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Probability when the next episode is

jrwoodwajrwoodwa
edited April 2014 in The Walking Dead

Industrial Engineer here (with too much time lol). For those wondering when the next episodes from a telltale game franchise will release, I came up with a cumulative probability function (CDF). Basically, check the today's date versus the last release date in the franchise and you can see how much longer you are expected to wait.

If Telltale Games acts as they have in the past

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Example:
Today is April 21st, last release for Walking dead was March 4th. Thus, 48 days have passed...

So if the probability we have a release up to 64 days is a 5% chance. Then it is unlikely there is a release within the next 16 days based on their schedule. So, if I am expected that as TTG has acted in the past with usually 92 days in-between, then Telltale games releases between now and June 4th..
Yikes! Then again giving the benefit of the doubt, as there is only 7 data points and 2 of them during the holidays, more data is better to counter the outliers.

If TTG always improve on their last franchise release times

An alternative, more optimistic view is to assume TTG improves their times throughout each season.

  1. Walking Dead Season 1: 64, 62, 42, 42
  2. Wolves Among Us: 115, 63, ... ?
  3. Walking Dead Season 2: 76, ...?

Suppose we say that they will do better than the last. Thus, at least by May 19th (less than 76 days), if they do better than the last.

For those interested how I did the cdf:

  1. I compiled the release dates of Telltale games recent years with the Walking Dead and the Wolves Among Us. I used Excel to subtract and compute the inter-arrival days between releases. (64, 62, 42, 42; 115, 63; 76)
  2. Then, I put the data into an input analyzer. It takes the data and finds the best fitting probability functions. Best fit, or least error, was a BETA function.
  3. In Excel, it can be inputted BETA.DIST(X,0.331,0.657,1)(74)+41.5 where X is percentage from 0 to 100%. So I calculated the x-axis or the days in between using 0%,5%,10%,...,100%. Voila! In the future, when more episodes come out, I can re-do the steps to get more accurate predictions.

Here's to hoping Telltale games does better than they have been recently (juggling multiple games) and don't delay past May 19th.

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