The shift to a Free2Play model seems to have only provided a brief boost for WildStar .
The “Google Trends” indicate how often a particular term has been searched over a period. For WildStar, the trends paint a bleak picture. Interest in WildStar has remained consistently low over the past 12 months. There was a spike at the end of May 2015. There, it was announced that WildStar would become Free2Play. Interest from Google users in the title doubled for a span of 2.3 weeks.
Then, about a month before the Free2Play launch, interest gradually began to rise, until it exploded at the “actual” launch. By the end of September, interest was 5 or 6 times higher than usual. Absolute peak values for the last year were reached. However, these peaks were relatively low compared to the release hype, reaching about 40% of the previous interest by the end of September.
The values in the statistics assume “100%” interest at the highest point in the last 12 months, at the Free2Play launch of WildStar, when the game was searched for the most on Google .
But interest in the release hype could not be maintained for long and declined week by week. In recent days, it had returned to the disappointing level pre-announcement.
Now, such Google trends are of course not ultimate and absolutely valid numbers, but they are still an indicator of interest in a game.
A dramatically rapid decline is noteworthy. While it is normal for interest to “normalize” after such hype, it typically lasts longer. And given the awful situation WildStar was in before the transition, the game might only have survived if it had landed at a significantly higher level after the transition than it was before.
In a few months, we will gain certainty about how the Free2Play switch of WildStar affected it both in terms of gameplay and financially. Then, NCSoft will disclose the business figures. They have been gloomy and getting gloomier in the quarters for WildStar.
Unfortunately, it doesn’t seem like the Free2Play switch has turned the tide.
