Multiplayer during the World Cup

Last week, Google posted the effects of the World Cup on search engine queries to Google.com by country. They showed how much of an impact certain games, and the tournament overall, had on search activity – basically showing that, in general, significant amounts of people were focused solely on the World Cup during the fixture. Not surprising considering that soccer (or football) is considered the world’s most popular sport. We figured we would take a look and see if we saw something similar with UNCHARTED 2 multiplayer. Before even looking, we expected to see the number of concurrent online players to drop during World Cup fixtures. We weren’t disappointed. The graph below shows the typical curve of our concurrent online player population on an average day. As you can see, we typically get our peak player population around the middle of the day, U.S. Pacific time. Now let’s see what happened during the World Cup Third Place fixture, which was played on Saturday, July 10, 2010. It’s pretty clear that a portion of our player population that is typically online was watching the World Cup fixture. It’s interesting to note that people started coming online before the game was over, much less decided, as the game-winning goal didn’t come until about four minutes before regulation time expired. Now, we would expect to see a much more severe dip during the World Cup Final, and that’s precisely what we saw, as shown in the map below. It’s not surprising that just about everybody watched the entire game before hopping back to playing UNCHARTED 2. Even after the game, not everybody came back – no doubt either celebrating Spain’s first World Cup or lamenting the loss suffered by the Netherlands.