Dominion Strategy Forum
Dominion => Dominion General Discussion => Topic started by: DooWopDJ on February 06, 2019, 09:08:49 am
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Does anyone track the popularity of Dominion in the board game industry? In my opinion the continual updates of new Expansions has kept Dominion popular, but I am curious if there are popularity trackers (from US / Europe and Worldwide). I am surprised that there are not more postings in the News forums about Dominion's success. Thanks.
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Any metrics in particular?
# of sales would be one (subdivided by language and expansion)....
https://www.boardgamegeek.com/geeklist/22976/item/1571298#item1571298
1 million copies, as of "the end of 2010"!
Number of plays?....
https://www.boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/36218/dominion/stats
594,598 total
490 this month
Doesn't seem possible to get info on other, specific months though
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When Dominion was run by Goko and Making Fun, ragingduckd had a plot showing the number of Dominion games played each day. I don't think such a plot exists for Shuffle IT but you should be able to get an estimate by checking how game numbers change between days (assuming it always counts up by 1). If you poke someone with access to the raw stats (people who work on Dominion Scavenger), maybe you can get estimates that way.
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When Dominion was run by Goko and Making Fun, ragingduckd had a plot showing the number of Dominion games played each day. I don't think such a plot exists for Shuffle IT but you should be able to get an estimate by checking how game numbers change between days (assuming it always counts up by 1). If you poke someone with access to the raw stats (people who work on Dominion Scavenger), maybe you can get estimates that way.
I think it's something like 35k games a day on Dominion Online, about a third of which are rated games.
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Obviously f.ds != Dominion, but there is surely a strong correlation between the popularity of the two.
So here are some graphs about f.ds from 2011 to 2018. Each data point is a percentage of the average for that series. The raw data can be found here (http://forum.dominionstrategy.com/index.php?action=stats).
(https://i.imgur.com/69PJ3We.png)
(https://i.imgur.com/ioiTlzF.png)
So the number of new topics and new posts has been steadily declining since 2012. However, most people online and page views have been generally increasing. There seems to be no particular trend for new members; I suspect the peaks coincide with the release of popular expansions etc.
My conclusion is that compared to 2012-13, Dominion has a bigger fanbase as there are more people checking in on the forums. However, people are generally less excited about the game now, so there is less content being posted.
I'm not sure how much of an effect forum games, RSP etc have.
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A lot of active f.ds people now mostly hang out in mountainpassbiddingstrategy.com (Dominion discord). That should explain some of the forums popularity decay.
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The Dominion League is bigger than it has ever been.
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So the number of new topics and new posts has been steadily declining since 2012. However, most people online and page views have been generally increasing.
Speculation: when a lot of stuff has already been discussed, and previous threads are frequently referred back to, when the forums are full of very experienced players some of whom are quite disdainful of newcomers, you need to be pretty sure of yourself and pretty confident you have something new and useful to say before you comment. This might contribute to the drift in comment to page-view ratio.
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My new thread frequency has exponentially decreased since game logs and game kingdoms are no longer available/pretty.
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A lot of active f.ds people now mostly hang out in mountainpassbiddingstrategy.com (Dominion discord). That should explain some of the forums popularity decay.
Am I missing something here? mountainpassstrategy.com just redirects to >>> http://forum.dominionstrategy.com/index.php?topic=15633
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A lot of active f.ds people now mostly hang out in mountainpassbiddingstrategy.com (Dominion discord). That should explain some of the forums popularity decay.
Am I missing something here? mountainpassstrategy.com just redirects to >>> http://forum.dominionstrategy.com/index.php?topic=15633
It's explained in more detail in here: http://forum.dominionstrategy.com/index.php?board=50.0
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My new thread frequency has exponentially decreased since game logs and game kingdoms are no longer available/pretty.
This is the problem I've found too. It's currently very hard to share game logs or read game logs unless you have a subscription. I don't play frequently enough to justify buying a subscription which means that on the off chances where I do play a neat board, I have no way to share my log anymore.
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My new thread frequency has exponentially decreased since game logs and game kingdoms are no longer available/pretty.
