I know plenty of people here are interested in broadening the community, so I took a look at the games that seem to attract the most consistent attention on IFDB.
These results are using IFDB data as of June 1st, 2026. The two metrics are:
wks_ply – the number of calendar weeks in which the game was played at least once during the period in question.
plys – the number of registered plays during the period in question.
As with past stats, “registered plays” record when either a) someone rated and/or reviewed the game on a given date, or b) someone with a public playlist checked “I’ve played it” on a given date. If someone has done both of those things, the earlier event is the one counted.
The following charts show the top 15 games over three-year spans in the “IFDB era,” excluding partial years (i.e. 2007 and 2026). Results near the top of the chart are remarkably consistent.
Here’s the same information only excluding any registered plays from the first week of IFDB membership; the idea is that this will leave out plays of games that took place before signing up, which are more likely to have happened before joining the greater online community.
It’s not perfect data, but it suggests where players are most likely to go after first getting into IF. There are some differences, but many of the same games still appear at high frequency, suggesting that not just first games but the first several games tend to be focused on these “standards.”
If we focus on plays registered in just the first week of membership, presumably we’re seeing games that either a) had been played prior to joining IFDB or b) were among the very first picks for those who have newly joined. By my reading, these would be the “gateway” titles of the era, i.e. those most responsible for motivating people to join IFDB, presumably in a search for more of what they liked in their initial experiences.
Once again, there is remarkable consistency at the top of the charts.
So… the question in my mind is: How do we help newcomers, who have been attracted to the medium by a relatively small handful of titles, find more IF that keeps them interested in experiencing more IF?
I don’t think this is the right interpretation of the data. People finding the medium of IF are most likely coming to it via more mainstream titles: Choice of Games, Fallen London, Disco Elysium. People play 9:05 because it gets recommended to them on a forum like this one as a quick case study in the relationship between player and narrator, not because it’s better-known than Choice of Games’s best-sellers—it’s just that forums like this one are how people get sent to IFDB specifically.
If we’re talking “IF” in the broadest sense of the word, COG/HG’s popular stuff often gets hundreds to thousands of plays and seems to be a starting point for new to IF quite often. Then you have the behemoths like “choices” which are king of the microtransactions and pushed at you regularly in the app stores. Speaking from COG’s side, a lot of users are unlikely to use IFDB. I’d say that number would be exponentially lower for the “choices type” app crowds. Then you have some of the steam games like inkle’s stuff or fallen london which is probably a bit more likely to transfer over here. But yeah, the IF scene can be pretty fragmented unfortunately, and the commercial ones tend to be easier to stumble on.
That may be the case, but I have to work with the data available, which is from IFDB. It’s the only public data that I’m aware of. By necessity, that means I’m talking about “newcomers” to the IFTF’s portion of the world of IF.
I do find it surprising that such a small handful of titles has been at the top of these charts so consistently over time, but the data is quite clear that part of the reason that they are played so consistently is that these are the highest-frequency starting points. Looking at the subset of first games registered as played, the list of Photopia, Anchorhead, 9:05Lost Pig, Counterfeit Monkey, Violet, Shade, Aisle, Spider and Web, and Galatea makes up almost 20%! (883 out of 4644, per Jun 01 data)
Yes, ~80% of users with at least one registered play have a different game as their first registered play, but it’s pretty amazing that this ~0.5% (10 out of 1827 unique titles seen) account for such a sizable fraction of first registered plays. They seem to be highly correlated with incoming players.
At the end of the day, I suppose it’s not surprising that popular games are popular. What surprised me was how steadily they’ve been popular over a span of 15 years.
I don’t think that’s what this data is measuring, though. People don’t play 9:05 because it’s a popular introduction to the world of IF; people play 9:05 because they’re already on this forum (or IFMUD or another related community), someone brings it up as a lesson in design, and since it’s only like five minutes long they take a look at it. That may be their introduction to IFDB specifically, but I don’t think they’d come across it unless they were already invested in the IFTF’s part of the IF world—it’s just not something that has a lot of recognition in the wider world.
