I was looking into playing Emily Short’s Bee on Varytale, and I noticed it said it had been played 450,000 times.
Now, I know that should include replays and bot views, but those are very high numbers. I worked a lot on math Wikipedia, and even big articles like Calculus only get around 600,000 views a year.
I’d like to ask if this is accurate, but I know it’s hard to verify. So my real questionis, how much traffic have other measurable games gotten? How many times has Hadean Lands been purchased, Creatures Such As We been downloaded, or Howling Dogs been played?
I always imagined the IF crowd to have a few tens of thousands in the US and twice that much in the rest of the world, concentrated in English speaking countries. That’s why I found these numbers surprising, since I doubt that more than 10% of players have played any given game.
I think authors have access to more analytics; I’d be curious to know how many people started playing early vignettes vs. how many people got to an ending.
Depending on how Varytale counts its plays, it could be that anyone opening the page counts (including even search engines potentially), even if they don’t actually do anything, or it may be that they count it after the player has interacted at least once. At one stage someone was embedding Parchment in an iframe on their website which meant that their story counted for half of every all stories played, but only a small fraction would’ve actually used it. Emily may be able to provide some more details, but I’d assume that that play count is overly high.
I think Varytale is counting each individual storylet view, so if someone’s playthrough of Bee included 50 storylets, that one reading would account for 50 views. Add that some people have played more than once, and you get a number of players much closer to your expectations. I’m not dead certain of this, but that’s how I’ve interpreted it.
I don’t have time at the moment to go poking around the analytics and collating ending data, I’m afraid, though if I remember at a time of leisure I’ll give it a shot.
The ADRIFT website has a counter for downloads with the top game at 4973 (double that of the game in the second place) but I don’t know how accurate an indication that gives of the games as they can also be played online or downloaded from other sites.
If you go to an author’s starting page on philome.la, you can see how many times their games have been played. But (unless I’m missing something), philome.la doesn’t have any kind of discovery system, so it’s difficult to find a cross-section.
After a little brief Googling, the most popular game I found at philome.la was baphomeme’s QUEER TRANS MENTALLY ILL POWER FANTASY, with 52,357 plays. But I suspect more popular games are out there.
