IFDB Milestones

Two historical milestones of note:

  1. Congratulations to Stefan Vogt for uploading the 13,000th game to IFDB: The Ghosts of Blackwood Manor

  2. 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:

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In April 2015, roughly halfway between its creation point and now:

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Now:

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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 :slight_smile:

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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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