Colonist.io 2020 Summary

Stats from Jan 2020 to Jan 2021:

- Monthly Active Users: 53,471 => 701,851 (+1330%) [Cloudflare Analytics] - Day 1 Retention: 11.67% => 10.79% [Google Analytics] - Day 7 Retention: 3.30% => 3.83% [Google Analytics] - Registered Players: 6984 =>287,733 [Account Database] - Games Played: 13,833,827 (Tracking since March) [Game Database] - Years of Games Played: 37 => 461(+1245%) [Game Database] - Average Time Per Game: 17 minutes [Game Database]

This year we’ve released 33 versions including lots of fixes & features.

Our revenue from Store vs Ad changed as below Store/Ad Ratio: 15%-85% => 60%-40%.

As we add new things to the store and make the items more attractive we’re planning on reaching a 90–10 ratio in the next 6 months.

Regarding our player base growth, most of it came from the pandemic. We can easily say quarantines accelerated our growth by 1 or 2 years. At the peak of the pandemic, we had max 9000 concurrent online users. It went down to 2000 during September and climbed back to 4000 in December.

Jeff & Juan joined our team. We also have many contributors around the game helping organize tournaments, fix bugs, handle community, and so on.

Team Updates:

Demi: Started the year in Singapore, moved to Malaysia, then to Taiwan then spent 7 months in Japan finally returned to Singapore. He will stay in this covid free country for the next year waiting for the rest of the world to get their shit together.

Goku: Just moved to downtown Toronto and bam corona hit. So instead of exploring Toronto, explored Azeroth. Bought 4 key techs that improved life quality by a lot: a cleaning robot, electronic standing desk, motion board, iron gym pull up bar.

Jeff: Got addicted to Colonist during the peak of the pandemic. Joined as a contributor halfway through the year. Currently living in Boston waiting for the vaccine to be distributed in the US because I know this country is never going to get its shit together.

Juan: Big fan of the board game, spent 2020 living in Argentina, and started playing Colonist during the lockdown. Contributed for a few months and joined the Team shortly after, mostly to manage QA and design new features.

Major Lessons:

Hiring Lovers: Are the people we’re hiring, joining because they love our product, our team, our vision, their work? If any of these is false, they are not a good fit and are not going to stick around.

Big Decisions: We’re only going to make a few important decisions per year, we need to identify those and spend time to make sure those few decisions are right, the rest will fall into place.

Expectation Debt: Each action creates an expectation in players. Just like financial and technical debt, actions create a debt, which must be repaid. Unlike financial and technical debt, you cannot repay it in large chunks. You need to change the expectations over a long timeframe. This method can be used in product pricing, service, quality, speed, design, social obligations. A decision taken in 30 seconds could create an expectation that might take years to reverse and be paid.

2021 Plans:

Here is our public to-do list. As can be seen, the next item we’re working on is Cities & Knights expansion. Then we will work on the mobile version. And then create an ELO system, rankings & leaderboards. We will also increase the size of our team. But we are very picky :) Hopefully, we can find developers & designers who can compliment us.