The missed potential of r/gaming

YoCzechIt · 3 months

It does have potential, but it's massively unlikely to get a participation rate even remotely approaching all 1 million subscribers. It's pretty likely that a significant portion of those subscribers are inactive redditors, alt accounts, and what have you. Keep in mind that /r/gaming is a default subreddit, so there are probably quite a few people who are still subscribed from when they signed up for reddit, but they never even visit the subreddit. Of course, I don't have hard data for this, so it's purely my speculation.

On top of that, I feel that the feature is somewhat out of the way for it to be utilized effectively. For one, it's about halfway down the sidebar, which I personally often completely forget about. On 1920x1200, the sidebar is so far removed from the content that it's practically invisible to me unless someone points it out. To even see the sidebar, you have to actually be on the /r/gaming subreddit main page, which runs somewhat contrary to the way I (and perhaps many others) browse reddit. I rarely visit /r/gaming, but I'm subscribed and occasionally enjoy the content there. I typically only seek out the subreddits that are a bit smaller, where there is likely quality content that I've missed on my frontpage.

But perhaps the biggest obstacle to frequent use is the fact that it's simply not something I consider when I start playing a new game. I do like the idea of keeping that sort of statistic, but having to update my list every time I start playing a new game (or every 30 days, since the submissions expire after that) is an extra step that doesn't even cross my mind.

Again, this is all my reasoning, but I feel like this is probably true for at least a portion of the potential users. Perhaps there is a way to collect this data automatically? Is it possible to read Steam user data programmatically so that we could have users simply "link" their Steam account to their reddit account and regularly update the list? And for those with privacy concerns and such, they could still use the old one. I'm not sure how feasible it'd be, but I think that would certainly increase the value and volume of the data we collect.

Deimorz · 3 months

Eh, I created the "What's reddit playing?" thing, and even I think you're taking it a little too seriously. :b

/r/gaming doesn't really have anywhere close to ~1,100,000 users. The "subscribers" count is from all time, and it's a default subscription. The large, large majority of those people probably don't even visit reddit at all any more, and a lot of the ones that do probably don't even know what being "subscribed" means. We get somewhere in the range of 300,000 unique visitors per day, but most of those won't even have reddit accounts.

Overall, it's really just there for fun, it's not going to be very accurate at all. As I posted in the thread, a good chunk of the top spots are usually decided by which subreddits get a bunch of their members to come vote for their game in that particular month. It's pretty normal to have at least 2 or 3 of the top 10 only be there because of the efforts of a game-specific subreddit to put it there.

If someone wanted to gather data from /r/gaming, there would be much better ways to do it than that list. All of the major platforms (Steam, Xbox Live, PSN) will already be keeping stats about what people are playing anyway, with a much, much, much larger sample size than the subreddit could ever produce.

Honestly, I'm actually surprised that so many people still send in their updates about what they're playing even when a post like this one doesn't specifically draw attention to it. I expected the novelty of it to wear off pretty fast after creation, and people to stop bothering to update it, but it seems to keep itself at around 2000 "normal" participants, with the odd surge here and there when another subreddit (or /r/gaming itself) decides to blitz it.

CydeWeys · 3 months

has only been filled in by 2322 users while the total subscription of r/gaming is 1,097,185 meaning it's only filled in by 0.002% of the subreddit's users

You're off by two orders of magnitude. 2322/1,097,185 is 0.2%, not 0.002%. It's still quite low, but not nearly as bad as your figures suggest.

Izazen · 3 months

1 million subscribes is a useless number because we don't know how many of those accounts are still in use.

[deleted] · 3 months

Are you at all familiar with surveys? People already have enough of a hard time getting targeted populations to fill out surveys once in a while. This would never work on a regular basis, even if it was once every 6 months, at which point the data would be pretty useless.

XFire, Steam, etc. are the only realistic solution to mapping out what games gamers are playing.

Daemonicus · 3 months

Who really cares about r/gaming?

Going from what gets upvoted/downvoted and the general way the community handles itself, I'm not at all surprised (and you shouldn't be either).

Why would it matter what games people are playing anyway? The top games are going to be EA sports games and CoD if everyone subbed actually voted anyway. It provides redundant data that game sales already tell us.

Epistaxis · 3 months

Really, that's the missed potential of /r/gaming?

I was expecting you to say something about how it was taken over by low-investment content, i.e. the kind that only requires a couple of seconds to decide if you'll upvote or downvote it and therefore is never informative or profound.

But I guess that actually is what you're talking about - a survey is higher-investment and it's not at all surprising that the people of /r/gaming wouldn't bother to fill one out when they could be upvoting image macros and nostalgia.

Neato · 3 months

With a potential sample size of over one million people which can be filled out weekly r/gaming is a statistician's wet dream.

Meh, the sample size is large, but the demographic isn't that varied. That and /r/gaming is a default subreddit, so a lot of those people aren't gamers and just haven't removed the sub. So a lot of those submissions would be "Nothing".

tppiel · 3 months

has only been filled in by 2322 users while the total subscription of r/gaming is 1,097,185 meaning it's only filled in by 0.002% of the subreddit's users

Note /r/gaming is a default subreddit, meaning if you have a reddit account you have a /r/gaming subscription.

That doesn't necessarily mean you are a gamer or visit that subreddit daily.

/r/games on the other hand is an opt-in subreddit, which has over 60.000 people would be a better sample of actual gamers in the community.

Jarerex · 3 months

Katawa shoujo has had far more than 2800 downloads, that is the current number of seeders for the torrent, which is an insanely high number usually associated with AAA releases like skyrim.

If you don't understand seeder to leach ratio I don't know what to say, really, except that your comment on the topic was entirely incorrect as several hundred thousand people have downloaded that game, if not well over a million.

