Bringing It Back

[kraflab]

http://www.google.com/trends/explore#q=roguelike

[Darren Grey]

Ah, that's awesome!  I wish I'd had graph for my talk on the Roguelike Renaissance earlier this year.

Note that the peak in July 2011 corresponds to the release of Dungeons of Dredmor.  The peak in September 2012 corresponds to the release of FTL.

[Mikko Lehtinen]

Finland wins by a HUGE margin, Russia comes second, and USA is the third.

Today, I'm proud to be a Finn.

[getter77]

Cool, surely many more surges of power to come!   

[Mikko Lehtinen]

The cities where most of the roguelike searches come from:

Helsinki 100
Moscow 62
Varsaw 38
Toronto 35
Sydney 32
London 20
New York 19

Considering that Helsinki is a city of only 1.3 million people, that's quite a feat. I know that Finns really, really like retrogames and roguelikes, but still... Are Finns something like one fourth of all the world's roguelike players?

The top three cities, Helsinki, Moscow and Varsaw, are quite close to each other. I'm not aware of any sort of cultural connection between the three that might be the cause of this, and there's the language barrier and all... Is it the weather???

[jim]

In Moscow, $ picks up @

[Mikko Lehtinen]

Russia has a huge amount of talented and well-educated coders who sadly don't have many opportunities to turn their skills into money. Probably for that reason all sorts of computer subcultures prosper there like nowhere else. Also a major part of the world's viruses and other sorts of cyber-attacks originate from Russia. Poland might be a similar case.

Finland might have the world's best computer games journalism. Pelit Magazine is very popular here, and it may be very different from the magazines that the rest of the world reads. Most of the world's gaming magazines have suspiciously close ties to the biggest game publishers.

The top journalists of Pelit are old dogs, they have educated Finns for some thirty years in different magazines. They frequently write about their favorite retro games, roguelikes, tabletop roleplaying, or whatever most satisfies their personal appetites at the moment. They mostly follow their own nose in gaming, not the big money in the business.

(Perhaps Russia has similar gaming journalism, I've no idea. Most Russians use pirated software, so their computer games magazines might need a business model that is not based on advertising...)

Of course we also have lots of male engineers; we have Nokia and Linus Torvalds. The engineer students have developed their own subcultures for tens of years. I'm not an engineer myself, but lots of my friends are, and many of them play roguelikes.

[Krice]

Kind of interesting graph I guess, but it may tell more about "mainstream" roguelikes than anything else. The lack of interest during recent years is also explained by lack of roguelike games pretty much.. I find it frustrating that if you want to play a roguelike, you need to dust off ADOM or Nethack.

[Darren Grey]

Well it's for people looking for roguelikes - those who already play DCSS and the like aren't going to be googling "roguelike".  It's when titles like Dredmor and FTL hit the scene that the wider community decides to find out what this roguelike stuff is all about.

For any interested, here's the audience stats for Roguelike Radio:

http://i.imgur.com/AGH8P.png

Note that this is somewhat influenced by our coverage of Dwarf Fortress and The Binding of Isaac, which each got over 10 times the usual visits.  But it's interesting to see that in our audience Internet Explorer is about as popular as Opera (in the early days Opera was higher), Linux beats Mac and Android beats iPhone (though not iOS in total when you add in iPad and iPod).

[Mikko Lehtinen]

The lack of interest during recent years is also explained by lack of roguelike games pretty much.. I find it frustrating that if you want to play a roguelike, you need to dust off ADOM or Nethack.

For people like me who like tight, smallish roguelikes that require tactical and strategic thinking all the time, this is a golden age. There just haven't been games like Sil or Epilogue until recently. (I'm aiming my own roguelike Halls of Mist in the same category, but I'm not exactly where I want to be yet.)

In the classic roguelikes, interesting tactical and strategic decisions are all too infrequent to keep the tension level high. I guess you need to enjoy the exploration part at least as much as tactical decisions to really get kicks out of ADOM or Nethack.

[Mikko Lehtinen]

We are probably missing some great Russian roguelikes.

Just consider that there are lots of talented coders in Russia who love roguelikes, and that they don't have many commercial venues to publish the games. Their games will remain hobby-projects that are loved locally but unheard of elsewhere in the world.

Games like Space Rangers. Only thanks to our great games journalists in Finland the game is somewhat known here. There are probably lots of locally popular games with procedural content generation, turn-based play, rich strategy and tactics... Maybe Russians don't even call them roguelikes, but some of us might.