New features on Game-Sales-Charts.com – Tags and a Game Finder

[James C. Smith]

There are a few new features on www.Game-Sales-Charts.com


Most of the games now have a “core mechanic” and other tags listed for them. The new Tag's Performance chart lets you see which types of games do best on each web site. For example, it can tell you that in 2005, the most popular core mechanic on Real Arcade was match 3 fallowed by chain popper. Or so far, in 2007, the best selling mechanic on Reflexive are hidden object and sim. Or you can see that the most popular themes on Play First.com are restaurant (no surprise) fallowed by fantasy.

Other "charts" let you list all the games with a particular tag, and many charts (like the world map summary and the top games) list the tags of each game.

Some types of tags are more complete than other. Every game that made it in the top 10 on a top 8 portals has a core mechanic tag. But many games are missing theme tags.

We also added a much needed “Find Game” feature to the navigation bar. Don’t use the search field, it only search news stories. Click the “Find Game” link and then enter the partial name of any game to find that game. Click the game name to see the details who know about that game

Much of this was added to facilitate the research I have been doing for a presentation at casual connect next week. I have made lots of summaries and bar charts of this data that I will present at the show. After the show I will post it all online. But you can use the tools to do your own research for any particular game, portal, or time frame.

[Game Producer]

That "Find Game" feature is really nice. Good job (again) on doing this.

[codeminion]

In my opinion the tags are a fantastic idea - the info is very interesting.

What I think would be quite useful is a normalization feature in the tag performance graph. When you sort the tags for example by score, the outcome is heavily skewed by the number of games. You could add a normalization checkbox which would make the sort criteria parameter to be divided by the number of games. In this way one could see the "true" average performance of a tag.

Of course the size of the sample for some tags is very small, so it would be even nicer if you could filer them out.

What do you think?

[cliffski]

I love this site. For the first time I ever I have TWO count them... TWO games on the world map! (Kudos on DFG and Rock legend on Arcade town). Hurrah!

[tentons]

Wow, the tags are really useful for seeing patterns. Very nice!

[Arthur]

If James keeps distracting us with these addicting charts and sorts, maybe the average number of new releases will drop to 11 per week.

Sneaky plan, James!