When I added the upcoming live game widget, a few people were wondering what the number of live games would look like before and after the change.

Now that the widget has been up for nearly two months, I thought I'd have a look at the game statistics. And, I thought some of the community might be interested, too:

This image shows the number of live games completed in each week:

http://imgur.com/PojpO18

The red line on the far right is the addition of the live game widget. It looks like it's caused nearly a doubling in the number of live games per week, so I'm pretty happy about that.

A number of people have said that they think the addition of the "advertise your live games here" thread was bad for the number of live games. I plotted that on the left (the blue line). It looks like it didn't have a major effect on the number of games - the decline immediately afterwards appears to be seasonal rather than related (although I've done no statistical analysis past looking at the graph and going "hmm".).

One of the cool things about this picture - in 2012, you can see the impact of improvements in the way we catch cheaters had on live games. Many banned cheaters were prolific in creating and joining live games.

Also interesting is that you can see the low interest in Diplomacy that happened in 2013-14. There are a bunch of reasons for this, but Diplomacy globally seemed to have gone through a dry spot in 2013-14. The FTF scene in Australia had all but died out (from being a thriving community of regular games in 2011, including hosting the WDC), and I've heard similar things from other FTF communities. Many of our live games are filled by new users who play a couple of games and then don't come back (possibly drawing from the pool of FTF players, I don't know), and for existing users, it didn't help that we had a long period of no site updates either.

With the recent publicity that Diplomacy has received (for example the Grantland article), and regular site improvements, it looks like we're coming out of that decline, at least in live games.

Overall, the site is pretty healthy though. Here's the weekly plot that includes all games on the site:

http://imgur.com/ykEvYvY

Similar trends are visible, but it looks like the core of non-live games are chugging along nicely. Looking at the far right of that graph, it's possible that games numbers are on the rise again, or possibly it's just another seasonal bump. Time will tell.

Hopefully this was interesting to a few of you!

~webDip Dev Team