GOTY By The Numbers

One thing that I have always done as a personal task for GOTY is to take the GB staff personal lists and see what the site's Game of the Year would be if you applied the most fun game of them all... MATH!!

The idea is simple, if a member of the staff gives a game their top slot, that game is awarded 10 points, 2nd is 9 points, and so on.

Here are the results. (Note: I excluded Brad because he didn't actually number his list.)

The results are actually pretty close.

- The big winners is Tekken 7 who went from 19th based on staff numbers to 9th on the actually GOTY list.
- The big loser is Assassin's Creed Origins who went from 7th based on the math to out of the staff top 10.
- PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds shocked the world (or the math) by jumping from 6th to the GB crew's Game of the Year.
- Night in the Woods, based on the math, the staff got in the perfect slot coming in at 8th on both lists.
- Pyre and SteamWorld Dig 2 tie for 10th on the list dropping Dream Daddy down to 12th from its 10th spot on the actual list.
- And @ybbaaabby was right in saying "Cuphead should be higher." moving up to 3rd from 5th, proving she was right.

I hope you duders enjoy.

Edit:

Here is the list giving all of Brad's games the #5 slot.

Hooray for Science !

Also Abby was wrong dream Daddy on #12 :D.

The real loser here is Divinity original sin 2. It's a crime ranking it so low ! at least Rorie mentioned it once or twice

That's a much better GOTY list to be honest. Praise the math.

Thought this was going to be a count of how many times abby said I think cuohead should be higher. Hast to be around 50 times

@nightriff: She was right though. Science never lies.

@gnomeonfire: ok, then Mario shouldve been game of the year and nier shouldve taken second, as per your math. This was honestly thid year was my least favorite year of talks considering how easily they picked number 1 and argued about placement that they still got wrong. Was hoping for a good nier pubg fight and got and shit of the top of the list fight. Oh also rewarded a buggy game that wasnt perfect.

This is a way more interesting list.

I'm hoping that someday the staff can put aside their differences and work together. For science.

Those monsters.

This list is very good.

@dwigtk: Do you have the math from years past knocking around that you could post? Would be an interesting read.

Also that list is way better than the actual staff top 10

@nightriff: I think it's really weird to say "argued about placement that they still got wrong" as though there's a right answer.

The individual top 10s are just as arbitrary and subjective as the list they talked their way to in the deliberations. This is a fun breakdown, but I don't think it's any more or less true than the official list.

I always love these kind of stat breakdowns. I'm a little surprised to see Pyre on there because I didn't feel like it was talked about that much through the year. I'm also surprised that NieR: Automata got so high. The site does thoughtful coverage of games but their focus isn't usually titles that are trying to make some heady, intellectual point.

I know you did it because he didn't number his list, but excluding Brad, who hosted the GOTY podcasts, is hilarious.

@dwigtk: Ima let you finish, but... https://www.giantbomb.com/profile/marino/blog/data-dump-goty-2017-staff-and-guests-breakdown/116314/

Great minds, yada yada. ;)

Meh, you should throw out the lowest and highest score, that is a better average. In that way games where only two people voted at all it is tossed out immediately.

This the REAL GOTY is thus...or something like that my math is bad and I did this is like 3 minutes.

I thought they should have picked Mario as number one for having the broadest appeal in the room. Why not include Brad's list and give each game a 5? I think not having him represented at all is worse than the math being slightly inconsistent.

That's basically what I did on my version (see link above). I also did an aggregate of guest lists.

@tom_omb:

@marino has a way better list that I missed when posting mine, check his out.

PUBG and Nier Automata are the only two games to have two editors pick them as game of the year, which is interesting, and Dream Daddy making number 10 doesn't seem as odd to me as it did before considering it was 12 on the math list, although I'm sure the Horizon fanbase will take umbrage with that seeing as they were 11. Also, and I don't say this because I don't value their opinion, Jason and Rorie are kind of my favorites in fact, but I'd be curious to see a list without Jason, Rorie, and Jan, so as to get a sense of what things look like with the editors who did take part in the main game of the year debate.

The problem with a straight math list is that a number of the games just didn't have a lot of people play them so they never had a chance at getting that high up a list. This year was definitely one of the best for "most games have been played by most people" though. The scores really need to be weighted/averaged by number of people that played them, or something, I'm not a statistics major.

@jigsawintospace : It is hard to remove just the people you want from the list. Do you say "just editorial staff"? Then you have to take out Vinny, Abby, Jan, Jason, and Rorie....

Here is the list with just the "editors"

And here is the list added all of Brad's games in the #5 slot:

Pretty interesting.