The games are placed in the chart with horizontal axis showing the IFComp score and vertical axis showing the IFDB score. Hovering the mouse over the dot displays the title. The blue diagonal line is the trendline. If the dot is above the trendline, it means it has been ranked higher in IFDB than in IFComp (in relation to other games in the same comp). Conversely if the dot is below the trendline the game did better in the comp than in IFDB. The distance from the line tells how big the disrepancy is.

Only games with at least 5 votes in IFDB are counted. That includes everything from 2008 on. Older bottom-tier games tend to have fewer votes. The only disqualified highly-ranked game is A New Life with only 4 votes which tied for second place in 2005.

(The charts might not show up if you're reading this from the RSS feed or Planet IF.)

If we look at how IFComp winners are rated in IFDB compared to games released the same year we notice that the best games aren't always found from the competition. In fact based on IFDB ratings the comp winner is the best-rated game of the year in only two cases, and more than half the time the comp winner isn't even the best rated IFComp game in IFDB.

The XYZZY award for the best game of the year goes to an IFComp winner roughly one third of the time, and one third of the time it isn't even nominated. Only Lost Pig in 2007 hit the jackpot (IFComp winner, highest rated game of the year, XYZZY award).

In the table below the first number column is the ranking among the competition games and the second is the ranking among all games that year. The last column shows if the game was nominated or won the XYZZY award for best game. For example in 1996 The Meteor, The Stone And A Long Glass Of Sherbet won the comp, was nominated for XYZZY and in IFDB is rated the 5th best comp game and the 7th best game of 1996.

(Data retrieved 2013-11-21.)

Here are the "best of"s of each year. The number in the "IFDB best of comp" column is that game's actual placing in IFComp that year.

(Blue Lacuna is listed as a 2008 game in IFDB, but it was eligible for XYZZYs in 2009. If you count Blue Lacuna as a 2009 game then Violet is the highest rated in 2008.)

What's obvious here is that people have different criteria for rating games in IFComp and IFDB. Lists and Lists, which teaches how to program in Scheme, is technically impressive but hardly something that people would want to win the IFComp.

There's also an inherent bias with this kind of scoring where you obviously need to play the game before you can rank it. When you're participating in the IFComp as a judge you often play the games without knowing anything about them beforehand, or play and rate them all even if you do. Outside the comp you're likely to not even pick up a genre that doesn't interest you; if roguelikes are not your thing you're unlikely to play and rate Kerkerkruip.

Moral of the story? Firstly, even if your game doesn't rank well in IFComp it might still be highly appreciated in other contexts or as time passes. Secondly, releasing in IFComp is not (and has never been) required for a good game to get the appreciation it deserves.

And finally here are the best IFComp games ever according to IFDB.

When we talk about development systems in IFDB, it's good to remember that some systems have better coverage than others. Parallel communities like Quest (201 games in its own site, 26 in IFDB), non-parser systems and the AIF crowd are underrepresented. Another factor that skews statistics is that game listings tend to display the system in which the game is available now—for example Scott Adams adventures are listed as Inform 6 games because the downloads are for the Inform ports.

In the all-time popularity chart Inform 6 is the clear leader: a quarter of all games have been made with it. Inform 6 and 7 together cover more than a third of all games.

The chart for current (2010-2012) systems is a bit different. Inform 7 has risen to dominate the field with the market share of two thirds. Inform 6 has dropped significantly and all other systems are in the margins. Does this mean that the field has become less diverse or that IFDB has not kept up with new systems?

The Commercial Era

I've split the statistics in two eras: the commercial era (before 1994) and the hobbyist era (from 1994 on). 1994 marks the beginning of a renaissance—IF died commercially but at the same time the publication of Inform practically created the modern hobbyist scene.

Many of the commercial era games don't have the system marked down or have a suspicious "none" (were they written directly into machine code?) or a vague "custom". The most popular system was Eamon, which was exclusively used to create stories in the Eamon game world. The Quill was almost as popular, although the Wikipedia article says there were more than 450 commercial The Quill games (203 listed in IFDB) which would make it more popular than Eamon.

