data visualization

This is your Gaming on Data: League of Legends vs Dota Trends

Search Trends of Google

Insight on what’s popular

But only relative

The popularity of the Action Real Time Strategy (ARTS) or MOBA games have shifted around between two main contenders ever since the genre took off with DotA (Defense of the Ancients) in 2004–2005 as the popular Warcraft 3 mod and picked up as standalone games due to their popularity. Now there are only two contenders for the most popular ARTS/MOBA games, League of Legends and DotA 2.

What I originally set out was to see how popular these two franchises are because in the US and much of the gaming communities that I frequent, there is a very strong influence of League of Legends and Riot Games over DotA 2 and I wanted to see if this was persistent across other areas of the world.

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October 18, 2014 1

As anyone in the industry should be telling you, graphics doesn’t equal fun and some of the most costly things about a game are graphics. Large teams of artists, designers, story writer, motion capture crews and voice actors, all working together to make a large-scale game what it is. Not just the graphics. Graphics aren’t a substitute for fun, but it can help amplify it. We don’t necessarily go into every game looking to have fun the whole time, but to think, to experience a different world and to get lost in a well told story for a while. It’s our form of escapism that we choose to occupy our reality with. One that is interactive and one that isn’t necessarily possible in our own reality.

Large scale productions don’t necessarily give you fun, but they give you opportunity. Opportunity to develop a mature design, develop detailed backdrops and sceneries, get the best voice actors in the market to bring all the characters outside of their reality and accepted in ours.

I will preface this with not every big budget game does this well, and I prefer indie games because they have a better sense of identity with how the product should be. That being said, there are sources of entertainment to be had in both the big-budget market and the small-budget one.

Continue reading “More Money for a Better Entertainment Ride? (Movies vs Gaming costs)” →

Gaming Data: Metacritic Scores over Time

The whole mess of it. Top is critic score data, bottom is user score data.

Animated summary. Poorly compressed, however... — Animated summary. Poorly compressed, however…

The whole mess of it. Top is critic score data, bottom is user score data.

Nintendo Handhelds – With some of the lowest averages for quality of game.

Oh, Nintendo. The Wii really did a number on you, didn’t it.

Why doesn’t anyone acknowledge PC as a viable platform, huh?

Probably the console with higher quality than others, but it has to still fight it out in order to keep its position.

Psp started out strong on debute and is probably the handheld with better quality of games. Too bad handhelds don’t typically sell well in the states.

The Xbox games. Started off with week games, but picked up in the late 2000s. Too bad the latest games haven’t been bringing up their average.

There’s also something to say about the user scores in all of the pictures. There is a trend that Users are grading games more harshly than the past. You can attribute this to the hedonic treadmill, where our future experiences require more novelty in order to get enjoyment due to the worn out novelty from past experiences. Or, you can attribute this to fanboys and ragewars about a game, franchise or console allegiance. Or, you can even attribute some of this to it being easier to hate on something than to find redeeming qualities in a piece of creation.

All data was collected from Metacritic.com around April 30th, 2014, graphed with Tableau.