ANN: Game-Sales-Charts.com gets some new features

[James C. Smith]

Key Takeaway:

• New sites are tracked including Logler
• Use the World Map to see the current top 10 on many casual games sites.
• Use the World Wide What's New This Week chart to see the new games that came out recently
• See a history any site's new releases in the Release Dates Calendar
• Many other charts show histories or summaries of Top 10 or release dates
• Click any game in any chart to see a summary of that game across many sites

Overview
Game-Sales-Charts.com tracks the downloadable games top 10 lists and the what’s new lists on many casual games portals. Data is updated hourly, archived forever and can be displayed in many different ways. The site lets you quickly see what the current top sellers are across all the major portals all on one screen, or look at a history of any site’s top 10 list over time, or see a summary of which games made the most top 10 appearances in any portal in any given date range.

More Sites Added
In July of 2006 we expanded from track just Real Arcade to tracking 17 web sites including MSN, Yahoo, Shockwave, BigFish and more. At the beginning of 2007 several more sites were added including WildGame (WildTangent), Boonty, and the Logler 'Casual Games Global Top 10' which aggregates all the major top 10 list. We also added tracking of the Reflexive favorites list which shows top converters rather than top sellers. Similarly we added Yahoo’s ‘Top Downloads’ in addition to their ‘Featured Downloads’. Now all these sites are included in the World Map and you can also view a daily, weekly, or monthly history of any of these sites top 10 lists.

I find this especially interesting in the case of Logler. Go to the Day By Day Top 10 Grid, select a ‘Retailer’ of Logler, and set the ‘Frequency’ to Weekly. You will get a history of every ranking ever published by Logler in a format that makes it easy to see trends.

New Releases / Release Dates
Game-Sales-Charts.com not only tracks which games are in the top 10, but for most sites, it also tracks the site’s new releases even if they never make it into the top 10. The brand new World Wide What's New This Week chart lets you see all of the new releases on all the portals in the last 8 days. It lays them out chronologically and by portal in a grid that lets you visuals the events of the week. The new Release Dates Calendar lets you see the complete release date history of any one portal in a calendar like grid. This view makes it easy to see that GameHouse almost always releases 2 or 3 game games on Wednesday and none on other days but Big Fish Release 1 game per day 7 days per week and Reflexive usually releases one game per day on Monday through Wednesday and then 2 games every Thursday. You can also see release date information for all dates and all sites as a list in the Release Dates ‘chart’ or laid out chronologically in the World Wide What's New Weekly chart. But these last two charts are a bit overwhelming.

Drill Down
Another new feature is the ability to click on any game name in any chart and see a list of all the portals that launched that game, what date they launched it on, the best rank the game ever achieved in the sites top 10 list, and how many days it stayed in the site’s top 10. Example: Westward

[TimS]

Very cool stuff.

Glad to see the site continuing to evolve and grow.

-Tim

[cliffski]

indeed, yet another site I'm totally addicted to. Cheers for all your hard work here.

[Tertsi]

I really appreciate it but it's weird how much time you spend on it.

[James C. Smith]

The site mostly runs itself. I just add new SQL queries and other minor features once every 3 months and occasionally fix the screen scraping templates when someone updates their site.

I really do this just to satisfy my own curiosity. For a long time I was obsessed with top 10 lists for hardly any good reason. I kept records in Excel for years until I imported it all into Access to do more robust analysis and then realized I could dump it all into MySQL and whip a web interface so that others could also fiddle around with the query parameters. Now I am slightly less obsessed with top 10 lists and more obsessed with release dates. (again for no real useful reason). I just like to see how many games per week sites release, what days they release them on, who releases a game sooner then everyone else, and how long developer/publisher/portals give themselves an exclusive on their own games. I also find it amusing to see a blip in the charts and say "oh, looks like someone screwed up their release today and didn't get a new game out like they should have." I really don't know why I care.

But I have discovered that many other people habitually check the charts every day and watch the little yellow highlights jump around and form patters and they wander the mouse cursor around. One developer PMed me to say my web site is like crack!

[Bad Sector]

Nice site, a bit complex at the first sight, but seems nice.

I found a "bug". Check this link about Kudos and see that in some cases the date is 1907 :-).

[cliffski]

I've been around a long time.

