Moshi Monsters Vs The Virtual World

If you do a quick google site concenring British company Mind Candy's biggest release (Moshi Monsters) you will find that it has been making some big moves. You may come across some rather large--yet not allways well supported statements and claims. Some of my favorites being that the games user base is now over 50 million strong, or that one in 3 brittish children are now playing moshi monsters on a daily basis.

This article won't be going into any detail about what has been broadcast through the news allready, this piece will be looking at the stats and figures concerning moshi monsters' main competitors and trying to establish exactly where the state of virtual world games is at.

Arguably, some of the biggest virtual world games that we have seen are titles such as Runescape and club penguin--if we now study a graph on google trends (to established search popularity spanning from 2004 to 2011) we can see that whilst Runescape has bathed in the most popularity, its golden years seem to have been lost in 06, 07 and 08 periods, and that it is now been brought back down to the same level as Virtual world games Poptropica and Moshi Monsters. The only difference being that whilst runescape is falling, Moshi Monsters is trending.

If we follow the same graph, we can see that whilst club penguin didn't experience such a high spike during the height of its popularity, it is following the same path as Runescape and is now starting to decline in search volume also.

Possibly the most interesting thing about the graph is that whilst both Club Penguin and Runescape experienced a dramitc rise and fall in search trends, Poptropica and Moshi Monsters seem to be following a more gradual rise--will this point to a more stable rise in popularity? Only time will tell.