Thanks, triggercut!
By the way, there’s a couple of errors towards the top of the article.
By contrast, 2016 gives us the closest vote margins may have had so far.
and
so that a first place vote is worth five points, a fourth place vote is worth four points, and so on down to one point for a fifth place vote.
Math is hard. :P
Ack, fixed.
I make math and numbers and words for a living, too.
Lol I was actually referring to Tom’s earlier “math is hard” comments by the by.
That did not surprise me, really, given the relative lack of attention the OW thread here gets. Other than that, I do kind of think it’s a little over-rated. It’s good, sure, and Blizzard polished, but it lacks content in a big way and has tremendous problems in some of its game modes, Coupled with a developer that is moving like molasses unless they can attach a loot box to content.
I didn’t even consider putting Overwatch on my list since I think the game has been mangled from a balance perspective since launch, to the point where I stopped playing it altogether and ultimately uninstalled it after the most recent patch didn’t fix anything.
High level team comps in Overwatch are basically the same thing over and over again, and if you’re not playing one of the best characters you are holding your team back. They can’t seem to figure out how to keep more than the same 7-8 characters in the meta, yet can’t help but keep adding more.
Heck, they have only added two in nine months! The first effectively broke the game, becoming a must pick that made one of the other healers completely redundant, and the other is pretty much completely useless due to gimped kit. Then they sit around for months with no changes.
So I thought it might be interesting to do some very (very) low-level statistical analysis of the games we all loved this past year. I didn’t weight the data based on how many people listed a game, I purely looked at what games were mentioned. I would consider Qt3 a PC-centric, strategy-in-some-form focused community so I thought I would look at what platform the games came from, what genre they belonged to, and when they were released. Caveats up front, Genre was the most difficult category to assign as that can be so broad it becomes meaningless or so specific that pretty much every game can be its own genre. I pretty much stuck to whatever the developer described it as or whatever Steam/Wikipedia tagged it as. In the end this is probably the least interesting set of data. Also unsurprisingly Multiplatform ended up with the largest share of games but I think it would have been interesting to see what was the platform of choice in these games (I’m betting PC still wins out). Finally, since I tend to suffer from recency bias I was curious to see how more older (relatively speaking) games fared against newer ones. While this obviously cannot prove or disprove any recency bias I thought it was pretty surprising that the highest percentage of games people loved this year came out in the first quarter.
Ha! Tom’s not the one to blame for the faulty math there, though…;)
So another math error, sorry Chris. If Doom and Witcher tied for #1, then OTC is #3, not #2… XCom is #4, not #3… etc.
I thought they were just being clever in order to include 6 games instead of a more traditional 5.
In this case, when a game comes out earlier in the year, it increases the likelihood that more of us have played it since it’s been out for a while and likely gotten a price reduction as well.
Things go to 6 around here.
These are the games ya’ll voted for?
I dont even know who you people are any more :)
That one you can blame on Tom. ;) He put in the numbers. I originally didn’t number them for that reason. They do make it easier to read however. If it bothers you, I have suggestions, but none are fit to say in mixed company.
Yep. Basically there was a clump of games really close to the top, and then a drop-off. It didn’t make sense not to include Stardew Valley.
Guess how those got there.
-Tom, official Qt3 editer
Thanks for putting this together, it’s a fine list. I like all these games except for XCOM2 which I’ve not played, so must be terrible.
I feel bad that Stephen’s Sausage Roll didn’t get a single vote, it’s an astonishing game that seems to have been unfairly overshadowed by aggressively average stuff like The Witness.
Nice to see Offworld do so well in the rankings… Qt3 is a nice alternate universe where OTC was a huge hit!
Thanks for putting in all the work and effort on this @triggercut - it was really fun to follow along with and the resulting front page piece was outstanding and very enjoyable to read.
I’m surprised given how many times I saw it listed not to see Warhammer on the final list, but on the other hand every game on the final list is a really, really good game that I also very much enjoyed so it must have worked out!
EDIT - I forgot to mention, a special Thank You for going with 6 winners and a shared 1st place instead of bumping the 5th place item off the list! I was really hoping that’s how it would go when I read the opening paragraph.
This is probably the biggest thing, when you look at quarters. Those are games which have had time to gain some of us late adopters. Then there is the Q4 recency/ Christmas rush which always gets a few big holiday hits (but the lack of time for price reductions/ sales means it lags Q1 and 2). That Q3 is the lowest is what I would have guessed. No major holiday releases, not the new hotness everyone has been playing (see: Tyranny), and no real sales yet keeping it from growing beyond early adopters.
