A new metric has been added to credit listings so you can get an exact count of how many people were credited on any particular release!

There are some fun and interesting ways to use this. For example, you can see how credits have grown between sequels:

Grand Theft Auto = 86 developers

Grand Theft Auto II = 158 developers

Grand Theft Auto III = 185 developers

Grand Theft Auto IV = 1,337 developers

Grand Theft Auto V = 3,692 developers

Note: In cases where credits include thanks, the numbers are shown separately. This is a useful distinction, especially for games that have backers which can easily exceed the number of developers. e.g., FTL: Faster Than Light has 1,053 credits, 1,046 of which are backers/thanks.

Some updates to kick off 2020!

First, special thanks to MobyGames contributor hoeksmas, who added hundreds of lesser known Apple II games and screenshots to the database! Helping make MobyGames the most accurate and complete collection of games published for the Apple II.

Now onto site updates:

• Optimized API queries (approx. 15x faster!)
• Behind the scenes infrastructure work for the API (moving to a new system soon that's easier to scale and develop)
• Improved page responsiveness for smaller screens (mobile)
• SEO tweaks to hopefully help improve our results on Google (if you're an SEO wizard and have any suggestions, please contact me)
• Changed credits display on combined game pages to show credits for the first release (was showing info from the first platform, alphabetically)
• Removed critic/user score overview section from game pages (discussion)
• Fixed combined game pages that were displaying the first alphabetical platform and release date in the page title
• Fixed issue with forms getting improperly cached

As per tradition, I present to you the database visualization! Made possible by the MobyGames API.

Previous editions:
January 2019 - January 2018 - June 2017 - January 2017 - January 2016 - January 2015 - January 2014 - January 2013 - January 2012 - January 2011 - January 2010 - January 2009



(Click to enlarge)

An explanation: each coloured shape in the graph represents a platform. The horizontal axis is time. The vertical axis represents the number of games released. So the height of a shape on a given point in time indicates the number of games released for that platform that year. The total height of the graph on a given point in time shows the total releases that year. The graph is meant to represent game releases and thus excludes DLC, Special Edition and Compilation items. It does include each game for each platform it was released on.

Notable changes since last year:
- Where last year I had to switch to LibreOffice to make the graph due to limitations in Excel, I hit some more since. I decided to write my own code to draw the graphs and nicely colour everything. Makes it look better too with some nicer anti-aliasing.
- As usual we see a drop-off at the end, simply because we haven't been able to keep up with all the new game releases.
- Feel free to point out other interesting info in the graph!


[All data taken from MobyGames. Of course, the graph is only as complete as our database is. Come help us if you can!]

Happy new year! It's time to ask once again: what are your personal goals for 2020, MobyGames or gaming in general related? These are our resolutions from last year. What about this year? Let us know in the comments below.

Another year, another 52 weeks' (well, almost) worth of gaming opportunities. Like in previous years, let us reminisce at our gaming experiences of 2019 and share which games we liked playing the most during this year.

Note that this does not necessarily include new games (since the most of us are here for older titles, wink wink). Whether a game was released in 1989 or 2019, if it impressed you, it is worthy of discussion!

Our featured games section of the site has showcased numerous games over the past two decades, and reasons why they are interesting. However, the list of games which are about to enter that section is getting depleted.

We would therefore like to ask you to submit featured games. Just pick a few games which you have found interesting for some reason or another, and make a short write-up about what makes them unique. Have a look at recent features to better see what we are looking for in these short texts.

Another one of our amazing MobyGames contributors is Danfer. He has been building up a sizable PC game collection since 1997, and shows no sign of stopping!

Among over 4400 cover images that he has posted so far in just 2 years, comprised mainly of Italian releases, we've yet to see anything that isn't of high quality. For instance, the unique Italian cover for Dark Colony, a clean Dune II cover set, a rare retail cover of the Total Annihilation: Commander Pack, and, something which we'd been missing for a long time, a full cover set from the original prints of Shogun: Total War - Warlord Edition.

We'd like to thank him for his contributions so far, and encourage him to keep it up!

We finally cleared the previous MobyGoal - adding all those iOS games took a lot longer than we expected - so it's time to move on to another platform that's been sadly neglected here: Arcades!

We currently have 2472 arcade games catalogued on the site; we need your help get to 2800! We're missing a lot of early arcade games, and there's quite a few gaps in the 80s and 90s we need to fill in. And don't forget, a lot of the games we have on other platforms were originally Arcade games, so if you know of any classic game that's missing that platform, feel free to add it too!

Just wanted to point out - and thank - MobyGames contributor CaesarZX, who describes themselves as "a big-box game collector, mostly Chinese version, of course."

They've been adding a lots of rare Chinese PC game box scans, with highlights including Anachronox and Civilization II, to name just a couple. Much appreciated, and long may this continue!

So, if you go check out the MobyGames database stats page, you'll see that we reached an important milestone - 200,000 games documented in the MobyGames database!

Congrats to everyone who helped us get there - and with a good deal of accuracy and checking along the way! (Also, in the comments for this post, maybe people can point out other neat user milestones achieved recently!)

That’s an amazingly long time in the world wide web. There aren’t many sites that have managed to stay alive for 2 decades!

With the help of our wonderful contributors, we have meticulously documented almost 200,000 games from 266 platforms. Including 793,123 developers, 33,015 companies, 850,321 screenshots, 524,875 pieces of cover art and much more! And did you know we now have an API (in beta) that you can access for free?

Many, many thanks to all of our contributors and approvers! Without their tireless efforts, our database would be quite lonely. Also special thanks to Simon Carless (who helps me, Reed, run the site in-between our day jobs), Brian Hirt for helping with infrastructure emergencies and the intricacies of the codebase, and Tracy who helps with updates and built the API. And of course thanks to Jim Leonard and Brian Hirt who started this amazing project way back in 1999! Check out Jim’s excellent in-depth retrospective.

What next?! We’re just beginning! We’ll always be documenting and growing the database. However, the MobyGames platform needs a lot of work and improvements. As you might imagine, things are getting a bit old in the tooth! Combined with the overall complexity of the site it makes for a daunting task with no full-time staff.

We want to improve the platform and ensure we’re around another 20 years! If you find MobyGames useful and are able to help us with this goal, please consider supporting our Patreon. If even 1% of those reading this contributed, we’d be able to bring on help and make meaningful progress toward improving the platform.

Thank you everyone, here’s to another 20 years!

Just checking out the overall MobyGames stats page, and looks like we got to 190,000 games (or DLC!) added overall - very impressive indeed.

Also a notable stat in there - we're now over 450,000 pieces of promo art, and we're VERY close to 850,000 screenshots, all taken by the community.

Good stuff - and I know there's been lots of user milestones too - please post them in the comments!