VGChampion · 3 months

I think almost all subreddits have missed or our missing a lot of potential. Don't kill me but a lot of people think this subreddit is pretentious (myself included). There are 24k people here. This survey could be done here just as well but it wouldn't happen.

hive_worker · 3 months

How is this post related to gaming? It seems like you're just rambling about being able to poll people.

Landeyda · 3 months

/r/gaming is the scum of reddit. It's the absolute bottom of the barrel.

If you want to know what /r/gaming is playing just look at the console top sellers list.

Simmerian · 3 months

currently it's total torrent download total is only 2800

That is somewhat incorrect, by the way.

Windows: 75035
Mac OS X: 6110
Linux x86: 1350

That's 82k torrent completions. You may have been counting the number of seeders on the Windows torrent, which is currently around 3000.

natey-nate · 3 months

even if r/gaming got a much bigger contribution to their "what's reddit playing?" poll i don't know if that could be counted as reflective of the general population. its not a randomized sample because it only targets people who are on reddit.

Tasonir · 3 months

It's horribly inactive and always will be. A couple months back starcraft was on the lower end of the top 10, there was an upvoted thread in /r/starcraft/, and then starcraft hit #1. It's very easy to swing the poll for a week because not many people fill it out. Of course after a week that no longer matters when it resets...

YLK · 3 months

To be fair, OP opened the door to getting those responses with the way he worded his image. It honestly sounded like he was upset that KS was in the top 3 and wanted to change that by getting people to send their data in, which is just as goofy as the people putting KS in just to spite him.

usingpond · 3 months

Do you really want to give pubs more of a reason to put shit out like Halo and Call of Duty? That's like examining box office receipts and hoping that indie movies have actually been the best-selling this whole time.

What I'm trying to say is that this will only reinforce big publisher bias.

internetter_ · 3 months

It's not a potentially powerful tool. Opt-in surveys are suspect regardless of the number of responses. All you're going to get is some blind men and an elephant deal.

Ilktye · 3 months

People don't want to answer surveys on image boards.

fagnostic_gaytheist · 3 months

Half the comments aren't really about the data and how very little /r/gaming uses the 'now playing' feature because the image in the OP makes a leading statement about Katawa Shoujo, implying many things. One obvious inference would be that Katawa Shoujo isn't good enough to be third on the list.

Posts on /r/gaming are designed to get comment numbers and karma, not actual discussion. Also, I'm wondering how you thought this text image post, which says "I could have written this as a text submission, but I wanted karma", was one of the most interesting posts in /r/gaming that you've seen.

pelanderfunk · 3 months

When they first put the survey up, I filled it out for a few weeks. It takes a lot of effort to keep it up-to-date with my actual gaming habits.

snagglefoof · 3 months

Remember that anything that asks a user for data typically gets an extremely low response rate.

Take, for example, surveys. Whether by mail, on the phone, email, on a website - how many times have you actually filled out a survey? I do them 50/50 and that's only because I studied them (briefly) in a tech comm class back in the day.

Response rates are always, always low for this kind of thing and that has to be considered when using the data. You can't ever send out a survey and expect to get an accurate picture of the audience, because it's simply accepted you will not get a big enough sample.

Surveys, polls, etc. should never be used as a final step in research. It can be used as a great tool to get an initial snapshot which will determine the methods of further research.

(I'm not saying further research is needed here, just wanted to point out that it's a known fact that user response rates are always low)

rhfs · 3 months

I don't subscribe to /r/gaming but I'm pleasantly surprised that Katawa Shoujo was really well received there. It's absolutely fantastic, and I do feel like the OP of that post probably never played it if he feels that it doesn't deserve such a spot.

That being said, the other comments about statistical accuracy are valid as well. The demographic that actually does the survey is oviously going to be different than the people just read and vote on the subreddit. And of course, /r/gaming is a default subreddit so there is probably a lot of dead accounts in there as well.

rm999 · 3 months

feature has only been filled in by 2322 users while the total subscription of r/gaming is 1,097,185 meaning it's only filled in by 0.002% of the subreddit's users

2300 is enough to get a decent statistical sample, at least for the more popular games. And really, isn't that what mostly matters? The presidential polls that represent 50 million voters use sample sizes of ~1000, and this yields pretty decent confidence bounds.

The sample in such a small poll will be biased, but this is inherent in all non-scientific internet polls. That thread is just changing the bias.

DeathOfTrees · 3 months

What is Katawa Shoujo?

All I can find are links to manga.

jabbercocky · 3 months

1 million is an inflated number, because r/gaming has long been a default subreddit... Also, deleted accounts don't come off the number of subscribers... Also, the number is inflated because many users have multiple accounts (which all have r/gaming set by default).

Next, statistically speaking, any non-random survey, being self-selected and being only Reddit users, isn't worth much beyond satisfying curiosity.

That said, the number of users is high enough to give an idea of what Redditors that actually participate somewhat in r/gaming actually think. You're not trying to take a census, but rather a survey. So it's good for what it is, leave it at that.

apester · 3 months

It could simply be that most don't really care what game others are playing or care to broadcast what they are playing at the time. Many of us play what we are in the mood for..it might be Skyrim today but this evening I could be bored and simply playing some iPad time waster. I suppose if it was some intrusive app that kept track of what your really doing it would be useful but as is its simply a vanity banner that is mostly useless in correlation to real activity.

cjt09 · 3 months

With a potential sample size of over one million people which can be filled out weekly r/gaming is a statistician's wet dream.

Except that reddit is not representative of the general population.

jokemon · 3 months

most people are lazy so

therealDrNick · 3 months

True gaming should be merged with r/games.

you'll need to login or register to do that

create a new account

login