This is the problem I've found too. It's currently very hard to share game logs or read game logs unless you have a subscription. I don't play frequently enough to justify buying a subscription which means that on the off chances where I do play a neat board, I have no way to share my log anymore.
Yeah. It still boggles my mind that Goko and Making Fun each had easily accessible logs for games, yet Shuffle iT—created by two top players—has yet to truly implement them. This thing where you can go back into old games is cool, but does not count! And as far as I know isn't available in bulk. And don't they "go bad" when an update happens?
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My new thread frequency has exponentially decreased since game logs and game kingdoms are no longer available/pretty.
This is the problem I've found too. It's currently very hard to share game logs or read game logs unless you have a subscription. I don't play frequently enough to justify buying a subscription which means that on the off chances where I do play a neat board, I have no way to share my log anymore.
Yeah. It still boggles my mind that Goko and Making Fun each had easily accessible logs for games, yet Shuffle iT—created by two top players—has yet to truly implement them. This thing where you can go back into old games is cool, but does not count! And as far as I know isn't available in bulk. And don't they "go bad" when an update happens?
My understanding is that Isotropic and Goko both stored raw text logs of what happened in each game to a local server or AWS, but didn't store much metadata past that. However, because the raw text logs were public, people could build tools to process the text logs to reconstruct metadata that let them implement log search, Council Room analytics, the Isotropish leaderboard, and so on.
In contrast, Shuffle IT stores the decisions of the game in binary format in a password-protected database, which is more efficient for storage but also means the data isn't natively human readable. There are probably reasons that doing it this way makes it easier / actually possible to implement the game-replay and undo features, but the flip side is that the raw text isn't actually saved.
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The Dominion League is bigger than it has ever been.
I wonder if the uptick in "most online" for 2018 can be explained by the influx of Dominion League members that was seen when the Dominion League was advertised on Shuffle iT Dominion Online.
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The Dominion League is bigger than it has ever been.
I wonder if the uptick in "most online" for 2018 can be explained by the influx of Dominion League members that was seen when the Dominion League was advertised on Shuffle iT Dominion Online.
This is without a doubt the cause of the League uptick, and with so many being new accounts it only makes sense.
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The Dominion League is bigger than it has ever been.
I wonder if the uptick in "most online" for 2018 can be explained by the influx of Dominion League members that was seen when the Dominion League was advertised on Shuffle iT Dominion Online.
Correct. We see massive spikes in the numbers of new users every time we make a client announcement. You can see that in the stats (http://forum.dominionstrategy.com/index.php?action=stats) by digging into the Forum History. For instance, there were 95 new users on March 20, 2018, the day our first client announcement went out, far more than the 2017 daily average of 1.
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Obviously f.ds != Dominion, but there is surely a strong correlation between the popularity of the two.
So here are some graphs about f.ds from 2011 to 2018. Each data point is a percentage of the average for that series. The raw data can be found here (http://forum.dominionstrategy.com/index.php?action=stats).
So the number of new topics and new posts has been steadily declining since 2012. However, most people online and page views have been generally increasing. There seems to be no particular trend for new members; I suspect the peaks coincide with the release of popular expansions etc.
My conclusion is that compared to 2012-13, Dominion has a bigger fanbase as there are more people checking in on the forums. However, people are generally less excited about the game now, so there is less content being posted.
I'm not sure how much of an effect forum games, RSP etc have.
Here's a hot theory: The stats look worse than they actually are. The people posting here then are all on Discord now. That's where all the hot conversations are going. The Discord community has been siphoning off of the forum users for a couple of years now, and now with League being conducted mostly on Discord, the numbers should start dropping even further.
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I'm not a Discord user, but by my understanding it's ephemeral? Isn't that a problem for conversations people might want to refer back to years later?
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I'm not a Discord user, but by my understanding it's ephemeral? Isn't that a problem for conversations people might want to refer back to years later?
The only reason to refer back to old strategy discussions is to laugh at how wrong people were. Also you can still look up the old discussions if you want, it's just not terribly convenient.
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The only reason to refer back to old strategy discussions is to laugh at how wrong people were.
