All the Casual Games Top 10 lists are fun to watch

[James C. Smith]

I have added a new ‘World Map (http://www.game-sales-charts.com/cms/index.php?option=com_dbquery&Itemid=33&task=ExecuteQuery&qid=38)’ chart to www.game-sales-charts.com. This page is updated daily with current top 10 lists from 14 casual games retailers (a.k.a. portals). This is a great way to quickly see the current top 10 list on many sites at once. Like all the ‘charts’ on game-sales-charts.com, this page isn’t very fancy looking. Each row is the top 10 list from a web site. The first column is the #1 selling game on each web site, the second column is the #2 selling game and so on.

Currently there is no way to see historical data (except for the existing historical data from Real Arcade that has always been featured in game-sales-charts.com). The site is now archiving all 14 top 10 lists daily, and eventialy I will add some ways to view that historical data, but for now, you just get a live view of what is currently in the top 10 on many different web sites.

This data is a “screen scraped” from the sites mentioned. It is up to the individual web sites to determine how these games are ranked. Most rank them based on the number of sales of downloadable games for a 7 day period but some may be based on number of downloads or even based on ‘editorial’ rankings. Some or based on different time frames and they all update at different intervals. Some sites, like Real, update once per week. Others, like Reflexive, update daily based on sales for the last 30 days. Other sites update daily and rank based on sales form the previous 7 days.


Here are the web pages that are currently tracked:

AOL 'Top 10 Download & Play Games' (http://videogames.aol.com/downloads)
Yahoo! 'Best Sellers!' (http://games.yahoo.com/hub/goto?page=gn_download)
Real Arcade 'Top Ten Games' (http://www.realarcade.com/gameguide)
MSN 'Hot [downloadable] Games' (http://zone.msn.com/en/root/downloads.htm )
Shockwave 'Top Downloads' (http://www.shockwave.com/home.jsp)
Big Fish Games 'Top 10 Downloads' (http://www.bigfishgames.com/)
Game House 'Top 10 Game Downloads' (http://www.gamehouse.com/)
Reflexive Arcade 'Top Sellers' (http://www.reflexive.com/index.php?PAGE=GameList&SORT=Sales)
Arcade Town 'Most Popular' (http://www.arcadetown.com/most_popular_games.rss)
Oberon 'Top Games' (http://gamecenter.oberon-media.com/)
PlayFirst 'Top Rated' (http://www.playfirst.com/topten.html)
GameFiesta 'Top 10' (http://www.gamefiesta.com/)
Zylom 'Top 5 Delux Games' (http://www.en.zylom.com/deluxe/)
iWin 'Top 10 Downloads' (http://www.iwin.com/)

Many of these web sites have multiple lists. I chose the list that I think is most likely to represent the ranking of downloadable causal games based on number of units sold.

Please let me know if there is a site you think I should add to the list. But don’t just give me a domain name. Please tell me what list on what web page you think is worth tracking.

Also, if any of these are available as RSS feeds or any kind of XML or data feed I would rather parse that since my HTML scraping code will likely break each time an artists/web designer changes anything on the retailer’s web site. Please let me know if this data is available as a feed.

Please don’t send me PMs on this forum. I prefer public posts or regular old e-mail. James@game-sales-ch...

I do not plan to try to combine all the sites into one global top 10 list. There is no accurate way to do that. My goal is to present lots of real data and some tools to query/analyze it in different ways. I really prefer to see the data rather than just a summary of it all. Now the current data is all available in once place with all it’s details. Soon I will add some tools to look up all the actual historical data. (as soon as we get some history recorded)

Enjoy! And please give me feedback so I know why/if I should spend my night and weekends making this stuff work.

[Stu]

Great new feature, thanks!

Here's a feedback tidbit for the future: When I place my curser on a game title it would be nice to see that title highlight everywhere it appears on the chart.

[James C. Smith]

That is exactly what I thought as well. I am just not sure how to implement it. I think I need to learn some DHTML and/or Java script or get some help from a webmaster. Feel free post or e-mail code snippets if you know how to do this.

[svero]

You know what Id really like tracked, if you're so inclined. The top games are interesting I suppose but Id like to see the ratio of top games to games that didnt make it. I guess you did that a little looking at churn rates before... but it would be interesting to see stats along the lines of...

Games released 2006 : 442
Games in sales charts : 12
games in charts < 1 week : 56

I think it's indicative of how crowded/comeptitive the market is and how much room there is for new games etc...

