How Many Games Were Released on November 15th, Compared With Films on the Same Date

The count depends entirely on which November 15 you mean. Wikidata holds 579 video games carrying a November 15 release date, spread across 36 separate years between 1985 and 2025, as queried on 8 September 2026. The yearly figure runs from 1 title to 115: November 15, 2024 (a Friday) has 115; November 15, 2022 (a Tuesday) has 60; November 15, 2001 (a Thursday, the North American Xbox launch) has 22; November 15, 2020 (a Sunday) has 8; November 15, 2025 (a Saturday) has 1.

What the 579 figure counts, and what it silently drops

That number comes from one query against the Wikidata Query Service: every item typed as a video game (property P31, value Q7889) carrying a publication-date statement (P577) recorded at full day precision for 15 November of any year. It returns 584 release statements attached to 579 distinct items, because five games carry two November 15 statements each, usually a regional pair.

Change any part of that query and the number moves. Include items typed as expansion packs, DLC, or compilations and it climbs. Demand a matching platform qualifier and it collapses, for reasons I'll get to. The figure is real and reproducible, and it is not a measurement of how many games came out. It is a measurement of how many games somebody has entered.

The gap between those two things is the whole problem, and it is the one part of this I can speak to from my own bench. For nine years I assembled circulating tabletop kits for library branches around Spokane. A boxed cribbage set with the board and no pegs went back on the shelf as one game, counted once in the catalogue, indistinguishable from a complete one. To the patron who took it home it was zero games. The catalogue was not lying. It was answering a different question than the one being asked of it.

Wikidata's coverage of recent years shows the same lag in the other direction. The whole of November 2024 holds 1,700 catalogued titles. November 2025, well in the past by now, holds 191. Nobody thinks the industry shrank by 89 percent in twelve months. Entry work runs years behind release work, so any recent figure you pull is a floor, not a total.

Why three sources give three different answers for November 15, 2001

This is the date most people are actually asking about, and it is a good stress test because three respectable sources disagree.

Microsoft's own launch-day press release, Xbox Erupts on the Scene, dated 15 November 2001, states: "Nineteen games are available for Xbox during launch week, and another 10 to 15 games will hit store shelves before the end of the holiday season." The same release gives the estimated retail price as $299 and the distribution as more than 15,000 retail locations across North America. Nineteen is a launch-week figure for one platform in one territory.

Wikipedia's 2001 in video games release table lists six titles dated November 15: Cel Damage, Dead or Alive 3, Halo: Combat Evolved, Nancy Drew: Message in a Haunted Mansion, Oddworld: Munch's Oddysee, and Wizardry 8. Those six generate eight platform entries across five platforms, since Cel Damage occupies three. Six is a notability-filtered figure covering every platform.

Wikidata returns 22 titles for that exact day, across three platforms named in qualifiers (Xbox, PlayStation 2, Game Boy Advance) and two territories recorded in place-of-publication qualifiers (North America and Japan). Twenty-two is a database-coverage figure.

Six, nineteen, twenty-two. None is wrong. They count different objects, and only one of them tells you which.

There is a smaller lesson buried in that Wikidata result. Run the query with an English label service and the most famous game on the list comes back as the bare string Q276217, because Halo: Combat Evolved no longer carries an English-language label on its item. Its name now sits in Wikidata's multilingual `mul` field, which the label service does not fall back to. Anyone eyeballing the output for familiar names would conclude Halo is missing from its own release date.

I have made the equivalent mistake with a printed record. I taught cribbage pegging backward for the better part of a season because I had copied a scoring diagram upside down and never once checked it against a board. The diagram was correct. My reading of it was not, and nothing in the diagram was going to tell me.

The day of the week decides the number

Across all 36 years, the 27 November 15ths that fell on a weekday average 20.8 catalogued titles. The nine that fell on a Saturday or Sunday average 2.0. That is a factor of ten, and it holds inside a narrow window too: between 2016 and 2024, the eight weekday November 15ths average 50.8 titles, while the one Sunday in that range, 2020, has 8.

| November 15 | Day | Games (Wikidata) | Films (Wikidata) | |---|---|---|---| | 2001 | Thursday | 22 | 9 | | 2016 | Tuesday | 23 | 4 | | 2017 | Wednesday | 22 | 8 | | 2018 | Thursday | 47 | 34 | | 2019 | Friday | 37 | 30 | | 2020 | Sunday | 8 | 4 | | 2021 | Monday | 33 | 1 | | 2022 | Tuesday | 60 | 3 | | 2023 | Wednesday | 69 | 25 | | 2024 | Friday | 115 | 24 | | 2025 | Saturday | 1 | 4 |

The composition changes as sharply as the count. All eight titles dated November 15, 2020 are small self-published storefront uploads: Deluxe Ski Jump 2 on Android, Juanita the Orange Fish, This is My Dungeon, Hentai Furry 2. Not one is a title a researcher would go looking for. Publishers do not schedule weekend launches, so a weekend date catches only the upload queue, which never stops.

