How does Reflexive's Top Sellers list work?

[Karja]

I have a highly hypothetical scenario that I'm wondering about... Let's say one is browsing Reflexive's Top Sellers list and notes that a new game of lesser quality than for example Eets is located above Eets in the Top Sellers list. What does this imply? I've thought of a few possibilities:

1) The Top Sellers list is based on current trends, and this simply reflects that the new game is currently selling better since it's...well. New. Not buried in the back.

2) The list is a complex calculation based on current trends and overall statistics, and the new game has no overall statistics to weigh in the calculation - thus it gets a default value and is placed relatively high for the moment.

3) Top Sellers indicate raw sales numbers, and this higher placement is a cause of Reflexive's increasing audience. Eets was in the spotlight when the audience was lower, and thus places lower due to that.

Ehm. Yes. It's all hypothetical, of course. Just wondering if anyone knows how this works. I didn't find anything on the Reflexive site, and a quick search here didn't yield anything in particular.

[Indiepath]

I seem to remember someone saying that it was calculated on the last 30 days sales.

[Karja]

Ah, thanks - that would explain it!

[cyrus_zuo]

I seem to remember someone saying that it was calculated on the last 30 days sales.

It is on 30 days, which makes the Top 10 selling games rather interesting as games that may be the best selling game for 1 week may not even make the top 10 for a 30 day period (if they can't sustain their sales over the long term).

Also, as a side note, the Top 10 selling games shouldn't be confused with the 'favorites' list on the site. That list is a ranking of games by conversion rate, not by sales.

[Nexic]

I got the impression favourites was now based on what star rating users had given the game? Previously the star rating was based on conversion (i think)

[James C. Smith]

The "favorites" list on Reflexive.com has always been based on conversion ratio for the past X days. I think it is 30 or 60 days. Before there were reviews, there was a star rating base on conversion. But now that there are reviews on Reflexive.com, the stars are based on the reviews. But the "favorites" list is still based on conversion. It is based on what people do not what they say. :-)

[Grey Alien]

It is based on what people do not what they saySmart move. I'm sure that lots of people give the demo 5 stars and then never buy it...

I tracked the rise and fall of all my games on Reflexive through the Top Sellers and User Favourites list and put them in a graph and looked at the correlation between the two. It was pretty interesting.

Say for example, your game has a peak for 1-2 weeks then fades away a bit, it will keep on rising in the top sellers chart until the 30th day and then will rapidly drop as the sample period goes through your 1-2 week peak (thus reducing the total sales in the last 30 days).

The best I ever did was reach position 33 in top sellers (out of 610 games!). I don't think that's breaching my NDA contract as the information is publically available via looking at the charts. Anyway, that mean that 32 games had sold more than mine in the last 30 days. They were new games that were coming out that were hotter than mine and made more sales AND some were older games that were STILL selling more than mine did in 30 days - and I sold a pretty reasonable number. I found it pretty interesting that some "classic" games just kept on selling bucket loads month in month out.

Anyway my next game will be right up there :-)

[Karja]

Glad to hear that I'm not the only one following the charts like that! :D It's amazing how well older games can sell compared to new ones - and it's not just the ones I expected, but older games of more...questionable fun-ness as well. (In my humble opinion.)

It's an eye-opener in general, what the audience prefers; I completely misjudged graphics/gameplay preferences with my own pitiful attempt. (For example, I thought that graphics were my biggest problem, when it turned out to be the gameplay.) I really wish I had studied the charts more before plunging in; they're extremely valuable, especially since they're do-not-say-based. I hope that I'm walking away a better game designer after investigating them now. :)

[Grey Alien]

Yeah for sure. See what works well and duplicate and add your own twist is a tried and tested business method IF you can get it right and do a good job. Of course that won't gel well with the whole "don't clone" crew. But I don't want to start this thread off down that well (and boringly) trodden road...

[Karja]

Oh, I don't mean just for cloning... I'm sure that there are tons of interesting observations to be made about stylistic choices and gameplay variations - that information might be interesting for "original" games as well. Not just things like "egypt and water sells." I was thinking along the lines of how an ongoing trend toward complexity in puzzle games might mean that your action game would do better if it has more involving gameplay as well. That example was just complete bull, of course; but I do think that there might be some subtle trends that could be noted.

At the very least one can examine what not to do!

[James C. Smith]

I tracked the rise and fall of all my games on Reflexive through the Top Sellers and User Favourites list and put them in a graph and looked at the correlation between the two. It was pretty interesting.


If you aren't using it already, you may want to check yout the Day by Day By Day Top 10 Grid (http://www.game-sales-charts.com/cms/index.php?option=com_dbquery&Itemid=33&task=PrepareQuery&qid=39) on GameSalesCharts.com (http://www.game-sales-charts.com/). It lets you see the top 40 games over time for any date in recent history. Hove your mouse over one game and the yellow highlight will show that game's rise and fall over time.

Many web sites post a top 10 but some post a top 6 or a top 20. Reflexive makes the entire catalog available sorted by sales order. So you can see the top 700 if you go to Reflexive.com. GameSalesCharts.com only logs the top 50 from reflexive and the top whatever is available from everyone else. This "day by day" chart defaults to showing the top 20 but it can be set to show as much as the top 40. Of course when running that query for any site other than Reflexive you only see the top 10 even if you say you want the top 40. That is a limit of what those sites publish.

Making your own charts in excel will allow you to be more precise and go beyond the top 40. But using this day by day chart on GSC is a quick and easy way to see a chart of any top 40 game.

[Grey Alien]

Thanks James, I've been there in the past but it seems to have improved recently. I'll be sure to try it out with my next game. Well I keep saying "my" game but really it's BFG's, I'm just the programmer. But it should be fun to track that one for sure! I'm gonna get major stat addiction with it.