Every year there are great games for PC and consoles, and, accordingly, the favorites of search results change. But some games manage to stay at the top of search queries for years or even decades.
And YouTube channel Latos Charts conducted a massive study to find out which games were the most popular in search engines from 2004 to 2020.
What gamers remember 2004
This was one of the best periods for computer games. In a short period of time of 365 days, some of the most influential games of all timeand lots of really good games that didn't have the same long-term appeal.
In 2004 came out, in particular:
- World of Warcraft,
- Rome: Total War (which changed the series),
- The Sims 2,
- Far Cry,
- Final Fantasy XI: Chains of Promathia (one of the coolest expansions),
- City of Heroes,
- Sid Meier's Pirates !,
- Splinter Cell: Pandora Tomorrow,
- EverQuest 2,
- Battlefield Vietnam,
- Tribes: Vengeance,
- Need for Speed: Underground 2,
- Painkiller,
- The Lord of the Rings: Battle for Middle-Earth,
- Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines,
- Star Wars: Battlefront,
- Doom 3,
- Half-Life 2, with one of the iconic heroes of video games
- Warhammer 40,000: Dawn of War.
- Unreal Tournament 2004.
Looking back, we can say that 2004 gave us a huge number of really good games that can satisfy almost any gamer.
It is not surprising that the creators of the ranking of the most popular video games by search queries chose this year as a starting point.
List of the most played games from 2004-2020
- In early 2004, the MMORPG Final Fantasy XI: Chains of Promathia, published by Square Enix, climbed to the top of the rating of the most popular games. It has 5 new regions, a new storyline, new equipment and 8 new chapters with missions.
A distinctive feature of the Final Fantasy XI series was the inability to independently select a server. It was assigned randomly to avoid overcrowding some servers and few others. Only in 2007, players were able to specify their preferred server.
- Then Final Fantasy XI lost the palm to Doom 3, The Sims 2 and GTA: San Andreas.
- And since December 2004, World of Warcraft has become the most popular game in the world by search queries, and by a large margin. This MMORPG offered players revolutionary things at that time: a wide variety of races and classes, exciting dungeons for 5 players and large-scale raids up to 40 people at the same time, a huge and beautiful world with many NPCs, tasks and creatures of varying degrees of hostility.
The classic World of Warcraft addon became so popular that it is still remembered and loved by millions of players. In 2019, Blizzard Entertainment, by popular demand, released the Classic version of the game, full of the spirit of nostalgia, and devoid of all the updates and additions that have accumulated over the years.
Several times WOW briefly yielded first place to major updates like The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim or Call of Duty: Black Ops, but invariably returned to the top of the rankings until 2011.
- However, since April 2011, the Minecraft sandbox has become the leader, and so firmly established itself on the first line that it was only replaced in 2018, and Fortnite did it. The reasons for such a wild success of the "cubes" are many, among them:
- endless possibilities for action and creativity,
- constant replenishment of new content,
- excellent multiplayer,
- a huge number of YouTube channels dedicated to Minecraft.
The main contingent of Minecraft is children, for whom this game has become "a world of try and error," as stated in an article by The New York Times.And many schools and universities have even begun to use Minecraft as an additional element of the educational process. There is even a Minecraft: Education Edition designed specifically for schools.
- Fortnite stayed in the top 1 until May 2019, then the brainchild of Mojang regained the leading position, and in March 2020 gave it to Animal Crossing: New Horizons for several months. In May of this year, Minecraft once again became the most "wanted" game, and this is where Latos Charts research ends.
Popular games for smartphones
There is no such detailed study on mobile games, but this is what a selection of the most downloaded games from Google Play looks like in 2020, during the Covid-19 pandemic.
The most downloaded strategy game Ludo King developed by Gametion Technologies has been downloaded from Google Play over 36 million times since the beginning of the quarantine period.
And given that rumors about the second wave are already in full swing, there is a possibility that these games will retain their leadership among their mobile "brothers" for a long time.