This is not true for things that are taken for granted now, but once had to be learned. For example, I doubt anyone will learn that Ambassador should return two Coppers over one Estate from Discord, but they could easily learn it from searching the Forum for old discussions about Ambassador. I think that makes the Forum better for people who are new to Dominion.
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The only reason to refer back to old strategy discussions is to laugh at how wrong people were.
This is not true for things that are taken for granted now, but once had to be learned. For example, I doubt anyone will learn that Ambassador should return two Coppers over one Estate from Discord, but they could easily learn it from searching the Forum for old discussions about Ambassador. I think that makes the Forum better for people who are new to Dominion.
They can also learn that by playing one Ambassador game online.
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I'm not a Discord user, but by my understanding it's ephemeral? Isn't that a problem for conversations people might want to refer back to years later?
lol Adam
Anyways, I mean forums are a dying system. Nobody uses forums anymore. Yeah, it's a real concern, but just about everything else is better with Discord versus a forum. And we have articles, we have the forum anyways. People still post there, it's just a lot less often.
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The only reason to refer back to old strategy discussions is to laugh at how wrong people were.
This is not true for things that are taken for granted now, but once had to be learned. For example, I doubt anyone will learn that Ambassador should return two Coppers over one Estate from Discord, but they could easily learn it from searching the Forum for old discussions about Ambassador. I think that makes the Forum better for people who are new to Dominion.
They can also learn that by playing one Ambassador game online.
Case in point.
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I'm not a Discord user, but by my understanding it's ephemeral? Isn't that a problem for conversations people might want to refer back to years later?
If you had posted this on discord, and I'd been around, I would have replied immediately. If I hadn't been around, I wouldn't have replied at all. Given that it's a forum post, I saw it, didn't feel like putting in the effort at the time, and here I am replying to it the next day.
So to me it seems like, in terms of the flow of conversation, a post on discord is more ephemeral. In terms of storage, they're just as stored and awkward to search.
Like many forum sites, this one started as a front page of articles you could reply to with comments. Forums are a better version of that and took over. The current front page would be well served by generating a forum discussion thread for each article, say in the articles forum. Anyway the forums are a good version of article replies, but discord works fine for that too.
Discord is better for chatting, which turns out to be a lot of what people want to do - less-thought-out conversations that occur in real-time. Forum games, it depends, discord or forums could be better. If you want to re-read pages of mafia discussions, okay, forums, but I have to think people are playing mafia on discord right now and loving it. Things like tournament reports are currently handled by youtube, with some discussion happening on discord. Discussing strategy works fine on discord.
Discord has, by convention, a lower barrier to entry on posting. For some people it's the same - hey it's just a convention. But for many, a post is more intimidating, suggests that more thought be put into it. Now maybe you want to be reading stuff that more thought went into. I personally think the lower barrier to entry is way better. It encourages posting, meaning it's more likely that there's actually something to read.
So, I recommend joining the discord. I don't think discord is just killing forums - note that a zillion sites still have articles with comment sections. But for sure a lot of our traffic has shifted there.
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For me it's pretty bad that people are posting rules questions on Discord, especially if it's a new question and Donald replies only there. It would be really bad if an actual ruling was made only on Discord. But in general I also want to catch rules question I know the answer to, because it helps me see new parts of the rules that people can be confused about, or even lead me to consider some other interaction I hadn't thought about. (I'm talking about maintaining my rules document.)
I just don't personally have the time or inclination to participate in that kind of chatting, and certainly not to monitor it constantly. And as far as I can figure out posts are not categorized in any coherent way, so searching for stuff is pointless (or maybe impossible anyway).
(Additionally, I prefer little but pithy content to just a lot of content just for the sake of it.)
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Can someone explain stuff to me, as someone who has just briefly used Discord? It looks like just a big chat room... like Slack or Skype or whatever. Is it not? I don't understand how it's a substitute or replacement for a forum; it seems like a completely different thing. Someone could ask a question, and the person who knows the answer logs on the next day; they won't see that question, because lots of other messages have been sent since then. How would a person even start to see what new stuff has been posted since they last checked?
The way people talk about Discord makes me think I must be completely misunderstanding what it is. But I've seen it first-hand, though just a tiny bit. It looks like a chat room.