[James C. Smith]

The Real Arcade churn rate chart helps show part of information you are looking for. The rest of the information can easily be estimated without actually tracking it. Most web retailers have a set schedule of release X games per week. Reflexive releases 5, Big Fish Releases 7 and I Real releases 3 per week. That means in a 13 week quarter, Real releases 39 new games. The churn rate chart (http://www.game-sales-charts.com/cms/index.php?option=com_dbquery&Itemid=33&task=ExecuteQuery&qid=17) shows that there are usually 38 or 40 unique games passing though the top 10 list each quarter. But some of those games were released in previous quarters. So the picture is not really very clear at all.

One of the things on my ‘to do’ list is to log the “what’s new” list on all the web retailers. This way we would have the date that each game was released on each site. We could then take a closer look at what % of the games make it into the top X, how many games get released per month/week/year/quarter, or which sites get games sooner or later. I am especially interested in taking a look at that last one.

[James C. Smith]

I added pogo to the list and made all the data update hourly rather than daily. The old method was usually showing yesterday's top 10. Now I don't have to guess about what time of day everyone updates their lists and you always get the current top 10 from 15 sites.

[arcadetown]

Hey that's totally cool. Love seeing everything together like that so can see what's going on at a glance, very useful. Did you have any plans to give historical access to the data? For example, seeing at a glance what was hot across the board last month versus this month would be sweet.

[James C. Smith]

I way to view the lists from yester, last week, and last month (or any date in the past) is certainly on the 'to do' list.

I guess I should clarify that this is really an open beta of a work in progress. Maybe I should have posted a feedback request in the new section. But this is still very useful even in it’s current simple form.

Last night I got the web site names to be more descriptive and made them all be links to the actual web sites.

So now the short version of my 'to do' list includes:

Improve the template matching code to make it possible to add some lists that currently can't be parsed (DFG, SpinTop, and others)
Make a way to select a date to view (preferable with next and forward buttons for previous day, previous week, next week, and so on)
Add a hover effect so all instance of a game will be highlighted when you have over one of them (hove over one Dinner Dash to see all the Diner Dashes highlight)
Make all the other charts on the web site use this data so that you can view this data in more way. You could do things like focus on any one web site and view all the top games for each week, or view a count for which games were in the top 10 most often on that site, or view the “churn rate” chart for any select site.
Track and display the 'what's new' lists


Thanks for all the feedback about my web site.

[James C. Smith]

So what do you guys think of the data itself? Which games are popular on some of the sites are rather surprising. AOL shows (#1Gold Miner Vegas, #2 AstroPop Deluxe, #3 Fish Tycoon, #4 Blasterball 2 Revolution, #5 Adventure Ball, #6 Atari: 80 Classic Games in One!)

I am surprised to see AstroPop so high. It seems like a nice game but I didn’t notice doing very well on any other sites when it was launched over a year ago. And that AOL audience sure like the action arcade games including breakout games. This is not your typical ‘casual games’ list. Maybe it has to do with which sub section of AOL I am collecting data from.

iWin seems to be very heavily focused on their own games. This is what I would expect of any developer/publisher/portal. But it is not so much the case with Game House, Reflexive, and Big Fish.

Of course, this is just one snapshot in time. Maybe if we looked at last month or next month it would be different.

There are a few exception, but for the most part you really do see all the game games on all the portals. There are 150 squares on this grid and it seems like 50% of them are filled with the same 10 games. Fish Tycoon, Cake Mania, Mystic Inn, Diner Dash 2, Super Collapse! 3, Big Kahuna Reef 2, Mystery Case Files: Huntsville, MCF: Prime Suspects and a few others.

[Ryan Clark]

Hi James,

Thanks for all of your efforts! I've been a silent lurker reading your data for a long time :) It's about time I posted something.

I think the most interesting thing about this chart is the disparity between the various portals/sites. I think it might be valuable to try to determine what sort of factors could account for the differences, as we can then try to (mentally) take these factors into account when looking at a particular game, or at a particular portal.

Factors I think may have an effect on the results:

A portal's audience
Obviously a large factor! Are the portal's users predominantly young, old, male, female, American, European? What kinds of games appeal to these various demographics?

A portal's layout
Does the top ten list feature significantly on the portal's main page? Top ten lists have a way of reinforcing themselves. If, as is the case on RealArcade, the top ten list is a major feature of the main page, you'll likely see those 10 games get the majority of the attention, while older games are somewhat ignored. However, on a site like AOL where the top ten list is a very small part of a large page, I think you're more likely to see a variety of games get their time on the top ten.

Does the "new games" list feature significantly on the portal's main page? If you look at ArcadeTown, the new games are featured prominently at the top of the page. In fact, of the four newest ArcadeTown games (which have large icons next to them), three of them are in the current ArcadeTown "Most Popular" list.

