Lost Ark's Decline: What Google Trends Says about the Game's Future

Despite a massive boom in search volume one year ago, searches for Lost Ark have continued to drop throughout the year, according to Google Trends. A slight increase in the past month has not halted this downward trajectory, as shown using Google Trends Supercharged:

See the top searches related to Lost Ark with our free Google Trends plugin: Google Trends Supercharged

Google Trends shows that after a boom in searches topping out at 43 million in April of 2022, besides a slight peak in November, the search term has been slowly losing search volume throughout the year.

In the past 12 months, users from Singapore had the highest interest in Lost Ark, followed by Canada and Germany. Despite its popularity during 2022, searches for Lost Ark have been overtaken by competitor Elden Ring, which, while showing a similar decline in the past year, has held around double the search volume consistently in 2022 and 2023.

For online MMOs (massively multiplayer online games) in 2023, a large surge of search volume followed by a steep and then steady decline appears to be a common ailment for games that have successful launches or experience an after-launch trend cycle online, but then only retain a smaller, loyal, amount of players. Even loyal players may begin to lose interest when day-to-day play shows little reward, or queue times become unmanageable - common complaints among Lost Ark players. Competition is fierce as gaming continues to capture the attention of the masses.

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