Gaming guides: The video games which we turn to the internet for help with
It’s well known that gamers typically love a challenge, but some games are infamous due to how tough they are to beat. Whether you’re required to have lightning-fast reflexes, overcome difficult puzzles or even just spend large amounts of time trying to finish it, which video games do players need to consult the internet on the most?
We’ve taken Google search data from some of the most popular games of all time to find which games people are struggling with the most, how often the internet is consulted as a guide, and how long people have taken to beat and complete each game.
The video games we need the most help with
Using search data into guides, tips and walkthroughs, we were able to find which games had caused people to consult the internet for their answers the most. Rather surprisingly, it wasn’t Dark Souls, Bloodborne or any other well known challenging game that came out on top, although they did rank highly overall.
With over twice as many searches as The Witcher 3, Animal Crossing: New Horizons is the game that has players searching the most for help online.
Although playing Animal Crossing may not be ‘hard’ in the traditional sense, millions of players wanting to progress their creative projects forward are still turning to Google.
Rather than leaving players stuck and unable to progress, Animal Crossing: New Horizons sees players consulting the internet for help on lots of game secrets, hidden features and achievements you can unlock, such as unique flower colours in your garden, or working out whether the art in the game is fake or not.
The volume of online questions and searches suggest that players are turning to the internet to find the keys to these hidden features.
The rest of the list is perhaps not as surprising to many. With long stories, tough skill challenges and lots of invested time being necessary to beat these traditionally hard games, such as Bloodborne, Dark Souls III and Resident Evil 2.
To be able to complete the main story for any game is a big feat for gamers, with Minecraft being one of the most time consuming to complete every single task.
Many of the games which took the longest to complete were also among those which gamers most often had to consult the internet on, such as Minecraft (97 hours to complete and 344,000 annual searches), Terraria (91.5 hours to complete and 419,900 annual searches) and Animal Crossing: New Horizons (60.5 hours to complete and 1.04 million annual searches).
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Sources & Methodology
We used Google to find search data for each of the games, combining data from search terms “tips”, “guides” and “walkthrough”. The volume of global search data was collected for the last 12 months available (January 2020 to December 2020).
HowLongToBeat.com was used to find the time taken to complete the main story for each game (or the main objectives for games without a traditional ‘story’).