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Can someone explain stuff to me, as someone who has just briefly used Discord? It looks like just a big chat room... like Slack or Skype or whatever. Is it not? I don't understand how it's a substitute or replacement for a forum; it seems like a completely different thing. Someone could ask a question, and the person who knows the answer logs on the next day; they won't see that question, because lots of other messages have been sent since then. How would a person even start to see what new stuff has been posted since they last checked?
The way people talk about Discord makes me think I must be completely misunderstanding what it is. But I've seen it first-hand, though just a tiny bit. It looks like a chat room.
The way it works is that you have it open all the time and you check it whenever you aren't in the middle of doing something (or sometimes even when you are). There's a red indicator that tells you if new stuff has been posted since you last checked. If you're asking a question only one person knows the answer to, you can ping them which turns the red indicator into a red "1" so they know that something requires their attention specifically, but most of the time a lot of people know the answer so you can just ask and someone probably answers, and if nobody replies and the discussion moves on, you can try asking again later.
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Can someone explain stuff to me, as someone who has just briefly used Discord? It looks like just a big chat room... like Slack or Skype or whatever. Is it not? I don't understand how it's a substitute or replacement for a forum; it seems like a completely different thing. Someone could ask a question, and the person who knows the answer logs on the next day; they won't see that question, because lots of other messages have been sent since then. How would a person even start to see what new stuff has been posted since they last checked?
The way people talk about Discord makes me think I must be completely misunderstanding what it is. But I've seen it first-hand, though just a tiny bit. It looks like a chat room.
It's multiple chat rooms, mostly themed around Dominion topics. The channels are like threads, although they will end up with sub-topics that can be like threads too. A new topic getting talked about a bunch, or the anticipation of that, can cause a new channel to get made, e.g. the current cardqvist channel; when it dies down it gets archived, e.g. the championship channel. You can see what people are saying, reply to them, start a new conversation.
I mean, so the qvist lists have been posted here, and people have discussed them some here, but way more in the discord channel. On the last page as of this moment, it is mostly talk about Scepter. They talked about Scepter; it worked out fine. People said things and said things about things. It in no way suffered from the lack of ability of someone to easily join the conversation many hours later, and in fact you could join that conversation now, or mention something someone said hours earlier if you wanted.
otoh, the qvist lists themselves aren't on the discord; that content is better for forums or front pages.
When I log on, it jumps me to the start of new stuff in each channel as I click on it. I scroll through it at whatever pace, depending on how interesting it is. There's a lot of "here's a board, what would you have done differently" and I don't usually read those.
I recommend just trying it out; go on, say something about a topic, see how it goes.
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The trend I would like to see is Discord getting used for random ephemeral notes and forums getting used for more long-form content or distillation of things people talk about on Discord. The search feature in Discord is okay but still a bit worse than forums IMO (I think forum search lets you add more conditions.)
This only works if people decide to actually post things on the forum now and then, instead of only using Discord.
I am appreciating the forum history a lot, since I've been working on-and-off on a history of Dominion article, and it's been very valuable to look up primary-source reactions to Goko's announcement, for example. If this was on Discord I'd have to go search and scroll back through a big unorganized feed of comments from 5 years ago. It doesn't have as strict of a thread system as forums. People start and pick up old conversations wherever they want on Discord, but it's all interleaved into one big stream.
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To get back to the original question, I think an aspect of the change in Dominion's popularity has to be that it basically birthed a huge genre which is the deck-building game. Regardless of whether you consider other deck-builders to be Dominion's equal, the fact is that while people who like deck-building games used to have one place to go and it was Dominion, now they have 1,000 places to go and only some of them are Dominion.
But that probably goes both ways -- all those other deck-building games are entry points that will lead some percentage of people who discover them back to Dominion.
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To get back to the original question, I think an aspect of the change in Dominion's popularity has to be that it basically birthed a huge genre which is the deck-building game. Regardless of whether you consider other deck-builders to be Dominion's equal, the fact is that while people who like deck-building games used to have one place to go and it was Dominion, now they have 1,000 places to go and only some of them are Dominion.
