Welcome back! You are reading Staying Alive, episode 4. The blog in which I take a look at data and trends in CCG’s, mainly dead, but also the alive ones..such as today!
First let’s take a look at this site’s top 3 CCG’s for this week. I take a look at the data up till 30-01-2022, combining various metrics to see which game is most popular here
As you can see in the graph, X-Files CCG has overtaken Chaotic CCG for the #2 position, it’s a difference of 1%..but still 🙂 For today I switched to adding percentages to the graphs, which will hopefully make it easier to track the rise and fall of games over the year. Switching over to this I also took a new look at past weeks data, and noticed I actually made a mistake in last week’s Top 3 (big oops!) Last week X-Files was also #2 with 23%, which means it’s actually busy dipping! And so is Chaotic CCG which last week stood at 21%. Middle Earth CCG, last week was at a whopping 30%..definately experiencing some growth here.
Well, not much interesting to say there, so let’s move on to something big in the alive CCG world, Yu-Gi-Oh got an online client causing it to surge!
Thanks to Yu-Gi-Oh! Master Duel, the Yu-Gi-Oh! TCG has passed Magic: the Gathering in US search traffic for the first time in nearly a decade. pic.twitter.com/3WqUgaDgNY
— miles (@Real_Kilometers) January 31, 2022
I zoomed in on the last 90 days on Google Trends, adding the digital cardgame Hearthstone for good measure. You can pretty accurately pinpoint the release of Yu-Gi-Oh thanks to this graph. This effect of releasing the digital client actually also cascades into sales of physical products. Now I don’t have much stock of Yu-Gi-Oh, because neither the IP as the game ever really attracted me, but the little stock I do have started moving just that tad bit faster. I can imagine a lot of professional Yugioh traders being very happy the past few days
As you can probably guess, the red line is Yu-Gi-Oh, but there’s also a blue line (MTG) and a yellow one (Pokémon), and if you look closely you will see a green line hovering at the bottom…that’s Hearthstone.
Yu-Gi-Oh Master Duel actually receives a lot of praise with initial reviews raving on how much better their economy is than MTG: Arena, partly thanks to the fact that you can dust your unwanted cards. A function that’s been missing in Arena sorely.
Well, that’s it for this week. I hope to see you again in next episode of Staying Alive. Until then, may your cards be in your favor!
