How the IdleRadar ranking works

The lists

Top rated: sorted by the community rating (a Bayesian average, explained below). Most voted: votes from the last 30 days. Most voted today: votes since midnight Brasília time. Most voted this month: votes since the 1st, at midnight Brasília time. Most played: clicks on “Play now”, counting each visitor once per hour. Newest: publication date.

When two games tie on votes, the rating breaks the tie.

The rating: a Bayesian average

A plain average would put a game with a single 5-star review ahead of one with hundreds of 4.8 reviews. So every game starts as if it already had 5 reviews of 3.5, and its real reviews weigh more as they come in.

The formula is: (neutral rating × weight + sum of ratings) ÷ (weight + number of reviews). Each account reviews a game once. Optional per-criterion ratings (gameplay, progression and balance, visuals and polish) show on the game page from 3 ratings and don't affect the ranking.

Example: a game with a single 5-star review ends up at 3.75. A game with 200 reviews averaging 4.8 ends up at 4.77. The second one ranks higher, as it should.

Votes

Only signed-in accounts vote, and each account votes once every 24 hours per game. Accounts younger than 3 days can't vote yet (the button shows when it unlocks), neither on the site nor through the in-game link, so creating accounts just to vote or to grab rewards doesn't pay off.

Temporary e-mail addresses are blocked and there are per-network limits. Some games give rewards for voting; those games show the “Vote reward” label, declared by the developer.

Monthly ranking and champions

The monthly race restarts on the 1st. The game with the most valid votes in the month becomes champion: it is listed on the champions page and gets a badge on its game page.

What money can't buy

Paid promotions and impression ads place a game in separate spaces, always marked “Sponsored”. They never change the rating, the votes or the position in any list.

Games made by the team behind IdleRadar carry the “House game” badge, follow the same rules, and our team doesn't vote for or review them.

Fraud and penalties

Bought, traded or automated votes are removed, and the removal shows up in each game's open numbers. If a game's server abuses our API (more than 50 blocked calls in 10 minutes), voting for that game is suspended for 24 hours; on a repeat offense, for 7 days.

Every month we publish a moderation report with what was removed and why, and anonymized votes can be downloaded as CSV.