But that probably goes both ways -- all those other deck-building games are entry points that will lead some percentage of people who discover them back to Dominion.
I wonder how many start out with 'Other' Deck Builders and THEN discover Dominion.
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I tried Discord one time. I was quite confused at first. I still am. My initial impressions were that it was some sort of "glorified chat room/IM service". I used it to ask questions for one of the Final Fantasy game remakes. As mentioned by a few posts here, it didn't seem to be the appropriate utility/software for question based topics, so that did get me to write it off, and just stick with message forums.
However, I have been made aware, even back then, that Discord has gone up in popularity. So for naysayers (including myself :\), it's here to stay, and worth considering as a viable means to discuss one's topics of interest).
To get back to the original question, I think an aspect of the change in Dominion's popularity has to be that it basically birthed a huge genre which is the deck-building game. Regardless of whether you consider other deck-builders to be Dominion's equal, the fact is that while people who like deck-building games used to have one place to go and it was Dominion, now they have 1,000 places to go and only some of them are Dominion.
But that probably goes both ways -- all those other deck-building games are entry points that will lead some percentage of people who discover them back to Dominion.
I've been going to board game conventions for the better part of the past decade. I remember my first game Dominion in 2008...
I was at a con that focuses on eurogames (although other types/genres were welcome). Trying out Dominion was on my "to do" list, but I was playing so many other games that by the time I got around to this, it was already 2am. I looked around, there were still 10+ tables of gaming going on. One game I couldn't get in.. they were full. Another one, I did get in. 1 guy could teach, and the other 2 players were new. We ended up playing 2 games (The First Game and Big Money presets). It was awesome 8)
Over the next few years, I'd see quite a few games of Dom. being played as a wandered the floors of such conventions. They also got played at various, meet ups, get togethers of gaming groups. Intrigue, Seaside, Alchemy, and Prosperity.. those were hot expansions!
In the past few years, Dominion either is nowhere to be seen, or perhaps you may see a game or 2 of it in play. But that's out of "a sea of tables" (up to 40 tables in some cases). Or, I see someone with a very large box, I look inside, and see he's got 10+ sets of Dominion cards in there, so even though that copy wasn't being played at the moment I walked by, it does show someone has it and brought it in.
Dominion is still great, but there are just soo many other great games out there, let alone great DBG. Kickstarter exploding in popularity helped get even more games out onto the market otherwise.
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In the past few years, Dominion either is nowhere to be seen, or perhaps you may see a game or 2 of it in play. But that's out of "a sea of tables" (up to 40 tables in some cases). Or, I see someone with a very large box, I look inside, and see he's got 10+ sets of Dominion cards in there, so even though that copy wasn't being played at the moment I walked by, it does show someone has it and brought it in.
It seems nice to have presence at cons, but that may be skewed towards new games, and there are other metrics. For example: https://icv2.com/articles/markets/view/42622/top-10-hobby-channel-card-dice-games-fall-2018
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In the past few years, Dominion either is nowhere to be seen, or perhaps you may see a game or 2 of it in play. But that's out of "a sea of tables" (up to 40 tables in some cases). Or, I see someone with a very large box, I look inside, and see he's got 10+ sets of Dominion cards in there, so even though that copy wasn't being played at the moment I walked by, it does show someone has it and brought it in.
It seems nice to have presence at cons, but that may be skewed towards new games, and there are other metrics. For example: https://icv2.com/articles/markets/view/42622/top-10-hobby-channel-card-dice-games-fall-2018
Nice! Happy to see The Mind on there as well.
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In the past few years, Dominion either is nowhere to be seen, or perhaps you may see a game or 2 of it in play. But that's out of "a sea of tables" (up to 40 tables in some cases). Or, I see someone with a very large box, I look inside, and see he's got 10+ sets of Dominion cards in there, so even though that copy wasn't being played at the moment I walked by, it does show someone has it and brought it in.
