Users may have noticed that, as of lately, some graphics are showing some pretty odd results, with certain games shooting high up on the chart or some other games disappearing.

Contrary to popular belief, this is not a sign of the apocalypse, that the website or its database has been fucked up beyond recognition, or (and this is my favorite) that this is some kind of conspiracy to make a game “popular”/”unpopular” artificially. Instead, this behavior is due to the incorrect reading of (more or less) one day’s worth of data. It’s not an ongoing error; it’s something that happened once and now is already back to normal.

The problem is, with the way I render the graphics - doing an evened-out 7-day average plot, to dilute the effect of weekends - having invalid data for a single date is enough to make the plot lines pretty weird for almost half a month. So that’s what you’re seeing right now; given time, things will look like they looked before, with game averages back to their original positions.

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Major Nelson - of the Xbox Team - has posted a few lists with the most popular games for Live, the online system used on the Microsoft consoles. The list is ranked by number of unique users (or sales, in the case of Live Arcade titles) and covers the entire year of 2007. No raw numbers are listed, but it’s still interesting.

Since a few visitors have noticed Call of Duty 4 hasn’t shown up on the site’s graphs, here’s a small update on the situation.

Just to make it clear, the game is indeed doing very well online. If you check the ServerSpy or Game-monitor statistics, you’ll see it’s doing well enough to put it quite strongly at the spot of 3rd most played online PC FPS.

The reason it’s not showing on this website’s graphics is because GameSpy stats - which is the source I use for my data - isn’t covering it yet. They probably still have to code the server query logic into their system, and hopefully they will have it soon. So unfortunately the post-release data is lost, but it’s a sure bet the game is having a big impact.

And before someone points how I should switch to using some other data source instead, let me remind you that none of these FPS statistics out there is perfect. Each have its own little perks and little issues with specific games. It just so happens now that GameSpy had a major issue with CoD 4, but the sanest thing to do is to expect it to recover soon. Just switching the data source to another website would invalidate any possible comparison to the data already gathered, requiring a database reset, so it’s something I’d like to avoid.

Update: it’s working now, as CoD4 is being listed on GameSpy stats. Check the comments for more information.

Three months after the release of id Software and Splash Damage’s Enemy Territory:Quake Wars, how well is it doing online?

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Slightly more noisy this year, here’s the new special graph, in commemoration of 3 years of data gathering and graph generation. Only the most major titles are drawn.

I have finally changed the way some of the graphics are generated on the website: now, certain mods are treated as full games and listed on the games graphics.

This move was needed because many full-fledged games based on the HL2 engine - games such as TF2, Counter-Strike:Source, Day of Defeat:Source, The Ship, Dark Messiah of Might & Magic, among others - are listed as HL2 mods. Technically, they might be mods after all, but since they’re sold as separate titles - with different SKUs and all - it makes sense to have them listed separately.

However, I went ahead and took the separation a bit further. Some original HL1 mods - Counter-Strike, Day of Defeat and Team Fortress Classic - are also separate now. This one is a bit controversial, as they are HL1 mods, and one can, technically, get them installed without the need to buy anything other than the original HL1 game. However, they’re also sold separately and generally considered to be very different games with separate communities and all. They also take a huge chunk of the online player base. So, as such, they are now treated as full games.

Due to this change, it’s now finally possible to see what kind of impact a few recent releases had on the online player base, specially comparing TF2 to the rest of the games. For example, it’s possible to see TF2 managed to get to the 4th place in online popularity quite fast, but now has dropped to 6th. I’ll have some more in-depth posts about this game and others in the future, as soon as December is over.

Finally, I will probably tweak these graphics - and what should and shouldn’t be considered a full game - a bit further in the future. The data remains the same - all mod-to-game “upgrading” is done when the graphics are rendered, not when the data is read - so I can always go back and undo anything.

The HL2 and HL1 mods are still listed on their original game pages, but that will probably change soon too.

In addition to other Half-life 2: Episode 2 statistics (released a few weeks ago), Valve now has updated their Game and Player Statistics page and added some Team Fortress 2 Gameplay Stats with some cool information such as class, weapon and map breakdown in a number of different parameters. There’s some really, really awesome information there.

As a follow-up, other interesting discussions about the statistics are taking place over at Rock, Paper, Shotgun and at ShackNews.

Valve - developers of games Half-Life, Counter-Strike and Team Fortress, among others - have recently updated their game statistics page. They added some very nifty gameplay statistics for Half-Life:Episode 2 and, more recently, they’ve also started a new edition of their player hardware survey which automatically gathers hardware and software data from Steam users through the globe.

The big news is that this version of the survey also detects whether the user has some specific applications installed - on my case, it successfully detected FireFox, OpenOffice, and Zone Alarm. Data from those specific results are not listed on the survey results page yet, though. Personally, being both a FireFox and an OpenOffice zealot, I was pretty happy to see something like this popping up there.

Finally, Tom at The Steam Review has some additional discussion about it.

Update: awesomely-named RockPaperShotgun.com also has an analysis of some of the preliminary results of the new survey.

If this October’s (legendary) release of TF2 (see how well it’s doing here) and ET:QW (follow it here) didn’t drain all the productivity you might have left, feel free to make use of your stash of sick days at work as the demo for UT3 has just been released (it’ll soon show up here too).

Lastly, just as a quick note: in the future I’ll arbitrarily separate some specific mod data from their specific game data, so games like TF2 and CS:S won’t show up as being mods of HL2 (they’re sold as separate SKUs after all). I’ll also have to remake the graphic generating algorithm to work around the server script execution time limit - the reason why the mods page isn’t getting updated. No data is lost, though, as gathering them is a separate process that’s still doing fine.

The Team Fortress 2 beta - available to those that preordered Valve’s Orange Box of games through Steam - started a week ago, even if slightly later than expected. How well did it do online?

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