They Told Us They Didn’t Like Our Rating System. They Lied
We reached 100,000 ratings in our database. That’s huge
We have always been proud of our rating system. On RAWG, you can rate the game with four scores ranging from “Skip” to “Exceptional.” These scores are also quite expressive with the emojis, it is easy to understand what the game is like if it’s a 😐 or a 👍.
This year, I alone got dozens of emails, tweets, and direct messages that asked us to change it to a more traditional five-star system, or ten grades, or 100% with the 0.5% interval. We stood firm.
We believed that those systems are not only old-fashioned but also confusing. It is hard to distinguish a 5 from a 6. Some people just rate every single thing they like as a 9/10 and everything they don’t like as a 1/2. Some people think that every score below 5 is just too harsh. All in all, such systems deceive everybody because most people actually use three or four scores implying these meanings — Don’t try it; It’s mediocre; It’s good; It’s great.
Our rating system is clear to understand: Don’t play it; You don’t need to play it; Play it; Do play it. And I am excited to announce that in November we surpassed the milestone of 90,000 ratings! Yeah, I know, it’s less exciting than 100,000, but wait for it. We launched the speed-rating feature then, and things got interesting quickly.
Speed-running with speed-rating
On November 30, we launched the speed-rating feature, a carousel that lets you dash through your library and rate the games that you have played. Less than a month later, we saw more than a 15% increase in ratings. As of today, we have 110,511 ratings, and over 14,000 were made with the carousel. Basically, we boosted the data we have aggregated since before our public launch in February by 15% in less than three weeks!
It has immediately become not only one of the few powerful engagement tools on RAWG but also a valuable source of data. As New Year inches closer, everybody is obsessed with GOTY awards and various top-10s. The abundance of data we got during the first year of our public beta lets us come up with all sorts of curious stats bits. For now, I am planning to go through the ratings and find out the most-rated game, the most controversial title, the Meh-est one, and, you guessed it, the ultimate GOTY. Expect the report on our Medium next week!
There is one more thing that the rating system allowed us to do. Now we can use ratings to sort games in our database. We are planning to start with the IMDb-styled top-100/200/500 games, and right now we are trying to nail the formula, and oh boy, is math hard.
It gives us shivers to see when something clicks with our users, and when the stats are so good, we don’t believe in them and have to double-check. As a database, RAWG can exist only if it has plenty of data, and we are very thankful for our community who contribute this data. Keep these ratings coming, we will build more cool stuff in the upcoming year!
