I swear I’ve done this before but can’t find the sheet anywhere.
I’ve made a google sheet with only the IFDB ratings of the last 5 years included:
Games made in the last 5 years are highlighted in green. Columns include number of ratings, average rating, and Bayesian rating (here found by adding the average number of average ratings to every game, so that games with 1 5-star ratings are well below games with 100 4 star ratings).
It’s interesting how popularity breeds popularity: the games that have gotten the most ratings on ifdb in the last 5 years are generally the games that already had the most ratings, but some newer-comers are rising up past the old-timers.
Edit: 3 games with formatting that broke the system were deleted (sorry @Joey, ‘Calm’ had to go) and I deleted all games that had at least one review in the last 5 years but no numerical rating (about 800 games)
Two pleasant surprises from that last table were @Afterward 's Visit Skuga Lake placing so high despite not being released in a competition (the original was part of a larger game in a competition) and, on a personal note, one of my favorite games of all time which I thought was kind of under-played/underrated, @HanonO 's Cannery Vale placing so high.
It just displays as “calm” after breaking the formatting. The other ones that break formatting are
"I am inventing all this and it is about to disappear, but it does not” and “So, About Last Night…”
I was wrong, it was a longer game with quotations around the word “calm”. I interpreted it as yours because when it broke formatting it just displayed as ‘Calm’. I updated my last post to mention it now!
Okay, one more: I looked up which games had the highest average number of ratings per year, not counting their first year of publication and not counting games made before IFDB was open in July 31, 2007: notfirstyearcounts - Google Sheets
Here are the top 50 games with the most ‘staying power’:
Summary
Name
Publication date
Ratings after 1 year
avg rating
years since publication
average number of ratings per year
Lost Pig
2007-09-30 0:00:00
475
4.4602
19
25
Violet
2008-10-01 0:00:00
363
4.3683
18
20.16666667
Counterfeit Monkey
2012-12-30 1:00:00
260
4.8231
14
18.57142857
Superluminal Vagrant Twin
2016-03-26 1:00:00
121
4.5983
10
12.1
Suveh Nux
2007-11-19 1:00:00
212
4.274
19
11.15789474
The Wizard Sniffer
2017-10-01 1:00:00
100
4.61
9
11.11111111
Birdland
2015-10-01 1:00:00
120
4.4435
11
10.90909091
Toby’s Nose
2015-04-04 1:00:00
118
4.4957
11
10.72727273
Eat Me
2017-10-01 1:00:00
92
4.6163
9
10.22222222
my father’s long, long legs
2013-08-28 1:00:00
128
3.9531
13
9.846153846
The Impossible Bottle
2020-10-01 1:00:00
49
4.449
6
8.166666667
Gun Mute
2008-01-01 0:00:00
144
4.0839
18
8
According to Cain
2022-09-28 1:00:00
32
4.3704
4
8
80 DAYS
2014-07-31 1:00:00
95
4.7021
12
7.916666667
16 Ways to Kill a Vampire at McDonalds
2016-10-01 1:00:00
78
4.4079
10
7.8
With Those We Love Alive
2014-10-01 1:00:00
92
4.3409
12
7.666666667
howling dogs
2012-10-01 1:00:00
103
3.9899
14
7.357142857
And Then You Come to a House Not Unlike the Previous One
This is really interesting! Curiously, how come all publiction dates are either 0:00:00 or 1:00:00? I’m not even really sure what that is meant to mean, because it implies all games were released at midnight or 1AM…
I suspect the database is recording the time, but since no time is provided, it defaults to midnight on that date…and then, some games are uploaded during daylight savings time, and others aren’t.
If you add a single apostrophe at the beginning, it acts as an escape character. So entering '9:05 into the box will result in 9:05 being shown as and treated like text, left-justified.