IMC Games has been pretty much silent about Tree of Savior for the first half October, only four patch notes throughout the month. So, I decided to find out which country is the most hyped about Tree of Savior. We all know Tree of Savior is developed in South Korea, but as far as Google is concerned, South Koreans are not the most hyped about Tree of Savior.

Acquiring Data

The chart below starts from November 2013 because prior to that, there were no searches on “Tree of Savior”. This is because the first game play video on Tree of Savior was released in November 2013. The chart ends at August 2014 because Google has not processed the data for September. I used the following keywords for data acquisition, “Tree of Savior”, “트리 오브 세이비어”, “救世主之樹” and “ツリー オブ セイヴァー” (Shout out to Tree of Savior Japan for tweeting the translation)

Important Dates

November 2013 – First TOS gameplay video released in G-Star 2013
February 2014 – IMC Games announced FGT on Tree of Savior
May 2014 – IMC Games started English blog for Tree of Savior
August 2014 – The last blog update regarding Tree of Savior contents

As you may notice from the chart, the important dates always co-relate with an increase of monthly searches. When IMC Games shows the game play video to the public, it intrigued many fans around the world. Then in February when they announced FGT, many people around the world were interested so they searched for ways to participate, however FGT was available for Koreans only. When IMC Games decided to open an English blog in May, everybody was hyped. As they were publishing articles relating to Tree of Savior, the hype meter (search volume) continued to increase until it peaked in July & August 2014. Then, CM Leslie announced that they would stop blogging and focus resources on development towards CBT on 4th September 2014.

This shows that whenever IMC Games publishes Tree of Savior content on the blog, their fan base grows. This will eventually affect the overall marketing and profit of the game.

Most Hyped Countries

Then I decided to dig deeper, so I categorized the search volumes into different countries. Below is a pie chart and a table that shows the six countries most hyped about Tree of Savior. The results are obtained from averaging the above search volume to obtain an average search per month of 48,284. Then, they are categorized into countries.

Country	Average Searches/Month	Percentage
Brazil	8,564	17.74%
United States	6,379	13.21%
Thailand	6,053	12.54%
Japan	5,094	10.55%
Taiwan	3,667	7.59%
South Korea	2,490	5.16%
Other Countries	16,037	33.21%
Total	48,284	100%

Surprisingly, Brazil came out first! I remember TOS blog mentioning about Brazil fans before in Q&A #10, but I never expect them to top the charts. Second is United States, followed by Thailand, Japan, Taiwan and South Korea. It is also worth mentioning that TOS Brazil, Koreans living in United States and TOS Thailand were the first few people to volunteer to contribute for translation works in the TOS Wiki section. Other countries such as France, The Philippines, Indonesia, Malaysia and Spain have around 900 – 1500 average search volumes each.

Note that these search volumes are obtained from Google only. Koreans may be using Naver to search for Tree of Savior related information, Taiwanese using Baidu and Japanese using Goo. Search volume from other search engines are not included in this calculation.

Conclusion

The country most hyped about Tree of Savior is Brazil!!

On a serious note, both Brazil and Thailand combined contribute to about 30% of the total search volume. Instead of supporting only Korean, Japanese, English and Mandarin languages, IMC Games should start to consider supporting Portuguese and Thai languages.

In addition, I feel that it is not the best move for IMC Games to completely stop Tree of Savior blog. The search trend for the keyword “Tree of Savior” dropped drastically after the blog stopped updating. This is shown in the graph below:

Like the previous chart, the search index for Tree of Savior peaked in August. However, when TOS blog halted, Tree of Savior search trend slide down to 54% from its peak.

Of course, limited resources and manpower may affect IMC Games’ marketing strategy. Or perhaps IMC Games is creating urgency to see the public’s response towards Tree of Savior. Whatever the reasons are, my recommendation will still be the same, continue to upload content to build fan base.

Let us know how hyped are you about Tree of Savior in the comment section below.

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