PoE's site trends according to Alexa

This is in response to another thread that said that PoE was losing steam, but since I did so much work on this post, and because it goes slightly off topic from the previous thread, I figured that it would be better on its own.

I've been having fun comparing PoE to D3 on Alexa. This is what I'm noticing from there.

DATA:
In September/October, PoE has had a very insignificant amount of reach in comparison to D3. Something like 5% of the estimated battle.net pageviews.

D3's amount of page views has been decreasing from then, now down about 20-30% from then. Similarly, by mid-January (before PoE's OB), PoE had increased to about 10% of the estimated battle.net page views. Moreover, PoE had about double the pageviews per player.

OB launched and Poe's reach went to about 25% that of D3, but only stayed there for about a day. Similarly, D3's hits decreased about 20%. Some fluctuation has returned, with D3 swinging back up over the course of February, and PoE has decreased since its spike, but PoE's current amount of pageviews is between 4 and 6 times that of what it was before OB, and D3's page views appear to be 10% fewer than what they were before PoE's OB.

ANALYSIS:
Clearly, PoE was gaining steam all the way up to OB. More players came and stayed over time. Knowing that PoE managed to generate 2.2 mil over that CB period means that the game was mostly successful up until then. Then, OB hit, and a huge spike in players came into PoE to try it out. That makes sense. PoE is a niche game, a game without much marketing, and is not in full release yet. So many players left after trying it out, returning to games they previously played. Many players have stayed, more than quadrupling the base.

The current trend shows that PoE will be plateauing after a few months. There will be some dropoff from players as new games come out, but there will also be some pull as new players are brought in, as well as while old players return. Some people had an initial bad run during the OB release, and might return in the future. Moreover, the game has many markets to still infiltrate, so there are plenty of avenues by which PoE can regain some of its initial burst. By no means does the game look like it's "dying" or anything.

OTHER GAMES:
I similarly checked out other websites of "successful" games: Realm of the Mad God, Urban Rivals, Torchlight 2, and Mechwarrior Online. Urban Rivals, with its enormous international fanbase, still "rivals" D3 in terms of total people checking out the website. It did have a significant drop when PoE's OB it, however, which is interesting. It looks like PoE's OB had an effect on the total F2P world. The 3 others mentioned all are still going strong as games, but they have significantly less internet-share than Path of Exile. In fact, PoE "beat out" all of them shortly before OB.

CONCLUSION:
PoE has a long way to go before we can determine whether it has completely lost its "steam" or not. But, what we can determine is that PoE is in no way "dying", and looks like it will stabilize into a profitable game that will fill the niche that all of us happy players have been hoping would be filled. So if you're worried about buying GGGold because you don't know if the game will be around in a year, don't worry. PoE is here to stay.

From my analysis the downward channel has been broken easily, and we are still much above support, i'm bullish PoE

Thanks for the image, Vulgaire. I was working on something similar, but you beat me to it (and I was posting a reply on a different thread).

Dont thank me, it's still in a pattern of lower highs and lower lows, but we are getting more strong hands with time :P

you deserve a free bump for the work.

I'm assuming that 2.2 million figure relates to a monetary figure as opposed to number of hits posted in your analysis above. Could you please elaborate that above.

Overall good analysis, though your projections are speculative at best.

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Foxtel wrote:

I'm assuming that 2.2 million figure relates to a monetary figure as opposed to number of hits posted in your analysis above. Could you please elaborate that above.

Overall good analysis, though your projections are speculative at best.

Yeah. That 2.2 mil figure is referring to the amount of money that PoE generated in CB.

And, yeah, my projections are, indeed, speculative. Of course, my opinions are biased in favor of hope that PoE succeeds, but, I did the research knowing that there were some concerns. By no means did I do a comprehensive, complete review; I just thought it was worth checking out.

When using an SEO optimizer with your site, such as Google's solution - does this information then become public knowledge? I've never researched such but it's interesting nonetheless.

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BuddhaSpeaks wrote:

you deserve a free bump for the work.

I wanted to post this here as confirmation. This is based on google trends data. The plot shows peak weekend search volume as a percent of the release weekend search volume for a number of games. You'll notice that PoE is trending well above average in terms of maintaining the level of interest that came from OB launch.