Reviewing this site’s predictions for the second half of 2014

Crystal ball iconAround half-way through the year, this site made a number of predictions as to what might happen in the second half of the year. It’s time to go back and review those predictions. Expect counterpart predictions for 2015 early in the new year.

There is practically a 0% chance that the whole exit game industry proves a fad that goes as quickly in 2014 as quickly as it came in 2013. Nothing lasts forever, but there’s no reason why the industry – or, at least, its best sites – shouldn’t be in it for the long haul.

Happily, this did not come to fruition.

There is a 10% chance that the UK mass media will catch on to just how cool exit games are and base a series around them with properly integrated puzzle solving, rather than the merely disguised quiz of, say, the US Exit show.

No joy so far on this one, but who can know what the channel commissioners of this world are being offered?

There is a 20% chance that one of the big players in the leisure industry – perhaps a chain of bowling alleys, or cinemas, or maybe even gyms or similar – will get on board and bring a corporate, commodified approach to the exit game business to compete with all the plucky independents this site loves so much.

This site is not aware of any progress on this issue.

There is a 30% chance that there will someone will hide a treasure in the UK with a hunt that really catches the public attention. Perhaps Masquerade must be a one-off in its impact, but there have been plenty of worthy successors. Maybe the clues will be shared in a book, maybe it’ll follow the tradition of Alternate Reality Games promoting mass media works, maybe it’ll be something new.

The biggest hit in this regard, to this site’s knowledge, was Gold Hunt London, and the success of that seems to be more likely to be measured in the hundreds or thousands, rather than the hundreds of thousands.

There is a 40% chance that existing exit game sites continue to grow and grow – as just one example, clueQuest is set to open its second Operation BlackSheep room on August 1st! – and that there is a single site which manages to serve forty teams on the same day. Thirty a day seems like a very unambitious target, forty a day pushes it to the “40% chance” category.

This site clearly didn’t see Escape Hunt coming, which serves forty a day – and the rest! – on a regular basis, and has had many days in which they have sold all seventy slots. Other than that, the next busiest site would appear to be clueQuest, which opened a fifth room and serves thirty-five teams on Saturdays.

There is a 50% chance that the next World Puzzle Championship will be won by Ulrich Voigt of Germany – after all, he’s won two of the last four! (Maybe this is underselling him; the full story is that he’s won 9 of the last 14, but surely the opposition is getting stronger as well.)

Indeed he won. On reflection, saying there is a 50% chance does not really count as a prediction either way.

There is a 60% chance that the monthly party that is Puzzled Pint will keep growing and growing in London, exposing more and more people to the puzzle hobby… at least, once autumn comes around and the nights start to draw back in.

It was attracting 10-11 teams in April-June and 13-14 teams in October-November, though the distributed Puzzled Pint experiment for December was less successful.

There is a 70% chance that at least one existing exit game covered by this site will officially call it a day, in addition to those which just might fade from sight. (And, still, the exit game industry would compare favourably with so many others when you think about startups failing quickly.)

This one is probably more of a miss than a hit. One site has been on a long-term “break between seasons” with no sign of a second season and a second site is up for sale, with bookings suspended, but neither have officially closed down. Could you count the Lock and LOL misfire in the category? Probably not quite.

There is a 80% chance that there will be a day where this site can list at least twenty sites open for business in the UK and Ireland, with at least five in the London area.

You’ll see the stats in a couple of days; this came true and then some to the point that the prediction proved rather conservative.

There is a 90% chance that the 23rd World Puzzle Championship and 9th World Sudoku Championship, scheduled for Croydon here in the UK on the 10th to 17th of August, will go with a bang and be a success to be proud of for years.

Arguably this is difficult to measure, but this site is not aware of ill-feeling towards the event and is aware of high compliments paid to it, which would seem to be a reasonable metric.

There is practically a 100% chance that something incredibly cool, of which this site was not previously aware, will make itself known. Maybe it’ll be… not just any exit game, but the exit game of all exit games; maybe it’ll be a puzzle game like of which nobody has seen before; maybe it’ll be the hottest new puzzle trend since sudoku. Be sure that this site will really, really enjoy telling you about it.

Again, this is so vaguely-defined as to be only subjectively judgeable. However, this site would offer Boda Borg and the CUCaTS puzzle hunt at Cambridge University as extremely strong candidates for the category. This site’s absolute highlight of the half-year was the Girls and Boys, Come Out to Play puzzle hunt; incredibly cool, sure, but this site did have an inkling that it was coming.

3 thoughts on “Reviewing this site’s predictions for the second half of 2014”

  1. “There is a 20% chance that one of the big players in the leisure industry – perhaps a chain of bowling alleys, or cinemas, or maybe even gyms or similar – will get on board” – there’s a company in Australia called Strike Bowling, that has ten pin bowling, laser tag and karoke plus now two escape room locations. In a way this prediction turned out somewhat true even if it wasn’t in the UK. 🙂

    I was thinking of writing up a blog post really soon about Masquerade, so it was nice to see a reference to it here as well!

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