The large number of Inform 6 games is because of ports, as mentioned above.

Looking at the numbers by year, Eamon reaches quickly its highest point in mid-80s and declines from there more or less steadily. The Quill and AGT have a more steady growth all the way to the 90s. As you might imagine, BASICs popularity drops quickly after dedicated development systems become available.

Here's the same chart but with percentages from the total number of games: the vertical thickness of the area denotes more games in relation to other systems, the full height being 100%. The data in this chart goes up to 1998 so that we see how all the "old" systems drop practically to zero in popularity by then.

The Hobbyist Era

In the mid-90s the playfield changes completely. TADS, Inform, ADRIFT and other systems are released and especially Inform gains popularity.

Inform's domination is apparent in the percentual view. TADS 2 has steady popularity until the turn of the millennium when it begins a downward slope. TADS 3 gains a small foothold but never grows very much. Hugo has seen a small resurrection lately, mostly thanks to a small but active group.

Inform

After Inform 6 was released, it rose to cover almost half of all published games in only two years. The same happened when Inform 7 was released: in a few years it took the lead, eating mostly Inform 6's popularity.

This year only a handful of Inform 6 games have been released and Inform is at almost 70%.

The question is: has Inform 7 attracted people into IF who would otherwise not have done so, or would people who now use Inform 7 started to use something else if it had never been released? Surely there are people in both groups, but the graph above suggests that Inform 7 is eating away the Inform 6 userbase, not others. The "everything else" line does not seem to have any correlation with the Inform 7 line.

TADS

TADS 2 was at its height in 1999 when 27% of all games were written using it. Another peak was in 2002 after TADS 3 was released, but since then their popularity has been on a steady downward curve.

Again, the statistics show no correlation between Inform and TADS. Peaks in Inform's popularity do not show anywhere in the TADS statistics. (You could argue that I7 might have cut short TADS 3's slow climb between 2004 and 2008, but I very much doubt it.)

A few months back Mike Roberts, the curator of IFDB, together with Andrew Plotkin released the full IFDB database dump. This is certainly a great deed, since the IFDB is the most complete source of information about IF to date and there's always a risk of data loss if the database is behind only one person. The database is an invaluable resource to (future) historians, researchers and people who love statistics.

And I do love statistics.

I've pulled a lot of interesting graphs from the database and will present them in a series of blog posts, of which this is the first one. We'll start slow by looking at the games' publishing dates and progress later to searching for more and more specific correlations.

It's worth noting that while IFDB has a lot of information, it's by no means comprehensive or 100% accurate. Therefore all this data reflects IFDB contents rather than the real world. How much the truth differs from the available data is open to discussion.

Click on the images to see the full data set, an interactive chart and chart display options. All available statistics can be seen collected on this page. More graphs are added as the series progresses.

You can also gladly suggest in the comments what kind of data you'd like to see analyzed.

Publishing date by year

There are 4173 games in the database, of which 4027 have a known publishing date. The graph for total number of games over time looks like this:

More informative is the number of games published each year:

You can see the "golden age" from mid-80s to early 90s, a small dip, and a steep rise starting soon after. I have no explanation for why there were so many releases in 2001–2003. In 2001 there were twice as many releases as in 2009.

In recent years the number of releases has varied between 115 (in 2009) and 173 (in 2010). There's no discernible trend to either direction and there's not enough data to make any predictions about the future. 2012 is not included in the graph but at the end of October there were 164 releases which is already more than in 2011 (153 releases).

Publishing month

This (and the next graph) is wildly inaccurate since about 70% of games have only the publishing year listed, not the exact date (which is why January 1st is excluded). Still, you see what you'd expect: IFComp games are released in October so it has the most releases and November is not a good time to release because the competition draws all the attention.

Publishing weekday

Games are released most often on Sunday and least often on Friday. Shouldn't be a surprise that weekends are the most common release days as most games are hobbyist efforts.

Next time we'll look at development system popularity.