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Simple BGG stats on solo games

Since Cadet Stimpy provided me with a way to get all BGG data in a simple spreadsheet, I have been able to produce a few plots that may be of interest to you!

- First of all, the data has been extracted in 2020. This means that the data for the 2020 year is not complete. Although there were already games in the database at that time with a year published posterior to 2020, they were few. So, I have set aside 2020, 2021, and 2022 for the "number of solo games released" plot. I also filtered out the entries by only keeping the games that are actually owned by at least 50 people.

- But this doesn't tell us much -except 'it's a lot!'. What's more instructive is how many games published are soloable - so we have an idea of the evolution of the "share" of solo games among all the releases. Here I kept the 2021 data (because it's a ratio), but not the 2022 (because all the games are soloable: it's only a bunch of Kingdom Death Monster expansions that people marked as "owned" because they have pre-ordered them). So here is the plot:

I think the last two data points are not too reliable, but even from 2019 we have a ratio of 40% which is huge.

5 comments

Comments (5)

Mar 23, 2022

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Wow, great! Thanks.

If you ever have too much time on your hands, please expand this into an essay for the website. Another point to add to the graphs, apart from "creation of the 1P Guild" could probably be the first Pandemic lockdown. We saw an increase in solo modes from all kinds of publishers then.

Zerbique

Mar 23, 2022

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Replying to

I wanted to add that but since data stops in mid-2020, you can't see the effect at all, unfortunately!

As I was telling Cadet Stimpy in another thread, manipulating data to do all sorts of stuff is easy to me -extracting it from BGG is, however, vastly out of reach of my limited programming skills.

Mar 23, 2022

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Replying to

Ah yes. It seems like covid was 5 years ago, now that we've moved on to the War.

Cadet Stimpy

Mar 22, 2022

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That didn't take long, Z. Awesome! So, in 2019 40% of the ~1,000 newly released games were Soloable? About 1.1 Soloable games per day? Extrapolation seems to show that number is only gonna grow significantly. Z, could it be said the growth is exponential? Well, whatever ya call it, it's still a shitload! I asked Alexa about 'shitload' - the reply was, "I'd rather not answer that." What a wiener! 😄

Zerbique

Mar 23, 2022

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Replying to

If the number of solo games has grown exponentially, then if you plot the logarithm of this number with time, you should get a straight line. So, I tried to do just that:

I'd say it's fairly safe to say that, yes, the number of solo games has grown exponentially.

Now a note on this. Most phenomena of diffusion (goods, new technologies, coronavirus) obey what is called an S-curve. Which means they start with an exponential growth, and then slow down (the famous "tipping point"). I think with board games, we are approaching this tipping point, so the number will still grow, but the growth itself will slow down. With solo games, not yet.

To see this, if you look at the number of board games released per year, you see we are past the peak. Note that there may be an effect of the limiting size of 50 owners, but 50 owners is pretty low, and you still see clearly the effect with a lower bar (e.g. 5 owners).