SOE president John Smedley validates the use of Google Trends to measure game popularity

In the throes of the recent launch of PlanetSide 2, SOE president John Smedley has been quite active on Twitter. Tonight (or actually last night) he tweeted this:

Happy to see this google.com/trends/explore...

His tweet links to a Google Trends plot much like this one:

The difference being that his plot shows the most recent 90 days, while the above shows an absolute time range of September through November. Both plots are similar now but the above plot won't change after the end of the month. [Update: He tweeted on November 22nd when the most recent data for Google Trends was from the 21st. November 21st is the point where the blue line for Planetside 2 briefly crosses the red line for League of Legends.]

When I first blogged about Measuring MMO popularity with Google Trends a bunch of MMO bloggers were pretty critical. Smedley could have cited Xfire or Raptr, but his tweet is a nice validation of Google Trends from the president of a prominent MMO company.