Posted July 24, 2016
One feature I find useful from Valve is the <span class="bold">game statistics page they post on their site and in Steam showing the top 100 games being actively played at a given time</span>. This list is useful for determining the real popularity of titles in terms of game play time they receive rather than in terms of units sold. Games that stay on this list over a long time tend to be the more popular, and those who stay in the top 25 or so tend to be the most reflective of what people are playing. It's a useful metric to have for judging game popularity at the moment as well as over time, and spotting trends during sales promotions as well.
It'd be nice to have a similar feature on the GOG website and in Galaxy, with the obvious caveat that GOG would not be able to accurately track this information to the same degree as Steam does because GOG games do not require an online presence to play, so the information of what people are playing offline would not be available to GOG. Nonetheless, for people such as myself that use Galaxy, if we are connected online and game time tracking is enabled (which it is if you're online as it can't be disabled) then GOG's servers already are getting some reliable information about what games everyone is launching with Galaxy client, and well it wouldn't be reflective of what the entire base of customers is playing at a given time, it would be reflective of the subset that are actively using Galaxy regularly like myself.
I think it'd be pretty nifty if GOG would consider adding a game statistics page that shows the top 100 games being played using this data subset as it would help customers to know which games are actually getting hours logged in them rather than just purchased and sitting in backlogs. This same information could be very useful to game publishers and developers also and give them a unique perspective of the GOG customer base and how it might differ from Steam for example.
GOG could also do a periodic voluntary hardware survey and publish the statistics of that as well. It'd be interesting to see how the average GOG Gamer's gaming rig might differ in terms of hardware compared to a Steam gamer for example.
It would be possible for GOG to implement all of this in a way that is both useful to the community here, to publishers/developers and to themselves (technically they already have much of that info via Galaxy anyway), and they could even make it so people can opt-out of being counted in the anonymous statistics if they wish (although I can't imagine why one would want to do that).
Granted, this is a "fluff" idea that is icing on the cake likely to not happen anytime soon as long as there remains high priority features/functionality left to do which aren't anywhere near complete, but it's a good future thinking idea I believe, and one I'd personally find a lot of value in when getting a feel for the true popularity of titles coming here to GOG, to be able to help separate the wheat from the chaff.
It'd be nice to have a similar feature on the GOG website and in Galaxy, with the obvious caveat that GOG would not be able to accurately track this information to the same degree as Steam does because GOG games do not require an online presence to play, so the information of what people are playing offline would not be available to GOG. Nonetheless, for people such as myself that use Galaxy, if we are connected online and game time tracking is enabled (which it is if you're online as it can't be disabled) then GOG's servers already are getting some reliable information about what games everyone is launching with Galaxy client, and well it wouldn't be reflective of what the entire base of customers is playing at a given time, it would be reflective of the subset that are actively using Galaxy regularly like myself.
I think it'd be pretty nifty if GOG would consider adding a game statistics page that shows the top 100 games being played using this data subset as it would help customers to know which games are actually getting hours logged in them rather than just purchased and sitting in backlogs. This same information could be very useful to game publishers and developers also and give them a unique perspective of the GOG customer base and how it might differ from Steam for example.
GOG could also do a periodic voluntary hardware survey and publish the statistics of that as well. It'd be interesting to see how the average GOG Gamer's gaming rig might differ in terms of hardware compared to a Steam gamer for example.
It would be possible for GOG to implement all of this in a way that is both useful to the community here, to publishers/developers and to themselves (technically they already have much of that info via Galaxy anyway), and they could even make it so people can opt-out of being counted in the anonymous statistics if they wish (although I can't imagine why one would want to do that).
Granted, this is a "fluff" idea that is icing on the cake likely to not happen anytime soon as long as there remains high priority features/functionality left to do which aren't anywhere near complete, but it's a good future thinking idea I believe, and one I'd personally find a lot of value in when getting a feel for the true popularity of titles coming here to GOG, to be able to help separate the wheat from the chaff.
Post edited July 24, 2016 by skeletonbow
