So I played around with google trends a bit. Here's what it has in store for PS. Feel free to discuss and enhance my analysis.
The overall interest in PS looks like this
Easy enough, PS was at its peak back in '07, however, it has largely fallen into oblivion with now interest less than 1% than what it was at the peak. Now, let's break this down a bit.
Here's what the geographical interest distribution looks like:
Interestingly, this suggests that interest in PS is somewhat localized, probably due to local communities (like the German community).
Another factor we can look at is statistics for individual countries.
Here's what the UK/Germany/France's statistics look like (I took Germany's par example, but the others are the same)
Of interest here is the essential drop to zero at the end of '09.
The next pattern includes Canada/Brazil/Italy/Spain
A series of peaks, nothing else.
And lastly, we got the US
Note the sharp drop to zero at the end of last year.
So what does this all mean? Well, for me, it indicates PlaneShift gets around by word of mouth and local communities as the geographical distribution is highly localized (twice as many people talking searching for it in Montreal than in LA). Note the trend for mainland Europe. Clearly, PS had an active interest (=community) in Germany, France and the UK until the end of 2009 (when the server was offline), which killed the interest in the local community.
In countries such as Brazil/Italy and Spain, PS never even gained a big foothold and raises an eyebrow or two a few times, but was quickly forgotten.
And in the US, PS is now as unpopular as ever before.
I wonder, does PS do any active PR? Clearly, we need to raise interest in PS, as this isn't just due to people not liking the game, but rather people not googling the game. We need to make the world aware of this game once more.
