Announcing www.Game-Sales-Charts.com (James’ history of Real Arcade's Top 10)

[James C. Smith]

www.Game-Sales-Charts.com

I set up a web site for tracking the history of the games that appear in the weekly top 10 selling lists. Currently it only tracks Real Arcade but I plan to change that eventually. So far the site only does about half of what I wanted it to do. None of the charts are “interactive” yet. I hope to change that soon. This web site is based on the same data I have been posting for years as an Excel spreadsheet. So rather than updating that spreadsheet each week, I now add some data to a database and all the charts on the web site update automatically. Plus I post a summary/comment on the site each week. Or at least that’s the plan.

I start this announcement topic here so that people who wanted to comment about the web site itself can do that here rather than distracting from the discussion about the games themselves that we normally have in the topic “The Real Arcade top 10 list is fun to watch”

[Sharpfish]

Excellent work James, Thanks a lot for putting the effort into this project! :)

[Dan MacDonald]

Wow this is really cool, I could get lost in this for hours :)

[Phil Steinmeyer]

Great site James - thanks for all your work on this.

[Gnatinator]

Kudos James, a fine resource.

[bob123]

Nice website, looks like it helped a lot of people!:D

[Stu]

Bravo! Someone buy that man a beer.

[James C. Smith]

I improved the “Top Companies” chart to display the company’s games in order of number of weeks in the top 10 and include the number of weeks next to each game. I also added a date range option to this chart. For example, you can run it from July of 2005 and later to get these results:

GameHouse - Aloha Solitaire (17), Luxor (9), Aloha TriPeaks (4), Super Jigsaw Lighthouses (4), Reader's Digest Super Word Power (4), Adventure Inlay Safari Edition (2), GameHouse SuDoKu (1)
Sony Pictures Digital - Wheel of Fortune (11), Bewitched (5), JEOPARDY! (1)
MumboJumbo - Luxor (9), Chainz 2 - Relinked (6)
PopCap - Bejeweled 2 Deluxe (10), Chuzzle Deluxe (4), Insaniquarium Deluxe (1)
Alawar Entertainment - Snowy - Treasure Hunter (8), Crystalix (2), Action Ball (2), Magic Ball 2 New Worlds (2)
PlayFirst- Diner Dash (11), TriJinx (2)
gameLab- Diner Dash (11)
Wildfire Studios- Tumblebugs (10)
Tik Games- Fortune Tiles Gold (6), Gold Fever (2), Cinema Tycoon (1)
AliasWorlds - Snowy - Treasure Hunter (8)


I find the UI for entering options a bit clunky, but at least it works. It is very fun to be able to customize the date range. If you search hard enough, you can find a date range like this one where PopCap is not #2. :D I plan to add more sorting and filtering options to all the charts as I find time.

[yanuart]

/me give a big thumb up for you man !
but looking at the charts make me realize that my kinda game isn't going to make it :D but what the hell

[James C. Smith]

I added a few more bells and whistles to this web site. The “Top Games” chart now has an option to select a date range so you can query things like “What was the top game of 2004”. This is similar to the date range option that was recently added to the “Top Companies” chart.

But even more promising that that is the addition of data from another source. You can now generate a “Top Games” chart for Real Arcade or Reflexive Arcade or Reflexive.com. I will be adding an option like this to all the reports as I find time. What is more exciting that having data from Reflexive Arcade, is just having date from multiple sources no matter what those sources are. This proves that my database structure is somewhat robust. Now all I need to is to get some data from places like Yahoo, MSN, and Shockwave. The backend already support it as does most of the front end. As soon is a finish more of the front end issues (user interface for the options) I will shift to focusing on getting more data.

There is also a new option to display “Reflexive Arcade Weekly Top 10 List” which just shows a top 10 list for every week for the past few years from Reflexive Arcade. This is data that Reflexive does not normally publish. On Reflexive.com you won’t find a weekly top 10 list. Reflexive.com lets you sort the games by sales, and it will show ALL games rather than just the top 10, but it is for a 30 day window rather than a 7 day week. The “feature of the week” game doesn’t usually make it very high on the top sellers list on Reflexive.com because of the 30 day window. But they do show up in the Weekly Top 10 List available exclusively on Game-Sales-Charts.com.

