Data Dump: GOTY 2017 Staff & Guests Breakdown

If you've been around this here website (about video games) for a while, you know I love stats. Unfortunately, I don't get to do it as often since site data is no longer easy to access, there's no more achievement tracker, and reviews are dead. But, here we are at the end of a hellacious 2017 and I thought it'd be fun to take a look at some numbers from all of the Game of the Year #content this year.

First off, some ground rules. Since not everyone decides to do a nice and tidy one through ten list, I had to get a little creative with how to tally everything.

• A "regular" ranked list results in a total of 55 points available. (1 point for 10th, 10 points for 1st, etc.)
• If a person gave 10 games but did not rank them, each game gets 5.5 points.
• If a person gave more or less than 10 and did not rank them, I averaged them equally to total 55. For example, an 11 game list would be worth 5 points each.
• If a person was exceptionally difficult (I'm looking at you, Danny), and ranked a list of 8 games...I made it work.
• If someone gave a spot a tie between two games, I split the allotted points. For example, if someone put two games in their 10th place spot, I gave each 0.5 points.

As always, it was fun to listen in on the deliberations to figure how they decided what game won each category. But, what if we trusted the math? How different would the outcome be? For what it's worth, I'm not saying it should be done this way. We've seen how well a democratic vote works out recently, right? It's just fun to compare the cold, hard stats to what went down in that hot, sweaty room.

Staff's Top 25

As you can see, the top 7 (and Night in the Woods at #9) from this list all appeared on the real Top 10 albeit in a slightly different order. Super Mario Odyssey clearly wins with 9 out of 10 staff members giving it a vote. The two outliers are Dream Daddy: A Dad Dating Simulator at #14 and Tekken 7 at #20. Taking their spots in the top ten are Assassin's Creed Origins and SteamWorld Dig 2.

Okay, I can hear you already. You're saying that Rorie wasn't in the room and Jan was only present at the very end. That's a fair point, so let's see what happens if we factor them out.

Not a whole lot changes in the top 10 other than Cuphead & PUBG moving up a few spots and Pyre jumping in.

Guests' Top 25

As a bonus, what if we take a look at the guest lists from this year. Nearly fifty friends of the site contributed a list this time. Did their views line up with the staff?

As you can see, it was a landslide victory for Zelda among the guests. It had nearly twice as many cumulative points than PUBG in 3rd. Here some other random observations.

• 201 different games were selected by guests.
• 5 games got first place votes with no other votes from anyone else (Animal Crossing: Pocket Camp, Butcher, Caves of Qud, Solitairica, and Wonder Boy: The Dragon's Trap)
• NieR:Automata got the most 1st place votes with four.
• The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild appeared on 22 people's lists (nearly half).
• Only 19 people actually ranked their list.
• The highest ranking game with no 1st place votes was Horizon Zero Dawn at #5.
• @aurahack's list was soundtracks, but I included it anyway. There are no rules on what guests can submit.

Well, that's all I've got this time. Obviously this isn't as in-depth as some of my past projects, but I thought it'd be fun to look at. Maybe if we ever get to 775 reviews, I'll dig up that spreadsheet one more time.

Thanks, I love stuff like this! At a glance something stands out though, what's up with Jan's column in the first table? There are 3 7-pointers for him, including one for Dead Cells which I don't remember being on anyone's list but Jason's.

@majormitch: D'oh. I'll get right on that.

Edit: Should be fixed now. Didn't really affect much. Thanks though!

@marino: No problem, thanks for putting this all together!

Edit: Also, total cop-out from Brad to only list 8 unordered games ;)

Weird, the mathematical staff lists look nothing like mine either, but I find them a lot more agreeable somehow. Thanks for putting this together, it’s interesting to see.

this is great! thanks! super interesting!

though I would point out the methodology is a bit wonky. if someone only had 1 game on their list would that give it 55 points? additionally splitting the points for a tie would mean a game tied for 8th got fewer points than a game at 9th (1.5 vs 2). Technically if there is a tie at 8th then there should be no 9th place and the next game should count as "10th" place. But that wouldn't fix splitting the points, as two games tied for 1st would get 5 points each, and then the 2nd place game would get 9, and I think it should be clear a tie for first should still be worth more than 2nd place. You want to instead count the second place game as a third place, and then average the point total of first and second place, giving the tied first place games 9.5 each.

I do not think this would impact the end list much, I'm just noting and please don't take offense! This is very cool!

That's a pretty solid top 6 on the staff lists, with Mario as a clear winner followed by NieR. Wolfenstein and BotW clearly suffered without Rorie & Jan on the reduced staff list, but stayed in the top 6.

Wolfenstein fell hard on the guest lists, from 4th/6th to 10th. Cuphead fell off the visible guest chart completely? Am I reading that right? I wonder if that shows that those 2 games had more in-office 'presence' than other games, or if wider audiences just didn't play them. The user generated list might help there (maybe).

It does seem like Mario, Zelda, PUBG, and NieR make a pretty solid top 4 core.

Yeah, I toyed around with doing it a couple different ways, but I don't think there's a perfect way since so many people don't all do a regular 1-10 list. If someone had actually only put one game, I would've probably figured out a different way to do it. There were also very few cases where someone put two games in one slot, so (as you said) the difference is negligible.

