Just on a purely math / statistical point of view and not involving any political banter, it looks like Barack Obama will win the U.S. Democratic nomination, barring some giant shift in the landscape. I'm pointing this out because it's largely ignored by the mainstream news, I suppose they're more interested in making it seem like a dragged out fight even if this conclusion is probable.

CNN has an easy delegate calculator chart that makes it fairly obvious, of the remaining delegates:

Clinton needs 62% to claim the nomination.

Obama needs 44% to claim the nomination.

Obama doesn't need to win states outright, he just needs to fall within that margin, including the remaining Superdelegates.

Clinton won today in Pennsylvania, but not by a wide enough margin to make a serious dent in the seats Obama has already won. By most accounts, it was her strongest state of those remaining and 55% just isn't enough. If she continued with exactly those numbers (which seems unlikely) she still wouldn't stop Obama from going over the top.

Politically of course, it's presumptuous to point this out.

Valve has more than a few nifty stats pages going now, including the very revealing HL2 Episode Two and Team Fortress 2 stats.

Bragging rights for the above-average player aside, the Episode Two stats are particularly interesting and fall inline with Valve's commentary on the page: "striving to make our products better". Indeed.

The death maps are an amazing visualization of the bottlenecks in single-player play. It's not hard to imagine the usefulness in a game design sense: Are players stuck on intended puzzles, or are they dying repeatedly somewhere unexpected?

It's refreshing to see statistics applied without a marketing push. Or at least the marketing is a secondary attribute, because Valve does gain significant respect from their audience, plus press attention when they publish these goodies. Other game companies, especially in online gaming (MMOs, hello!), should stand up and pay attention here: you don't need to scream your own accolades directly when you can create them by just being damn smart.

An important distinction is Valve doesn't harp on the popularity of any game features when they present these stats and graphs. They obey that old rule: Statistics do not demonstrate intent, just direction. Let the reader decide how player direction meshes with game design intent.

In other words, don't try to measure fun, but use the tools to maximize it.

Valve's litmus test for PC gaming has been rebooted again: the Steam Hardware Survey has been restarted as of yesterday and the first wave of results are already in.

Be aware, that while interesting, the real results won't be in there for about a month or two. From the previous surveys, I'd estimate that they've only sampled about 3% of their likely total so far.

Update: Valve keeps an archive of older Steam Surveys:

• Steam Survey v1 - began March 3rd, 2004
• Steam Survey v2 - began September 21st, 2004
• Steam Survey v3 - began April 5th, 2005
• Steam Survey v4 - began August 9th, 2005
• Steam Survey v5 - began March 3rd, 2006
• Steam Survey v6 - began May 30th, 2007

VideogamesBlogger and others are comparing WoW to countries today, indicating that its population has surpassed that of Haiti, at least according to Blizzard's latest press release.

It's a slowing of growth for a number designed to only go upwards, considering they hit the 8.5 million mark in January. Were they expected to peak now that the game is nearly three years old? Honestly-- No. Everquest didn't max their population for 4 years and it had a small fraction of WoW's footprint. Personally, I thought with Blizzard blowing the rest of the MMO market out of the water it would have longer legs.

I think that they could keep on top of things with significant and timely expansions, leapfrogging as it were. TBC was significant, but not timely. No doubt the second xpack will be announced at Blizzcon. I'm certain we'll see Blizzard set a similar schedule as the last, setting a 2008 date and then realistically it will actually come in 2009.

It's hardly time to ring any death knells for WoW, it's still the King Kong of MMOs. But I do think Blizzard needs to step up their game. The initial product had a much bigger "geez whiz" factor than what they've added since.

Congrats are in order for Ilterendi, the first guild on our server to kill Vashj. Landroval and I discussed the fight at length and it sounded very entertaining. His post regarding the kill made some interesting notes however:

"My biggest regret for the populace in general is that (So far, going by that amazingly nifty wowjutsu armory magic) so few will ever see something quite like it."
. . .
"Wowjutsu has 806921 characters in 14310 guilds listed in it's database. Those numbers represent (mostly) every player that has killed something in Karazhan on up. 56% of that 800,000 have killed High King, 42% gruul, and a spare 20% Magtheridon. SSC kills dwindle even more, with 13% of the playerbase having seen at least one thing in there. Players that have beaten Vashj drop to 2.77%, or 22,351."

If you calculate by the total subscribers in North America (2 million is the Blizzard ballpark), the percentage that have killed Vashj is just 1%. Worldwide, it would go much lower because mainland China still doesn't officially have TBC.

This is no surprise. Raiding content is designed to trickle down from the few guilds that master it quickly, giving other raiding guilds a goal to progress towards. For the rest of the population it provides mystery and perhaps jealousy. It makes the world feel bigger for all but a few, which is exactly the point. If everyone could see all of the content sooner, the feeling of having completed the game might set in for the general population.

I don't know if I agree with that, it's not bad design, but it also leaves a good deal of players feeling unsatisfied. It ~IS~ part of "The Vision", which Everquest started and Blizzard follows now in all but name.

June has started off as a good month for game statistics. MMOGChart hasn't been updated in a year, so someone else has decided to pick up the torch and run with it: MMOGData has entered the scene and is bound to become a much linked reference for blogs such as this.

The main difference with the new pie charts are the inclusion of F2P (Free to Play) and B2P (Buy to Play: Buy once, play for free) alongside the usual subscription model MMOs. Personally, I think that's comparing apples to oranges and I would really like to see individual graphs continued for each of those markets.

Valve has released their latest version of their Steam survey, with revealing results. Overall, this is the most real-world and realistic sampling of stats from current gamers. Steam has a potential base of over 13 million players. The survey, restarted for May 30th, already has stats from over 390,000 unique gamer's PCs.

The number that has commanded everyone's attention of course, is the abysmal ~1% showing for DirectX 10 capable systems.

DirectX 10 is tied to Vista, which skews this number. More than three times that amount have the capable videocards, but have not moved to Vista. That will probably change over time, but of course the cynic in me is still unimpressed with Microsoft milking PC gamers for OS sales. They could have done the PC games market a great service by allowing DirectX 10 on Windows XP.

Other notable stats: Most gamers still have less than a gig of RAM, but own a near-current videocard. For me, that means high-end videocards have truly become mass-market: I can't imagine a 'hardcore' gamer that would upgrade one without the other. Developers should adjust their expectations accordingly.