If we want to study the behavior of newcomers, I don’t think we’ll get that data from registered IFDB users. Newcomers to the community usually aren’t making accounts there and tracking what they play; they’re trying out some games, then either getting more invested, or moving on. The more relevant number would be plays/clickthroughs from non-registered users. (Which I’m pretty sure can be recorded without violating anyone’s privacy rights; knowing which files are seeing the most downloads is important for the IFTF to know in order to provide the service, and it’s not tracking any individual’s behavior.)
It’s interesting that the data is the same, but I would agree that (although they may be the only available public data!) this doesn’t show games played as such – just games reported as played to IFDB.
Splitting hairs? Perhaps!
As an example of why this particular hair being split matters, though A Death in Hyperspace still receives 20-60 plays per week on itch.io two years after its release in 2024, and only 16 members of IFDB have registered plays of it.
Still, it’s interesting data. And actually doesn’t surprise me. Even outside of this forum, Counterfeit Monkey, Spider and Web, Anchorhead, Aisle, and Galatea are well-loved games that are also well-known (inasmuch as any IF is well-known), and as such they are referenced in places like Wikipedia and academic/informational books on the topic.
Which is to say I disagree slightly with both of you.
I think the bigger question is an interesting one, anyway:
My engagement with the writing community is largely outside of this forum, and my usual approach is to encourage people who try a piece of IF and find it interesting to check out game jams on itch and the established comps like IFComp, IntroComp, Spring Thing, and Ectocomp.
The games you mention seem to have a very high overlap with the set of games that are preloaded (or should I say have preloaded links) in Frotz. I wonder, is that cause or effect?
Yeah, my most-played game according to IFDB is actually one of my least-played games on Itch, and given that the scale of Itch plays dwarfs IFDB (my top IFDB game has 38 registered plays, my top Itch game >5000), that probably makes it one of my least played games full stop, even accounting for the fact that some people have played it on the IF Archive instead.
Agreed. (It was studying that question in general that led me to the unexpected discovery above.) And it’s probably tautological to say that even if it’s not this particular set of games, it will always have been a small handful of games that acted as any one person’s introduction to IF.
I’d love to have better and more complete data! As it must be, this is an exercise in looking through the glass darkly via the closest information we have to what’s desired, in this case what IFDB members register as having played.
Although it’s not ideal, I’d trust the registered play data over clicks of “play online” and/or “download” buttons on IFDB because the former confirms actual completion of the game. It would be great to have the latter for comparison, though. (I’m curious: Does the itch.io “plays” metric just mean people clicked “run game”? If so, that would seem comparable in essence to a hypothetical measure of “play online” clicks on IFDB.)
I compiled some data in an effort to see how well the “first several plays” hypothesis holds up. By the 10th game played, the prevalence of this 10-game subset has dropped off a bit, though it’s still quite notable:
It’s interesting that the percentage is actually higher for 2nd and 3rd than 1st. This isn’t a longitudinal study tracking individual choices in a row, though – it’s mass data.
By comparison, when taking into account all registered plays by anyone ever, this subset accounts for 6048 out of 98039 (6%). Limited to just the first ten registered plays, they make up 3854 out of 22176 (17%). Limited to the first five registered plays, they make up 2823 out of 14424 (20%).
A question: In many older games, the “about” information had information about how to find the r*if newsgroups and the precursor to the current IF archive. Do authors still do that sort of thing?
Might doing the modern equivalent (i.e. pointing to IFDB and intfiction.org) help to drive more players “out there” toward the IFTF’s part of the internet?
That’s a fair point! I guess I’ve always assumed that the people who come from outside the IFTF-sphere have their own communities and aren’t necessarily looking to join ours, but certainly it wouldn’t hurt.
