Hosted Games Data Sheet: For All You Number Nerds Out There

Hosted Games
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Okay, so, I am obsessed with this and just spent a few hours doing a quantitative analysis of the data in python. Check out my analysis at Analysis, or the github repo. For measuring “popularity”, I just used Google ratings + omnibus ratings…

This includes a regression analysis to predict popularity by word count and genre; see the results at the end of the first link.

It turns out that The Great Tournament is a massive outlier in terms of popularity; it has a ton more Google plays and ratings than any other game. So if you see an outlier in the graphs below, it’s probably that.

Here are some basic graphs and summaries:

Games by year

stories_per_year

Games by genre

stories_per_genre

Mean popularity by genre

mean_popularity_per_genre
mean_popularity_per_genre1095×450 23.2 KB

Boxplot of popularity by genre

boxplot_popularity_per_genre
boxplot_popularity_per_genre1095×450 22.4 KB

Popularity by word count

ratings_per_word_count
ratings_per_word_count1095×450 20.5 KB

Summary of regression results

Interpreting the regression coefficients literally:

  • Every additional word gets a game between 0.005 and 0.009 additional ratings.
  • If a game is free, it’ll gain between 521 and 2868 ratings.
  • If a game is in the fantasy genre, it’ll gain between 213 and 2217 ratings.
  • If a game is in the supernatural genre, it’ll gain between 971 and 3594 ratings.
  • If a game is in the Superhero genre, it’ll gain between 513 and 4134 ratings.

These are all the “significant” conclusions here. According to the regression coefficients, puzzle, adventure, sci-fi, horror, historical, and steampunk all have penalties, while war, school, and post-apocalyptic all have slight bonuses. But none of those are “significant”, because the sample size is very, very small.

Games that are more or less popular than expected

The games that are more popular than expected are, in order (not including The Great Tournament which would be 1st): Life of a Mercenary, Wayhaven 1, Wayhaven 2, Hero or Villain, Doomsday on Demand, Samurai of Hyuga, The Parenting Similator, War for the West, The Aether, and Evertree Inn.

The games that are less popular than expected are, in order: Tin Star (mostly because of the huge word count), Magikiras (also bc of the word count), Gambling with Eternity, Elemental Saga, Burn(t), Seven Bullets, Twin Flames, Lost in the Pages, The Aegis Saga, and Best of Us.

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