2 did. Some may consider it a stretch, but I think that we have neatly put NSMB and U2 right next to each other in terms of "relative sales." 

That leads us to Assassin's Creed 2 and its 0.15 ratio. This is going to be different than NSMB and U2, because it is a multi-platform title.This will inflate the ratio and the sales numbers, but not exactly to the same degree. First, there will be more people who search for the game as a purchase because more people have the potential to play it. However, there's an overlap of users who own both a PS3 and an Xbox 360, so the total isn't a simple addition problem. If we add total 360s with total PS3s the sum (about 34M) is a little bit more than Wii (31M), then we have to compensate for multiple-console owners. This doesn't affect the Wii as much, because multi-platform games are rare on Wii. I'll say the total number of people with a PS3, Xbox 360, or both is around 24M (I have a method for coming up with this. If you want to know what it is just ask). 

AC2 is a potential purchase to 24M gamers, but faced with the stiff competition of MW2 and other holiday games, we can see how the .15 turns into 2.99M copies sold. That is 2.26 times what U2 sold and the combined number of PS3 and 360 gamers is about 1.9 times just the PS3 install base; the extra .05 in the ratio easily makes up for the rest of the copies sold. I believe that I have shown some interesting numbers to support the idea that the Search Volume Index can predict excitement and eventual sales. I have yet to prove anything, but I think we at least have some concepts to work with.

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The Future:

This is the first time I've looked nto this data, so this may not work, but here are some charts I gathered of games that have just been released or are about to be released. The first chart is a look at the past 12 months (from this day last year). The second chart is for the past 30 days. Each chart uses Mass Effect 2 as a base, and therefore the ratios in these charts should not be compared to the charts that had Modern Warfare 2 as a base.

The lines are provocative. We can see that Darksiders has peaked higher than any other game so far, but it peaked after it was released. Mass Effect 2 yet to be released, and it's still on the rise.