A recent study looked into what is the most popular game in the world. The result’s that the research and algorithm produced were agreeable to most people with an idea of what’s going on in the gaming industry. The top five, in descending order, are Fortnite, Pokemon, Minecraft, League of Legends, and PUBG. However, it seems that Roblox may be the more common game searched for on Google.
The question of most popular games may have been asked before, and one that has most recently been asked by Student Beans, a discount app aimed at students. To find out what the most popular game is, Student Beans created a rating system based on Twitch views, Reddit followers, and social media mentions on sites like Twitter. They also used estimates regarding the revenue of particular franchises and monthly searches on YouTube and Google. All of these factors were then fed into an algorithm that spat out a top ten list of the most popular games.
However, the investigation produced a flawed result. The reason the top five list is so feasible is that so many different aspects of popularity were fed into the algorithm. If the Student Beans team had simply used the frequency of Google searches, the result would have been alarming. As it turns out, no game experiences more searches than the primarily fan-built fever-dream that is Roblox.
Roblox is a popular game, there is no doubt about that, but by the metric of Google searches, the amount of money the company generates off of player-made worlds and experiences, and the sheer number of players that the game has are of no consequence. The only factor that matters is the frequency with which Roblox is queried in search engines. This frequency would make Roblox the most popular game in the world. But not for the reasons you think. Yes, Roblox did recently launch Spotify Island, which no doubt created more demand for the game.
Deeper research revealed that the real reason people Google Roblox so much is because of the outages it experiences. Think of search engine queries like ‘Why can’t I play Roblox? And ‘Is Roblox down?’ As it turns out, Roblox experiences over 500 outages a day. The game also crashes over 20,000 times every 24 hours. We all thought that the Roblox outage of October 2021 was a big deal; apparently, it was just a precursor for how Roblox would handle 2022. Hopefully, next year will be better.
While you wait for Roblox to get its act together again, why not check out how this gaming platform made for kids primarily by kids is starting to attract the attention of major video game developers?