[arcadetown]

James... the perveyor of crack for devs. I bet you've actually saved time by automating it all compared to all the manual tracking you used to do?

[James C. Smith]

>> I bet you've actually saved time by automating it all compared to all the manual tracking you used to do

I can now spend less time entering data and maintaining the site. But I spend more time "play with the numbers" and looking for patterns now that there is so much more to look at

>> I found a "bug".... in some cases the date is 1907 :-).

The 1907-01-11 date means that the game has already been launched on the site when I started tracking the new releases on that site on 2007-01-11. In other words, it was released some time before 2007-01-11 and I don't know exactly when. So I estimate it was probably 1907-01-11.

I guess it would make more senses to just display “???” rather than 1907. But storing 1907 in the database was a simple hack I did to make the system know that the game was not new without falsely reporting the release date of 2007-01-11.

Anyway, I changed it now do that it doesn’t display dates before 1970 even though I use them internally.

[Omega]

Wow! This looks so much different than the way it first looked. GREAT JOB!

[vjvj]

This site is awesome. Thanks for the update!

[James C. Smith]

I made a few more minor changes to Game-Sales-Charts.com.

The World Map chart shows the current top 10 games on 20 web sites at the same time. This screen has new little "arrow" symbols to indicate a games recent movements. In the tradition of Game-Sales-Charts.com, these arrows are functional and informative but not slick or sexy looking. They are actually greater than and less then signs. For example, "Peggle <<" indicates the Peggle moved up the top 10 list two spots on the last 7 days. "Peggle >" would mean it is down one rank from where it was 7 days ago. Now it is easy to hover over one game and not only see its current position in all the top 10 lists, but also what velocity it has (based on its previous relative position).

If anyone would like to donate some nicer looking graphical arrows it would be appreciated. They would need to be fairly small and show varying amounts of movement. (at last 4)

The Day By Day Top 10 Grid shows a history of how one portal’s top 10 list has changed over time. You can display daily, weekly, or monthly slices of history and highlight any game to see the up and down trends of that game over time on the one portal. What’s new is that this chart now supports paging. With nearly a year of daily data from most of the portals, the chart was becoming unnamable and the java scrip ran very slow. Now you can use the paging to view just one part of the history such as the 30 most recent weeks or the last 20 days. It makes this chart usable again.

I also integrated some historical data about Shockwave that Gabriel was tracking for a while. Now if you run the Day By Day Top 10 Grid for Shockwave you will see lots of data from parts of 2004 and 2005. This same data is used on other historic reports like the Top Games chart. According to this, the top games of 2004 and 2005 on Shockwave were Diner Dash™, Zuma&#174; Deluxe, Insaniquarium, Bejewelled 2, Luxor, Chuzzle™ Deluxe, Tradewinds 2, Jewel Quest&#174;, Cubis 2, and Word Slinger™

[soniCron]

If anyone would like to donate some nicer looking graphical arrows it would be appreciated. They would need to be fairly small and show varying amounts of movement. (at last 4)

Here's my contribution: http://www.solaristudios.com/share/temp/gscarrows.zip

[James C. Smith]

I appreciate the contribution but they don’t really seem to fit. Due to the way the "world Map" is laid out with the first column (on the left) for the #1 game and last column (on the right) for the #10 game, it would be better if the arrows pointed left and right. Left would be the positive (improving) arrow and right is the negative (declining) arrow. I guess making them somewhat on an angle (mostly left but slightly up) could help show this relationship.

[soniCron]

Hey James, does this suit better? http://www.solaristudios.com/share/t...rrows-vert.zip

[soniCron]

And here are some diagonals: http://www.solaristudios.com/share/t...rrows-diag.zip (They look kind of awkward, but they might look better on the page.)

[Yatec Games]

Great work as usual, James. Any idea when the Search feature will work?

[James C. Smith]

Sorry. I know a search feature is sourly needed, and I plan to add one soon, but so far I haven’t even attempted to put one up. Unfortunately the Joomla template I use has a search box in it whether I want one there or not. It is not hookup up to anything and I didn’t put it there intentionally.

If you want to see the detail/history of a specific game, the best way to get there is to run a “top games” report for all time and all retailers sorted alphabetically. Then you can find the game in that list and click on it. It is not simple or perfect but it works.