Hi all, in the interest of opening up some of the data I’ve been collecting on dustkid.com I’ve decided to add a post with some graphs that I’ve set to automatically regenerate each day.
This first graph is meant to gauge the activity of Dustforce as a whole. It shows the number of PBs obtained by users each week since the beginning of Dustforce.
This next graph shows the number of Time WRs per week since the start of Dustforce. Unfortunately since I’m missing some metadata on old replays I can’t include historical score WRs so I just decided to not include them at all for now.
This one shows the number of replays dustkid.com receives directly from its users.
Finally the last graph shows how many users dustkid.com receives replays from each week.
Dustkid Blog 
Interesting stats! I’ll try to give some perspective to the graphs!
The first graph is the number of scores improved by all users per week. As mentioned, this is a good way to gauge the activity of the Dustforce playerbase. It also lines up with the sales figure article published by hitbox: http://hitboxteam.com/dustforce-sales-figures and with the DX release: http://hitboxteam.com/dustforce-dx-update-released
Dustforce was released on January 17th 2012. The replays from the first nexus are not recorded in this chart. The first spike is when the game is from a Steam midweek madness sale on May 1st, where the game is updated to have the second nexus, the editor, and extra difficult levels. The second spike is from when Dustforce was in the Humble Indie Bundle 6 and then the Steam holiday sales tapering off after that. The third spike is around late April 2014, where Dustforce is in the Humble Weekly Sale powered by TSG, selling almost 90k copies. After that in June 2014 Dustforce is in the Steam Summer Sale. Then the fourth spike is caused in October of 2014 by the Dustforce DX release and the Humble Mozilla Bundle that sold almost 90k copies again. The fifth spike in June 2015 is probably due to the Steam Summer Sale.
Dustforce DX was aimed to lower the learning curve and added 16 new easy levels, which appears to have increased the base number of replays and activity. Is Dustforce more popular now than the first few years it was out? Dustforce may have claimed its place as a modern platforming cult classic alongside Super Meat Boy and I wanna be the guy, but only time will tell. There are widespread praises for Lifeformed’s soundtrack and complaints about (arguably) clunky controls and difficulty.
The second graph has two spikes when the new leaderboards (for the May 1st update and the DX update) come out and new records are being set. The rest of the graph seems to be whenever a top tier player has the inspiration or motivation to set new records.
The third and fourth graphs show the growth of Dustkid.com. Something interesting about these is that on average a Dustkid user will complete ~250 runs per week. Dustkid currently provides separate character leaderboards, various other leaderboards, achievements, TAS tools, records of replays which are not PBs, an autosplitter, stats for replays and more, making it appealing to almost any Dustforce fan.
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