Two historical milestones of note:
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Congratulations to Stefan Vogt for uploading the 13,000th game to IFDB: The Ghosts of Blackwood Manor
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Fewer than 10 reviews are needed to reach an average of 1 review per game on IFDB. Amazing!
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Wow, that’s pretty amazing!
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I looked through the stats on the front page on the Internet Archive.
In its first capture in 2007 soon after its creation:
In April 2015, roughly halfway between its creation point and now:
Now:
At first I thought that the speed of game creation in the second half had kept about the same pace or slower than in the first half, but then I realized that I needed to subtract the games from the ‘initial dump’. So about 4300 games were added as listings in the first ‘half’ and about 5700 in the second ‘half’.
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Impressive!
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I believe that DeusIrae’s review of Honk was the one that officially brought the ratio of reviews to games to 1:1 for the first time. Since the number of games is a moving target, it is possible that it will happen more than once.
Special credit to mathbrush, who is responsible for almost a quarter (!) of all reviews on IFDB. Of course, everyone who’s ever posted a review helped to get to this point.
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Oh, that’s a fun coincidence! But yes, we’re all standing on the shoulders of giants, except there’s just one giant and it’s @mathbrush 
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The number of games on IFDB has just passed 14,000, meaning that about 1,000 new games were added in the last year.
The ratio of ratings (not reviews) to games is about 50 ratings shy of 4 to 1. That’s down a bit from what’s seen in the “now” snapshot by mathbrush from last year, when the total count of ratings was about 100 over that mark. Statistically speaking, it’s still pretty much the same.
On the other hand, the ratio of reviews to games is about 1.05 to 1, a 5% increase from this time last year.
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This made me look to see what kind of games were added over the last year. Somehow I got mixed up and looked at 2023 instead, but I already wrote this, so I’ll roll with it.
I searched for games published in 2023 with no reviews, getting this list
It was an interesting mix. There are some games in languages not common on IFDB (like Russian and Chinese), a lot of BASIC games by DBT (who I recently wrote about in a different review and I thought had stopped writing years ago), a lot of Fallen London exceptional stories (which I’m working through), some jam games, and several games uploaded by the author.
I was surprised to see Mask of the Rose had no ratings! I think it got handed out as a reward for a few comps, so someone’s probably played it.
Now I’m going to look at 2024. Now there are 243 games (out of roughly 700) with no ratings at all. Here is that list.
I set it to ‘random order’ as well and out of 6 entries, 5 were Neo-interactive jam games and the last was a French competition game. Looking lower on the list, I see more Exceptional Stories from failbetter, some other non-English comp games (like Helikoj, a Spanish game I skipped due to content warnings), and some games that are unfinished (like Romance the Backrooms).
Back to 2023, among games with ratings but no reviews, the highest rated are mostly commercial games like Hosted Games, seen here.
In 2024, most were independently released itch games and a few seedcomp games, found here.
Looking at past years, it seems like a general pattern is that no-rating games are often non-English and no-review high-rated games are often commercial releases or other non-comp but high-quality releases.
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Was this meant to be games with no reviews, or no ratings? Some of them have rating-less reviews.
I think I got it from you as a Spring Thing prize, but I have such a backlog of Steam games that I haven’t gotten to it yet! Someday, though…
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You’re right, that search is for games with no ratings at all (but could include reviews), I just wrote wrong.
I would play Mask of the Rose myself but I don’t play many VNs myself.
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Unless I’ve miscounted, the review by @mathbrush for Seascape Paradiso is the 15,000th review on IFDB.
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Some fun facts:
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The first year in which at least one game was registered as played on every single day in the year was 2021.
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The second year in which that happened was 2024 – a leap year.
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The year with the highest average number of games registered as played per day was 2023 at 15.7.
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The year with the second-highest average number of games registered as played per day was 2024 at 14.7.
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The day on which the most games were registered as played was February 18, 2018, on which a single user registered 319 played games.
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The 16,000th review on IFDB was by Kinetic Mouse Car for The Witch Girls.
The 15,000th game entry should be made pretty soon.
There are currently 1.0675 reviews per entry – an increase over the last milestone.
Ratings per entry has edged down to 3.95 – about 700 ratings short of 4 per game.
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The 15,000th listing on IFDB has been added: Saturnine by John Matthieu, a commercial ChoiceScript game.
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