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Hitwise Intelligence - Robin Goad - UK

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Game cheats: GTA4, Mario Kart Wii and Halo 3

May 20, 2008

Following the recent launches of two popular video games, Grand Theft Auto IV (GTA4) and Nintendo's Mario Kart Wii, we noticed an interesting search pattern. As you can see from the chart below, searches for the game itself peak during launch week, while searches for game cheats take off a week later

UK internet searches for gta4 cheats mario kart wii cheats march april may 2008 chart.png

Looking a bit further back, we can see that this pattern is well established. The chart below illustrates searches for 3 key terms related to Halo 3, which was launched in September last year. The basic term ‘halo 3’ is always the most popular and peaks during launch week, as does ‘halo 3 review’. Again, ‘halo 3 cheats’ takes off a week after, but the chart also shows the longevity of the three terms. It’s interesting to see that while ‘halo 3 review’ drops off the radar after just a few weeks, the volume of searches for ‘halo 3 cheats’ has remained significant since, occasionally almost catching up with searches for the basic term ‘halo 3’.

UK Internet searches for halo 3 cheats review 2007 2008 chart.png

So, if game cheat searches are so popular, where are these searchers going? The table below lists the top destinations over the last 4 weeks for people searching for the terms ‘gta4’ and ‘gta4 cheats’, and as you can see, they are very different. Three in ten people searching for the basic game title are ending up at the official website of Rockstar Games (the publisher of GT4), while a further 20% are ending up at a popular fansite, www.gta4.net. Other popular destinations include Wikipedia and YouTube, plus gaming sites and retailers such as Gamespot UK and Play.com.

On the other hand, people searching for ‘gta4 cheats’ are much more likely to end up at a specialist cheat site such as GTA IV Cheats or Cheat Genius, which combined account for over half of all visits from the term. With the exception of Gamespot UK, the sites receiving most traffic from the term ‘gta4’ do less well from ‘gta4 cheats’. Interestingly, 99%+ of search traffic to the top 2 cheat sites comes from organic rather than paid search, implying that this would be a good area to develop content for search engine optimization (SEO). Paid search may not prove such a cost effective option, however, as most of the people searching for cheats will have already purchased the game.

top 10 websites receiving traffic from grand theft auto generic and cheat search terms may 2008 table.png

I assumed that some of these cheat sites would be affiliates, sending lots of traffic to retailers and elsewhere. In fact, 48% of people visiting GTA IV cheats last week visited a website from our Blogs and Personal Websites category afterwards, while a further 28% visited an Entertainment – Games site, many of which were other cheat sites. However, Cheat Genius - which is more a more generic cheat site – does seem to have stronger commercial relationships in place. The site is sponsored by Zango, a “premium content access tool, paid for by advertising”, and 22% of people visiting Cheat Genius last week went to Zango’s website afterwards.