You may wonder what the difference is between Relfexive.com and ReflexiveAracde. The ReflexiveAracde charts include sales from Reflexive.com and all web sites that are affiliates of the Reflexive Arcade. The Reflexive.com charts exclude all the affiliates and show only games sold directly on Reflexive.com.

All of these charts are in the inaccurately named Real Top 10 Charts (http://www.game-sales-charts.com/cms/index.php?option=com_dbquery&Itemid=33) section of the web site.

[James C. Smith]

I could use some help with a logo for this site. If anyone is graphically inclined, and would like to contribute some free work to this cause, I would appreciate it. Just a nice logo in a .JPG would be great. But if you happen to know anything about making templates for Joomla / Mambo that would be even better.

[soniCron]

I could use some help with a logo for this site. If anyone is graphically inclined, and would like to contribute some free work to this cause, I would appreciate it. Here's my contribution to the cause. (Sorry, I'm not familiar with Joomla/Mambo theming.)

[soniCron]

And here's an alternate-color version. I can give you large versions of any of these if you, or the person who themes the site, need/want them.

[whisperstorm]

It would be really nice if there were rss feeds for the charts.

[James C. Smith]

The rss feed is on the wish list. It shouldn't be too hard. But it is a long list.

Thank soniCron. That looks nice.

[DGuy]

James, has any thought been given as to how to weight the top-ten list of different sites?

Obviously, the top-ten list from a site with high traffic should have a bigger effect on a games ranking than the top-ten list from a site with far less traffic.

Just curious ...

[James C. Smith]

There are currently no plans to combine the data form different retailers. For example, you can currently see the “Top Game” for Read Arcade for a specific date range OR the “Top Games” from Reflexive.com for a specific date range. As more retailers are added, there will be more choices for which top games list to show. But I didn’t plan to have an overall “top games” chart that combines all retail channels, mostly due to the exact problem you mentioned.

[James C. Smith]

And as long as we a bumping this topic again, I will also mention that I added a few more bells and whistles last night. Now any place a game is mentioned by name it is a clickable link that takes you to a summary of that game. The same is true of company names. So you can look at Real’s the most recent weekly top 10 list (http://www.game-sales-charts.com/cms/index.php?option=com_dbquery&Itemid=33&task=ExecuteQuery&qid=8&limit=5&limitstart=180) and click on Bricks of Atlantis (http://www.game-sales-charts.com/cms/index.php?option=com_dbquery&Itemid=33&task=ExecuteQuery&qid=20&cqo_game=Bricks%20of%20Atlantis) to see details on what weeks in was in the top 10 and who made it. From there you can click on Arcade Lab (http://www.game-sales-charts.com/cms/index.php?option=com_dbquery&Itemid=33&task=ExecuteQuery&qid=36&cqo_company=Arcade%20Lab) to see a list of other games they made and then click on Spin & Win (http://www.game-sales-charts.com/cms/index.php?option=com_dbquery&Itemid=33&task=ExecuteQuery&qid=20&cqo_game=Spin%20%26%20Win) to see what weeks it was in the top 10. Or you could click from Hamsterball -> Raptisoft -> Chuzzle Deluxe -> PopCap -> NingPo Mahjong -> Pyrogon -> Super Letter Linker -> GameHouse -> Aloha Solitaire.

This type of stuff (in addition to the date ranges) is was I was talking about when I said the initial launch of the web site wasn’t interactive enough. Now it is starting to get really interesting.

I also added a “score” column to the “Top Games” chart and added an option to sort by Weeks In Top 10, Score, or Name of game. The “score” is 10 point for each week the game was #1 and 1 point for each week it was #10.

[DGuy]

This may be on your todo list, but different background colors for every-other row and/or col would be nice.