The timing of releases.
A game may be a #1 hit on one portal because of a lack of strong competition at its release date, while being a mediocre performer on another portal because it was released in the same week as other strong performers.

Alliances/exclusives
Do certain portals have access to games that other portals do not? Or perhaps they have early access? This would obviously affect the timing (mentioned above), but it might also have a cross-over effect if some users are visitors of multiple portals. i.e. If a user visits both Big Fish and RealArcade, they may have purchased Huntsville back when it was only on Big Fish and, as a result, when Huntsville appears on RealArcade later, RealArcade will not get that sale.

Special Offers
Special offers like subscription services or mega-packs can obviously change the buying patterns of users. If you're just going to buy a single game, you'll likely be very choosy about which one you pick from the portal. However, if a portal has a large number of subscribers who get 1 free game per month, those subscribers may end up increasing the sales of new titles, as they've likely already seen and tested the various old ones the portal has available.

Differences in DRM
Some sites allow for a variety of DRM methods. ArcadeTown, for instance, has a feature limited demo of Professor Fizzwizzle, not a 1-hour limited version. Some sites allow for a combination of DRM methods, while others only work with a 1-hour time limit. Different games may perform better with different DRM methods, and as a result, may place differently in top ten lists.

Web games
Does the portal also host web games? On portals that do host web games, games that have web versions may see better sales than games without web versions. So if you compare 2 games (one of which has a web version, and one that does not) on 2 portals (one of which hosts web games, on that does not), you'll likely see quite different results for the 2 games on the 2 portals.


So, can you think of any other factors? I'm sure there are more that I haven't thought of! I'm just trying to find a way to explain the differences we see between the various portals. If we can't explain these differences then we can't really make any accurate inferences about why certain games perform well and why others perform poorly. And that is, afterall, the reason we analyse this data, isn't it? :)

[arcadetown]

So what do you guys think of the data itself? Which games are popular on some of the sites are rather surprising.
Data's great and makes it so much easier to see what's going on out there than visiting all the sites. A cool future enhancement would be 2nd graph showing by title perspective, how many top 10s a game is currently on plus it's min, max, and avg position. Sorted by total # of top 10s it's on so biggest sellers probably at top. For example...

Fish Tycoon is in 6 lists with max of 3, min of 9, and avg 5.5.

[Mouse]

You can parse TryGames "TOP SELLING CASUAL GAMES":
http://www.trygames.com/datafeeds/page=25C/bgcolor=FFFFFF/fontcolor=000000/num_games=25/

[James C. Smith]

I added that TryGames list to my “world map”. The only thing that bothers me is that I can’t find that list anywhere one TryGames.com when I manually browse around. I can only find it with the direct link you provided. I am not looking for that exact same formatting. I am just looking for any page containing a list with those 10 (or 25) games at the top of it. It seems none of TryGames.com promotes “casual” games. Many casual games are featured on TryGames.com but I can’t find a way to navigate to a page that features just casual games.

Don’t get me wrong. I am not saying there should be. I think the industry today focuses too much as “casual” games. You should just promote the games that players want without regard for if they are “casual” or not.

I am just saying that it seems odd to have a separate sales chart for a category that visitors of the site never see.

[James C. Smith]

I improved my parser and added a couple more web sites.

I also added a new way to view the top 10 data. The Daily Top 10 Grid (http://www.game-sales-charts.com/cms/index.php?option=com_dbquery&Itemid=33&task=PrepareQuery&qid=39) lets you pick any one of the 17 ‘top 10’ lists I track and it will show a history of what that site’s ‘top 10’ list looked like every day since the tracking started. So you see the daily history of ArcadeTown.com or any other site you pick.

I also started tracking the new releases on some of the sites. The World Wide What's New (http://www.game-sales-charts.com/cms/index.php?option=com_dbquery&Itemid=33&task=ExecuteQuery&qid=40) ‘chart’ currently shows all the newest games for 4 sites. (more to come). This data is somewhat interesting in this form, but it will be much more interesting when we have been collecting it for a long time and can look back at how many games a site launch last year and how many of them made it into the top x. Or which sites got which games first.

[James C. Smith]

This weekend I went to JavaScript university (powered by Google) and I whipped up some code that should highlight all the games in the top 10 lists is a useful way to help find all instances of any one game. My first attempted worked on IE 6 but not Firefox. My next attempt worked on Firefox but not IE. I finally came up with a version that works on Firefox 1.5, IE6, and IE7.