My grandmother's cribbage board is scarred to the point where two of the streets are hard to read, and it survived thirty years of a family using it as the house set. The catalogue records it identically to a board bought last week. A release database has the same flatness: Hentai Furry 2 and Halo: Combat Evolved occupy one row each, and the row shape carries no information about which one anybody will look for in ten years.

How this compares with films released on the same date

Films are the nearest thing to a controlled comparison, and the same database answers both questions with the same method. Querying items typed as film (Q11424) with a November 15 publication date returns 462 films across 93 years, from 1907 to 2025. Restrict that to the same 36 years the games span, and it is 286 films against 579 games.

Both media share the messy part: regional openings, so one work legitimately holds several dated release events in different territories. What games add on top is a platform axis and a set of digital-access states with no cinema equivalent. Early access, playtest builds, server launches, storefront-region staggering, and console versions arriving weeks apart all produce dated events that a database has to either record or discard.

The weekend signal separates them cleanly. Games drop from a weekday average of 20.8 to a weekend average of 2.0, a ratio of 10.4. Films drop from 9.4 to 3.4, a ratio of 2.7. Cinema still opens on weekends; games effectively do not. If you are trying to explain why one November 15 looks empty and another looks enormous, the day of the week does more work than the year does.

Platform entries, and why they inflate a day's total

November 15, 2022 makes the mechanism visible. Sixty distinct titles, but 69 game-platform pairs, across eight platforms including Windows, Xbox One, Xbox Series X and Series S, Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, iOS and Android. Territory qualifiers on that day include worldwide, Hong Kong, Macau and Taiwan.

Here is the part that should stop you: only 11 of those 60 titles carry any platform qualifier at all. Of those 11, seven list more than one platform. Somerville, Jumpship's debut, lists three, and Thunderful announced its acquisition of Jumpship the same day. So among entries where platform data exists, the majority are multi-platform, and a true platform-entry count for the date is not obtainable from this database. November 15, 2024 is worse: 115 titles, exactly one of which carries a platform qualifier.

I went through the 2022 list line by line on a wet evening with nowhere to be, expecting the recognizable names to dominate. Pentiment, Somerville, Bendy and the Dark Revival, Syberia: The World Before, Smurfs Kart, Garfield Lasagna Party, RWBY: Arrowfell, Let's Sing 2023. Eight of sixty. The rest are titles like Karych vs Telegraphs - Pacman Edition and Hidden Harbor 2 Top-Down 3D, catalogued with precisely the same authority.

Whether a Switch port six months later deserves to be called a release is an argument about definitions, and I am not the person to settle it. What I can tell you is that the answer changes the number by a large factor, and that almost nobody quoting a date total says which convention they used.

Counting a November 15 yourself

1. Fix the year first. A count without a year is not an answer to anything.
2. Choose the entity type and write it down: video games only, or expansions and compilations too.
3. Filter the publication date at day precision, so month-precision records dated to the 1st do not leak in.
4. Decide whether you are counting titles or title-platform pairs, and report both when they differ.
5. Record the date you ran the query. A live database gives a different answer next quarter.

Frequently asked questions

What games are releasing in November?

November is the heaviest month in the release calendar. Wikidata catalogues 1,700 titles dated to November 2024 and 1,236 to November 2023. The recognizable retail and first-party launches cluster on Tuesdays and Fridays, while the bulk of the monthly volume is small self-published storefront releases arriving on every day of the week.

How many games are releasing in November 2026?

Twenty-one, as catalogued in Wikidata on 8 September 2026, against 1,700 for November 2024. That gap measures cataloguing lag rather than a quiet month, since forward-dated releases live in press announcements and storefront pages until they ship. November 15, 2026 falls on a Sunday and currently holds zero entries.

How many games were released on November 15, 2022?

Sixty distinct titles carry that date in Wikidata, producing 69 game-platform pairs across eight platforms. Pentiment, Somerville, Bendy and the Dark Revival and Syberia: The World Before are the recognizable names. The remaining fifty-odd are small self-published Steam releases, catalogued with exactly the same weight as those four.

How many games were released on November 15, 2020?

Eight, the lowest figure of any recent year, because that date fell on a Sunday. None is a notable release. All eight are small storefront uploads, among them Deluxe Ski Jump 2 on Android and Juanita, the Orange Fish. Publishers avoid weekend launches, while self-publishers upload on any day.

Do platform ports count as separate releases?

It depends on the database, which is why date totals rarely agree. Wikidata records one title with several platform qualifiers, so Somerville's Windows, Xbox One and Xbox Series X and Series S versions on November 15, 2022 form one title and three platform entries. Retail-era counts often treated each SKU separately.