This is why it seems like PUBG won the site’s Premium Subscriber Best Streamed Game of the Year to me.

Neat, I always like this stuff.

Fits reasonably well with the aggregate GotY awards so far

1. Zelda (by a gigantic margin)
2. Horizon
3. Mario
4. NieR
5. PUBG

ALways love these breakdowns

Seems like the end of their discussions were probably right, Mario got to the top from a high volume of votes rather than high value. PUBG might've been the 'obvious' pick for GOTY, but I don't think that makes it any less deserving.

Brad and Rorie - Unknown Cop Status

Yeah, I felt that way as well. Also, after listening to the deliberations, I felt like Dream Daddy was getting too hard of a push from only a couple people. Though I was ultimately satisfied with where it landed.

Ultimately, though, It's surprising how much the math aligns with the actual list. Maybe if they started out with personal best 10s and did something similar, the deliberations wouldn't have been 5 hours, lol.

@marino: A thought I just had... you could theoretically use this data and the actual site top-10 to calculate how much pull various people had at the deliberations. By pushing games out of position relative to the math, closer to their personal lists. Not that you should, of course.

Maths! Thanks for doing the number crunching. I always like looking at various GOTY charts like this.

Thanks for doing this. I've made my own in the past and it's one of the reason I've begun to find it intolerable to listen to the podcast for the top 10.

I know the staff would never go for this, but it makes so much more sense and is a true depiction of what "Giant Bombs" top ten games of the year is, instead of "Who can be the most persistent in the podcast room".

Thanks for the list, I was just curious how this list would look.

I'm kind of curious what the order would be if Brads games wasn't scored, he didn't really mean that they all were on the same shared level right?...

@forcen: That's also what I'm curious about. If we took the liberty to order at least some of his games that we know are higher than others based on the podcasts, I would be even more interested in the list. Only 12 points separates the top 4. and that's a lot of points left off. I would do it myself, but I just don't have the time right now.

In any case, solid work on this @marino!

E: did the math a few dif ways. Just about nothing changed.

Man, you can really tell that Zelda only ended up as high as it did because of Dan and Abby. Shame that 2 people who never bothered to play Nier were the 2 that kept the game down.

Also weird to see PUBG so low despite how easily it won consensus pick in the deliberations.

@black_turtle: Brad was also pretty vocal about how much he revered BotW and how bad of Nier he did not like.

Nintendo makes great games.

Also, thanks for the hard work putting this together, @marino!

Is there already a master list out there of every initial starting-list (nominations) for the Best Game category through the years?

I guess I can listen to the first five or ten minutes of every Day 5 ever and jot them down on a pad but if the works already been done- :D

I know you used science here, but I think Cuphead should be higher. I think it's very good, I liked it a lot.

Interesting to see aggregation of the guest lists, and I'm glad to see Zelda get top marks there.

Oh hey, so all the hubbub over this year's list was for nothing. 8 out of 10 of the stats derived games made the deliberation list.

@mikachops said:

Let's not be disingenuous here. The two most contentious games that many people are talking about either A) fell from 1st to 3rd/5th on this list, or B) fell off the top 10 list entirely.

@viking_funeral: That happens every year though + the list is actually very predictable if you've been listening to the west and east coast podcasts this year. Tekken might be the outlier... maybe? But given how much of a splash it made in the fighting game community since release, it's inclusion makes sense.

Knowing that PUBG was the game of the site + the general zeitgeist game this year it's really not that shocking that the top 5 or 6 moved around a little in relation to the stats placements (particularly when you add the Nier factor, the second zeitgeist game this year). There's also usually one non-consensus game that cracks the top 10, so again, not at all surprising and certainly not worth the stupid amount of discussions that's been going around.

Yeah, there's definitely a few ways to approach it. But, like you said, the results don't really change much.

Persona 5 was statistically robbed.

I've not been keeping up with the GoTY stuff, but why did Yakuza 0 hardly get any attention?

Recency bias really did a number on Horizon and Persona 5 this year.

@tesla: That argument doesn’t really stand up considering Zelda and NieR came out at the same time as Horizon and before Persona.

Fair point, but I think those games had things going for them that counteracted the recency bias.

No one is going to short change a new, open world Zelda during GOTY talks...even if it came out on January 1 and was an average game. And Nier is so wild that it would be impossible to forget, even if the game didn't play as well as it does.

My point isn't that Horizon and Persona 5 didn't get the rank I think they deserved. What I find unfortunate is that the discussion around those games was surface level at best. I think all 4 of these games are of a similar level of interesting, and would have in depth conversations about all of them if I were involved in a GOTY deliberation.

That guest top ten list is fantastic! Site GOTY being Mario is hilarious considering how against that being number 1 they seemed. (Pyre is forever 11 <3 )

also

201 different games were selected by guests.

holy shit that's cool!

Super interesting to see it broken down like this. Doing the lord's work duder.

Now that we're all looking at cold, hard, irrefutable numbers we can safely conclude Nier:Automata was the best game of 2017.

Sorry, if you don't agree. That's just how the math works out.

Really goes to show what kind of a year it was.
It just hurts me inside that Divinity: OS2 fell victim to its release window and the general awesomeness of the year.
That game is fantastic and might have made a case for a spot near the back 10, if someone had had the time to play it.