What Games People Are Talking About: A Pie Chart

You may have seen me talking about EN World's HOT GAMES TRACKER recently. It asks the question: What's the current zeitgeist? What are the hottest games being played right now? This isn't a list of sales figures; it tracks what's currently being talked about using a top secret algorithm. Each game is also conveniently linked to a search for discussion about it right here on EN World, should you want to find out more. The spotlight list changes from time to time. The red and green arrows show a game's general trend over the last 90 days - is it being discussed more or less than it was in the previous 90 days?


This page tracks discussion of over a quarter of a million forum members and approaching a thousand blogs on a selection of major independent RPG discussion forums to create an overall sample from a list including EN World, RPGnet, UK Roleplayers, RPG Geek, the RPG Bloggers network of nearly 300 blogs and the RPG Blog Alliance of nearly 600 blogs.

I've extracted some data from that page and turned it into a couple of nifty pie charts. I've presented them below. A couple of caveats:

1. The pie charts aren't really the the thing. The raw data on the linked page is. If you disagree with the way the data is presented here, I encourage you to look at the actual numbers instead and derive your own conclusions.
2. This is NOT sales data; it's also NOT what games folks are playing at home. It's exactly what it says it is: a large representative sample of the game folks are talking about online. So be careful what conclusions you extrapolate from that.
3. The final D&D Next playtest packet was just released. This gave DDN a huge boost. I looked at this data this time last week (sadly, I didn't think to graph it) and Pathfinder was leading D&D Next by nearly 5%. I'll look again at it in a few weeks to see if D&D Next holds its current lead or drops back down to second place again.
4. The two graphs were compiled a couple of days apart, so the figures changed slightly between them.
5. I was asked yesterday why 13TH AGE was considered D&D in one graph, and not part of "Other D&D" in the second. That was simply because it was the largest item in "Other D&D" so I slipped it out separately as a clear visual point of comparison. It's not meant to imply the "D&D-ness" or "lack-of-D&D-ness" of it or anything else.
6. It's ROLEPLAYING GAMES sites and blogs only. I'm sure if we were looking at tabletop wargaming sites, things like Warhammer 40K would be vastly more popular; as it is, that game refers here to the line of RPGs, not the wargame.
7. This is not a qualitative judgement. Your favourite game is the best.

So, without further ado:

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[Ahnehnois]

The amount of 3e discussion continues to amaze me. Even as someone who still plays 3e, I sometimes wonder what else there is to discuss at this point.

 

[Lindeloef]

[MENTION=17106]Ahnehnois[/MENTION]
You can always discuss the topic of fighters vs spellcasters

@topic
Nice, thanks [MENTION=1]Morrus[/MENTION]. Do the 13% for Shadowrun come from the "RPG of the Moment" or whatever it was called Subforum that once existed? Or was that more than 90 days ago?

 

[Olgar Shiverstone]

I guess TheOneRing is doomed ... it doesn't even crack the 1% list.

 

[Nytmare]

Somebody out there must have done a The Orc and the Pie Chart joke by now, right?

 

[coz]

I wonder if there is some danger in publishing explicit results like this to game the system, for instance, while delighted that the Best RPG ever(TM) (Star Wars D6) is still being talked about, it's percentage seems awful low, could that not inspire someone to go out and mention their favorite system as often as possible online in order to get its' numbers up? For instance: hiding multiple mentions of a particular game in the header or footer of a webpage (or using multiple shill accounts to add many comments to a blog post/forum thread/subreddit with their favorite system within it). I suppose the danger isn't that regular gamers will do this , but that a designer or the marketing departments at a larger publisher seeing that their game doesn't have "enough" mindshare here and going out and directly gaming the results to make their game look much more popular than it is.

Also, a few questions about your sources, do you include reddit, it has many many subreddits for specific games, tho many are fairly dead in terms of activity compared to the main r/rpg sub, if not why? Do you include the GenCon forums (they're independent of any publisher I think and plenty of games are discussed on there), if not, why? And why not include the non-independent forums in the results, I've seen plenty of discussion of other systems on the Paizo boards for instance (and they have a no edition war policy to boot). For instance if your algorithm could be tweaked to look at paizo's forum and exclude mentions of pathfinder or look at wotc's forum and exclude D&D/gamma world, etc?

Finally, regarding your formatting, please use colors that are easier to distinguish from one another in future charts, even after zooming the image it was difficult to tell which green for instance referred to Shadowrun, which to firefly, etc.

 

[haakon1]

Interesting stuff, Morrus.

 

[Morrus]

I wonder if there is some danger in publishing explicit results like this to game the system, for instance, while delighted that the Best RPG ever(TM) (Star Wars D6) is still being talked about, it's percentage seems awful low, could that not inspire someone to go out and mention their favorite system as often as possible online in order to get its' numbers up?

And talking about Star Wars is dangerous? I think that would be a good thing. More people talking about games!

sources, do you include reddit, it has many many subreddits for specific games, tho many are fairly dead in terms of activity compared to the main r/rpg sub, if not why? Do you include the GenCon forums (they're independent of any publisher I think and plenty of games are discussed on there), if not, why? And why not include the non-independent forums in the results, I've seen plenty of discussion of other systems on the Paizo boards for instance (and they have a no edition war policy to boot). For instance if your algorithm could be tweaked to look at paizo's forum and exclude mentions of pathfinder or look at wotc's forum and exclude D&D/gamma world, etc?

The current list of sample sources is on the hot games web page:

http://www.enworld.org/forum/hotgames.php

While more sources will definitely get added as I find ways to do so, once the sample size reaches a certain place the relative positions tend to get reinforced rather than changed. The last blog network I added, for example, hardly budged the percentages despite being 600 blogs. But I'll definitely add any I can; it can only improve the system!

The Gen Con forums are an excellent idea. They hadn't occurred to me! I'll definitely look into that. Social networks are much harder to extract data from - I'm currently working on Twitter hashtags, but I don't know if that will work out.

Reddit is a good idea. I don't know how possible that is, but if it can be done I'll do it!

 

[Morrus]

Hey, whatchaknow! Reddit was really easy to add! It's counting Reddit posts as of right now!

Gen Con's a bit harder. I found the RSS feeds, so it's technically easy, but is there a general RPG type forum there? I might be looking in the wrong place.

 

[coz]

Morrus, the main GenCon forums are here: community.gencon.com/forums They don't have a specific gaming related forum as far as I can tell, but I know in the lead up to the con plenty of games were discussed in the general, events and exhibitors subforums for 2013, as well as the ones dedicated to gaming groups like Kentucky Fried Gamers, I guess it might be harder to locate useful data from them unfortunately. What I meant about it being dangerous was people might see the numbers for their favorite games and then and superfluously mention their favorite a million times, like:

" Star Wars D6 is the greatest game since Star Wars D6, it uses D6s, this Star Wars D6 game, and it takes place in the Star Wars universe, all in all, much fun is to be had with the Star Wars D6 game, run out and buy some used Star Wars D6 books now."

Obviously, this facetious example is over the top, but we are gamers, someone is going to try and game the system, but again, I feel a publisher or marketer is more likely to do that than a regular gamer.

As to other sources, I see RPGGeek is one you use, the top of their "The Hotness" list on the left hand side of the page lists Torchbearer in the top slot, but it doesn't even make any of your lists (though I suppose maybe RPGGeek is the only place it's being discussed maybe?). Have you considered using show notes from popular podcasts as a source of data?

This is very cool stuff, I'm deeply interested in this and the WotC survey and whatever future similar survey you do, so much so that while I've had this account for like 10+ years here this is more or less the first post I've made in like 8 or 9 years.