The most popular games of 2004-2020 in the search
• Every year there are great games for PC and consoles, and, accordingly, the favorites of the search results change. But some games manage to stay at the top of search queries for years and even decades.
And the Youtube channel Latos Charts conducted a large-scale study to find out what games were the most popular in search engines from 2004 to 2020.
What gamers remember in 2004
It 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 time, as well as a lot of really good games that didn't have the same lasting 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,
- Ever Quest 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
- doom 3,
- half life 2, with one of the iconic video game characters
- Warhammer 40,000: Dawn of War.
- Unreal Tournament 2004.
• Looking back, 2004 gave us a huge amount 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 popular games 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 impossibility of self-selection of a server. It was assigned randomly to avoid overpopulation of some servers and small number of others. It wasn't until 2007 that 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 searched game in the world, by a wide margin. This MMORPG offered players revolutionary things for those times: a wide variety of races and classes, exciting dungeons for 5 players and large-scale raids for 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 addon World of Warcraft has become so popular that it is still remembered and loved by millions of players. In 2019, Blizzard Entertainment, by popular demand, released a 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.
• On several occasions, WOW briefly lost top spot to major updates like The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim or Call of Duty: Black Ops, but consistently returned to the top of the rankings until .
- However, since April, the “sandbox” Minecraft has taken the lead, and so firmly settled on the first line that it was possible to shift it only in 2018, and Fortnite did it. There are many reasons for such a frenzied success of "cubes", among them:
- endless possibilities for action and creativity,
- constant replenishment with new content,
- excellent multiplayer,
- a huge number of YouTube channels dedicated to Minecraft.
• The main contingent of Minecraft are children, for whom this game has become a "world of trial and error", as the New York Times article put it. And many schools and universities have even begun to use Minecraft as an additional element of the educational process. There is even a version of Minecraft: Education Edition designed specifically for schools.
- Fortnite stayed in the top 1 until May, then the brainchild of Mojang returned to the leading position, and in March gave it to Animal Crossing: New Horizons for several months. In May of this year, Minecraft again became the most wanted game, and this concludes the study of Latos Charts.
Popular smartphone games
• There is no such detailed study for mobile games, but here is what a selection of the most downloaded games from Google Play looks like in 2020, during the Covid-19 pandemic.
• The most downloaded of these is the Ludo King strategy developed by Gametion Technologies, which has been downloaded from Google Play over 36 million times since the start of the quarantine period.
• And given that rumors about the second wave are already circulating, it is likely that these games will retain leadership among their mobile “brothers” for a long time to come.
