Topic: Do number of user ratings increase with the end of year list?

Huge fan of the site since I got back into Nintendo this year! It's been a wonderful discovery and an essential compendium for games new and old.

I generally go by the user scores as a broad indicator of quality - the games in the End of Year Top 50 list for each year have brought me to some really good games I wouldn't have ever thought to buy on Switch.

However, I have noticed that games released in the past 12 months on Switch seem to have a pretty low number of user ratings, particularly compared to games in previous years. Not everything - Metroid Prime and Zelda and Mario have loads of ratings, obv. But a lot of the smaller indie games.

Do the user ratings tend to increase a lot when the end of year list comes out? Just seems odd that there'd be so many games in the Top 50 that have received loads of ratings in 2022 then such a steep drop-off for other fairly big games this year.

@milesajackson we tend to do a big call for user-votes towards the end of the year before we publish our "best games of the year" list, this is usually in December — but there is nothing stopping people recording their scores now.