It seems nice to have presence at cons, but that may be skewed towards new games, and there are other metrics. For example: https://icv2.com/articles/markets/view/42622/top-10-hobby-channel-card-dice-games-fall-2018
I wish they gave more info on what metrics those are gong off of. It says "reflects sales", and then also says it's based on interviewing retailers, distributors, and manufacturers. But is this about the number of copies of a game that gets bought? Seems silly to compare a $40 game to a $10 game in this way. And for an LCG, what does "number of copies" even mean? You can buy small expansion packs, right? Is that counted the same as buying a full game?
I'm just mad that Exploding Kittens is on any sort of top 10 list.
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I'm just mad that Exploding Kittens is on any sort of top 10 list.
Have you seen the list of the ten most funded kickstarter campaigns? I believe it was number one when it came out. There have been a few that have made more since then, but I believe it is still seventh (as of now; but there is another one which given its current growth rate is likely to push it down to eighth).
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I'm just mad that Exploding Kittens is on any sort of top 10 list.
Have you seen the list of the ten most funded kickstarter campaigns? I believe it was number one when it came out. There have been a few that have made more since then, but I believe it is still seventh (as of now; but there is another one which given its current growth rate is likely to push it down to eighth).
Ugh. If you want a completely stupid game based only on the fact that kittens are cute; but actually has substance and fun gameplay, play Tem-Purr-A.
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I'm just mad that Exploding Kittens is on any sort of top 10 list.
Have you seen the list of the ten most funded kickstarter campaigns? I believe it was number one when it came out. There have been a few that have made more since then, but I believe it is still seventh (as of now; but there is another one which given its current growth rate is likely to push it down to eighth).
Ugh. If you want a completely stupid game based only on the fact that kittens are cute; but actually has substance and fun gameplay, play Tem-Purr-A.
Exploding Kittens is based only on the fact that it's created by famous webcomic authors.
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I'm just mad that Exploding Kittens is on any sort of top 10 list.
Have you seen the list of the ten most funded kickstarter campaigns? I believe it was number one when it came out. There have been a few that have made more since then, but I believe it is still seventh (as of now; but there is another one which given its current growth rate is likely to push it down to eighth).
Ugh. If you want a completely stupid game based only on the fact that kittens are cute; but actually has substance and fun gameplay, play Tem-Purr-A.
Exploding Kittens is based only on the fact that it's created by famous webcomic authors.
I never knew about the connection to The Oatmeal before now.
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I'm just mad that Exploding Kittens is on any sort of top 10 list.
Have you seen the list of the ten most funded kickstarter campaigns? I believe it was number one when it came out. There have been a few that have made more since then, but I believe it is still seventh (as of now; but there is another one which given its current growth rate is likely to push it down to eighth).
Ugh. If you want a completely stupid game based only on the fact that kittens are cute; but actually has substance and fun gameplay, play Tem-Purr-A.
But they're obviously doing something right, if they are that successful. Maybe it's not the game itself, but something they're doing has worked out for them.
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If you want a game based on a web cartoon, Joking Hazard is much superior. There's an actual game in that one!
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I'm not saying it's a good game; I'm saying it's a successful game.
Although I do think there are times in which a game that isn't really much of a game is just what I need. Those moments aren't common; I'd usually much prefer to play an actual game. But they exist, and Exploding Kittens is one of the games that does a good job then.
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But they're obviously doing something right, if they are that successful. Maybe it's not the game itself, but something they're doing has worked out for them.
Yes, it's not the game itself, it's the webcomic.
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I'm not saying it's a good game; I'm saying it's a successful game.
Although I do think there are times in which a game that isn't really much of a game is just what I need. Those moments aren't common; I'd usually much prefer to play an actual game. But they exist, and Exploding Kittens is one of the games that does a good job then.
We Didn't Playtest This At All is a good non-game for this that I found much more fun than Exploding Kittens.
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I'm not saying it's a good game; I'm saying it's a successful game.
Although I do think there are times in which a game that isn't really much of a game is just what I need. Those moments aren't common; I'd usually much prefer to play an actual game. But they exist, and Exploding Kittens is one of the games that does a good job then.
We Didn't Playtest This At All is a good non-game for this that I found much more fun than Exploding Kittens.
Okay, true. Now that I think of it, there are multiple non-games that I would consider better than Exploding Kittens.
And We Didn't Playtest is strictly better.