The semester report for late 2014

Calendar for second half of 2014This site was looking for an image of half a calendar, covering only the last six months, and thus searched for JASOND. Perhaps it shouldn’t have come as a surprise to get pictures of a R&B singer-songwriter…

The single months’ worth of TripAdvisor that are tracked in the League Table feature are only really meaningful as snapshots in time. However, with sufficiently many of them, it is possible to draw slightly more meaningful trends – or, at least, to reflect on how far the industry has come. The Timeline shows that the number of open exit games in the UK more than doubled over the first half of 2013, more than doubled again over the second half of 2013, doubled over the first half of 2014 and more than doubled once more over the second half of 2014. (Those numbers: 1 to 3 to 7 to 14 to 30.) Past performance is not an indicator of future results, as you may have previously been told, which is just as well or the metaphorical king’s chessboard will become swamped with rice.

So, for the sites that have stood the test of time, it’s worth looking back to where they were six months ago and compare that to how they are doing now. Here’s the situation from six months ago:

Site name Number of exit rooms Number of different games Number of TripAdvisor reviews Number of 5/5 TripAdvisor reviews Proportion of 5/5 ratings
Breakout Manchester 2 2 30 28 97%
Cipher 1 1
Clue HQ 1 1 1 1 (*)
clueQuest 3 2 493 472 96%
Cryptopia 1 1 25 22 88%
Escape 2 2 29 29 100%
Escape Land 1 1 1 1 (*)
ESCAP3D 1 1 81 68 84%
Ex(c)iting Game 2 2 21 15 71%
HintHunt 5 2 846 783 93%
Keyhunter 3 3 39 25 64%
Make A Break 1 1 25 16 64%
Puzzlair 2 2 45 44 98%
Tick Tock Unlock 1 1 25 25 100%
XIT 4 4 4 3 (*)

Across the population, that’s 1,532 5/5 reviews out of 1,665, a proportion of 92%. The (*) symbol represents a population of fewer than ten reviews, where a proportion is not particularly meaningful. Now let’s consider the same sites again, but only those reviews posted in the second half of 2014:

Site name Number of exit rooms Number of different games Number of recent TripAdvisor reviews Number of recent 5/5 TripAdvisor reviews Proportion of recent 5/5 ratings
Breakout Manchester 4 4 150 133 89%
Cipher 1 1
Clue HQ 2 2 232 217 94%
clueQuest 5 2 381 348 91%
Cryptopia 1 1 1 1 (*)
Escape (Edinburgh) 3 2 226 204 90%
Escape Land 1 1 80 68 85%
ESCAP3D (Belfast) 1 1 28 16 57%
Ex(c)iting Game 2 2 32 21 66%
HintHunt 5 2 292 270 92%
Keyhunter 3 3 16 5 31%
Make A Break 1 1 25 16 64%
Puzzlair 2 2 53 50 94%
Tick Tock Unlock 1 1 221 210 95%
XIT 4 4 4 2 (*)

Across the population, that’s 1,578 5/5 reviews out of 1,741, a proportion of 90½%. Again, the (*) symbol represents a population of fewer than ten reviews, where a proportion is not particularly meaningful.

There is nothing to suggest that the market has decreased in quality over the last six months; surely the opposite is true. It might be tempting to suggest that the novelty of exit games among the reviewing has faded, resulting in a fall of 5/5 scores across the population from 92% to 90½%, but that difference is so small that it might well arise through the noise of random chance and is not statistically significant to a particularly meaningful level. (OK, a χ2 test suggests it might be approaching significance, but if you accept that level of significance then you’re going to go on a lot of wild goose chases.)

If one particular site had been getting 100 reviews with 90% 5/5s previous to one half-year and then another 100 reviews with only 75% 5/5s in a half-year then there might be cause for alarm, but the sample sizes here are generally so small that there are only a very few cases in which the observed lowering of the percentage for a particular site is at all meaningfully significant. Run your own tests!

In conclusion: exit games were awesome up until the first half of 2014, and have been just as awesome in the second half of 2014 as well.

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