2014 was a banner year for orc-stabbing aficionados.

Giant Bomb recently conducted a incredibly rigorous scientific set of polling to determine our readers' games of the year for 2014. We opened up voting around January 1st so as to not overlap with the efforts of thatfrood, who has conducted a set of forum-focused polls over the last few years; you can find his poll's results for this year at this link. (For reference, the staff's top ten is at the bottom of this article.)

We thought it'd be interesting to create a profile list-based method of conducting these polls, as well, and sent out notifications to community members via Twitter and Facebook around the time that the polls went live. You can find more info on how this went down via my forum post over here. We'll take a closer look at getting something more elaborate done when the time comes next year!

Some quick facts before we begin:

We received a grand total of 1,462 lists, either fully filled with ten candidates, or only partially filled.

The number of votes cast totaled 12,679. (Again, some lists weren't fully populated, which is why this number isn't exactly 10x the number of lists.)

A grand total of 629 games received at least a single vote. Some of those games were not from 2014; automatically filtering out non-2014 games led to some oddities the last time we attempted something like this, so we let people vote on what they wanted and simply disqualified anything not from last year from appearing in the top ten. As it was, we didn't have to worry about it.

Top Ten Games (Total Votes)

Here's the top ten games by number of votes received, regardless of position in the top ten list. (I'll post the full spreadsheets in a forum thread in a bit if you data nerds want to see the complete lists.)

Top Ten Games (Weighted Votes)

In this list, games are weighted by position in the list of the reader who voted for them. Votes are weighted with a value of (1/slot position), such that a first-place vote is worth a whole vote share, while a game ranked in tenth place would only receive a tenth of a whole vote for the purposes of this list.

Game Name Weighted Votes 1. Middle-Earth: Shadow of Mordor 329.5308 2. Dragon Age: Inquisition 228.4623 3. Dark Souls II 200.9838 4. Bayonetta 2 169.4146 5. South Park: The Stick of Truth 166.0844 6. Wolfenstein: The New Order 140.6332 7. Hearthstone: Heroes of Warcraft 102.5046 8. Super Smash Bros. 102.0463 9. Far Cry 4 99.7698 10. Mario Kart 8 90.6307

It's interesting to compare and contrast with ThatFrood's weighted list. The top three games are unchanged; people sure did like Shadow of Mordor in 2014, including the Giant Bomb editors, who likewise voted it their game of the year. The big winner on our weighted list is Bayonetta 2, which jumps up four spots from its position on ThatFrood's community list; the biggest loser is Transistor, which drops out of the top ten games when you sort by vote weight. It's replaced by Hearthstone, which wasn't even in the top ten total vote-getters. Apparently enough people who did vote for it placed it high enough on their lists to bump it into the top ten games when sorted by weight.

For what it's worth, two games appeared on the staff list that didn't appear on either ThatFrood's top ten list or this weighted top ten list: Jazzpunk and Shovel Knight. Shovel Knight came in at position 12 on our weighted list; Jazzpunk ranked number 14.