Collated data from my IGDA presentation

In the interests of transparency, I’ve made available the data from my IGDA talk as a published google spreadsheet.  You can find it here.

To gather the numbers, I used metacritic‘s advanced search restricted to developers (here‘s an example using Torus) and hand-copied the results straight into a spreadsheet.

In some cases, where data wasn’t available on metacritic and there was more than one sku for the game, I used gamerankings.com for a representative value.

To select by ‘unique’ title versus ‘port’ in cases where there was more than one version (both Heroes of the Pacific and Heroes over Europe are good examples) I treated the highest rated version as the ‘unique’ and the other versions as ‘ports’ of that. All versions of Heroes of the Pacific rated 76% so it’s just a function of a sorting algorithm that I took the Xbox version as the original. In the case of Heroes over Europe, the PC version rated 66% compared to 64% on PS3 and 62% on Xbox 360 so that’s treated as the lead platform and the others as ports.

Because of the way metacritic gathers reviews & collates data, there are omissions, so if anyone has additional data, feel free to email it to me or post it in the comments and I’ll update it.

The state of things

Last night at the reboot of the Melbourne IGDA chapter, I gave a short talk on the state of things locally and options for indie developers.  The full presentation is available below, but I thought I’d make the first half – the data on metacritic scores – a bit more accessible.

For more information on the second half – opportunities for independent developers – check out Simon Carless’ and David Edery’s presentations from Film Victoria‘s Digital Distribution Summit:

Simon Carless (from here)

Indie Game Metrics  – October 2009

Western Indie Game Trends

Digital Distribution Summit Video

David Edery

Digital Distribution Summit keynote

A more detailed breakdown of the numbers is below the fold…

Read moreThe state of things

Some upcoming presentations…

In the run up to Freeplay, I’m doing a couple of presentations / talks / general ramblings.

  • I’m going to be talking at the Computer Games Boot Camp taking place at Monash in July.  The program should be up soon, but it’ll likely be a general ramble about my job as a writer with a little bit of workshopping thrown in to keep things interesting.
  • I’ll also be talking at the ICT & Careers Expo on August 1st as part of VITTA’s ICT Week.  Looks like it’ll be an updated version of my talk from last year discussing my winding career path to where I am now – and the importance of playing games if you’re going to make them.
  • Lastly, I’ll be doing a presentation at CAE‘s Writing for the Web class on August 4th about mechanics and expression, games on the web, and ARGs.