The League Table: end of July 2014

Graph showing broadly improving performance over timeThis is the fourth instalment of an occasional feature to act as a status report on the exit games in the UK. On its own it means little, but repeated sufficiently many times it could be the basis of a survey of growth over time.

Exit Game sites known to have opened in the UK/Ireland: 15/1
Exit Game sites known to be open in the UK/Ireland: 13/1
Exit Game sites known to have closed temporarily in the UK/Ireland: 1/0
Exit Game sites suspected to have closed, at least temporarily, in the UK/Ireland: 1/0
Exit Game sites known to have closed permanently in the UK/Ireland: 0/0
Exit Game sites known to be under construction in the UK/Ireland: 6/1
Exit Game sites less confidently known to be under construction in the UK/Ireland: 5/0

Site name Number of exit rooms Number of different games Number of TripAdvisor reviews Number of 5/5 TripAdvisor reviews Local TripAdvisor ranking
Breakout Manchester 3 3 55 50 5
clueQuest 3 2 556 529 1
Cipher 1 1
Clue HQ 1 1 39 36 1
Cryptopia 1 1 25 22 9
Escape 2 2 78 75 1
ESCAP3D 1 1 91 74 11
Escape Land 1 1 23 21 34
Ex(c)iting Game 2 2 28 18 20
HintHunt 5 2 899 832 3
Keyhunter 3 3 40 25 7
Make A Break 1 1 31 20 18
The Gr8 Escape 1 1 3 3 41
Tick Tock Unlock 1 1 51 51 1
Puzzlair 2 2 52 51 4
XIT 4 4 4 3 97

This needs to be taken with a heavy pinch of salt. This site supports all the exit games that exist and will not make claims that any particular one is superior to any other particular one. Please note that the TripAdvisor rankings represent a wide variety of locations and cannot be directly compared against each other. In fact, it’s probably pushing it even to compare the tripAdvisor rankings of two exit game sites in the same city.

One trend becoming evident in the TripAdvisor ratings is that there’s starting to be the first signs of a backlash against the popularity of exit games; both in this country and abroad, there’s at least one or two people rating exit games poorly on TripAdvisor just for being exit games and for being popular. Accordingly, there may be some degree of fall in some ratings for some sites that does not represent any drop in quality. Perhaps this should be taken as a sign that exit games have made it.

Some sites definitely appear to be struggling to some extent when the competition has included a warmer-than-usual July. On the other hand, the sites that are doing well (whether they opened this May or in previous years) seem to be doing really well; clueQuest of London are opening a second Operation Blacksheep room today, and Breakout Manchester opened their Madchester room yesterday, at least for previews, both of which will only ratchet up the rate of players further still.

Accordingly, this site makes an estimate with its usual level of confidence (i.e., not especially high, though it should be correct to within a factor of three) that the number of people who have played an exit game in the UK or Ireland by the end of June was 46,000, rather than the previous estimate of 45,000, and by the end of July is now 54,000. Six figures by the end of the year looks quite possible.

(Is today’s post a little dull? Get excited about the things coming up soon!)