Please remember.

Hey yo! I love stats. And if you've been around here at any point over the last decade, you probably already knew that. Unfortunately, I don't have as many opportunities as I did in the past since it's been years since site data was easily accessible. You may remember the good ol' days of monthly Data Dumps, achievement tracking, and annual reviews data. Game of the Year is one of the few chances we have to put some spreadsheets together these days, so let's do this thing!

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. And I'm doing it slightly differently from last year.

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 less than 10 and did not rank them, they still only get 5.5 each.

If a person gave less than 10 and did rank them, they forfeited their points available for 10th, 9th, etc. (i.e. a list of 8 ranked is a total of 52 points)

If a person (@matt) is a weirdo and doesn't rank their list but specifically says the last game they talk about is their GOTY, then that game gets 10 points and the rest get 5.

If a person (@will) is a bigger weirdo and gives two games their #1 spot, yet doesn't rank anything else...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 9th place spot (2 points), I gave each game 1 point. If you can't make up your mind, your choices take the hit. Sorry.

So, what are we actually doing here? Well, what if we good ol' mathematics to determine the site's GOTY rather than hours and hours of arguing? Sure, the deliberations are fun, but if we deployed a spreadsheet, how different would the final results be? As I've said before, I don't necessarily believe this is how it should be done, but it's just fun to compare the cold, hard stats to what went down in that hot, sweaty room.

Staff's Top 45

As you can see, nine of the top ten games from the math are also in the official list that came out of that hot, sweaty room a couple weeks ago. They're in a slightly different order, but it's still pretty cool that it was that accurate. Especially since the only outlier was the #9 spot.

Despite ending up in seventh on the real list, Marvel's Spider-Man got votes from eight out of the ten staff members; the most of any game.

East vs. West

@mnzy brought up in the comments that they thought the West vs East split would make wildly different lists, so I broke out the spreadsheet again to have a look. And here's what we got:

As you can see, eight games appear on both lists. The outliers are Moss and Astro Bot Rescue Mission in the East, and then Destiny 2 and Monster Hunter: World out West. Also, nine of the ten West games got on the official site list while eight of the ten on the East list made it. So, even though the eight games shared between the two lists are in a different order, the lists are quite similar.

Guests' Top 25

Now let's take a look at those guest lists. There's way more data to wade through with these. And since guests have no rules, I have to get a little more creative with the math sometimes.

God of War mostly ran away with it here. Not as much as Zelda did last year, but still convincingly.

That's all for now. Hopefully I'll have another opportunity to share a bunch of stats in 2019.

Sav'orq, 2018.