Before I implement this in all the different charts on game-sales-charts.com, I would appreciate it if a few people could view this test page (http://www.game-sales-charts.com/research/highlighttest.html) and let me know if the highlighting works.

I appreciate the help

http://www.game-sales-charts.com/research/highlighttest.html

[Musenik]

Thanks James,

It works on Safari 2.0.3. I like it!


I look forward to the day when a Mousechief game hits any one of these charts. :-)

[Stu]

Yes, works for me on Firefox 1.5. :)

[Shaz]

Works fine on IE6 for me

[Ryan Clark]

Works in Firefox 1.5 on Mac. Good stuff :)

[Roman Budzowski]

Works in Opera 7.54

Roman

[Arthur]

That's so cool, James!

Working fine in IE6.0.2

[James C. Smith]

Thank you for all the testing feedback.

The new JavaScript highlighting code is now enabled on the World Map (http://www.game-sales-charts.com/cms/index.php?option=com_dbquery&Itemid=33&task=ExecuteQuery&qid=38 ), the Daily Top 10 Grid (http://www.game-sales-charts.com/cms/index.php?option=com_dbquery&Itemid=33&task=PrepareQuery&qid=39) and all the other charts that it is appropriate on.

It is very helpful and makes the chart much easier to interpret. Since the same game will often have slightly different names on different web sites, it is not 100% accurate but it sure helps.

[arcadetown]

Been finding the World Map pretty darn interesting. Previously our "most popular" was driven by pure user access #s which had issues such as outside referrer affects and accounted badly for popular but weaker converters. It's now been flipped to top sellers so our comparison will make a little more sense on your world map now.

Note: Will probably take James's site a day or so to scoop up updated feed.

[James C. Smith]

I haven’t spent much time working on new features of game-sales-charts.com (http://www.game-sales-charts.com/cms/) lately but the site runs itself and keeps the stats up to date. You can always find the top 10 on 17 web site in once glance on the “World Map (http://www.game-sales-charts.com/cms/index.php?option=com_dbquery&Itemid=33&task=ExecuteQuery&qid=38)” or use the “Day By Day (http://www.game-sales-charts.com/cms/index.php?option=com_dbquery&Itemid=33&task=PrepareQuery&qid=39)” chart to see how any one site’s top 10 list looks over time. The “Release Dates (http://www.game-sales-charts.com/cms/index.php?option=com_dbquery&Itemid=33&task=ExecuteQuery&qid=45)” and “What’s New (http://www.game-sales-charts.com/cms/index.php?option=com_dbquery&Itemid=33&task=ExecuteQuery&qid=44)” charts also are getting more interesting now that they have been collecting data for a new months.

A few weeks ago I put a bunch of effort into making a big a.k.a. table to make sure that “MCF Huntsville” is counted as the same game as “MCF: Huntsville”, “MCF – Huntsville”, “Mystery Case Files: Huntsville” and “Huntsville”. Now things like the “World Map Summary (http://www.game-sales-charts.com/cms/index.php?option=com_dbquery&Itemid=33&task=ExecuteQuery&qid=43)” are much more accurate.

You can see a list of all the available "charts" at: by selecting Top 10 Charts (http://www.game-sales-charts.com/cms/index.php?option=com_dbquery&Itemid=33) in the nav bar. There are more than 20 to choose from. Some are based on the older data I have that is from Real Networks only and covers 2001 thought present. Others track "17 web sites" including Yahoo, MSN, Shockwave, and BigFish but only go back to July of this year. For most sites I archive the data for the top 10 list but some sites only report 5 or 6 and other's report more. For TryMedia Casual games I track the top 25 and for Reflexive I track the top 50.

In is fun to use the "day by day" chart to track daily or weekly trends on any one portal. The yellow highlight that track your mouse hover make it easy to see patterns. One interesting one is to look at is Real Arcade in a "week by week" view and see Mystery Case Files: Prime Suspects hang out at #1 and #2 for 7 weeks and then drop off the face of the earth. Usually you see more natural trends of rising quickly and slowly falling such ass the very smooth decline you can currently see in Family Feud™ http://www.game-sales-charts.com/cms/index.php?option=com_dbquery&Itemid=33&task=PrepareQuery&qid=39 (be sure to select "Real" and then "Weekly" to thee the trends I am talking about here. Or pick anything you want and look for other trends.

Anyway, I just wanted to remind everyone that even though I don't post weekly updates, my web site is updating itself hourly and archive the results so that you can query them in 20 different ways.

[Ryan Clark]

I still check out the site now and then. Very useful info, and much appreciated James!

I'll buy you a beer next time we meet :)