Hello my dear friends,
As usual, at the turn of the year I'd like to report on the basics of the game.
The number of players has declined somewhat in the last year and a few regular players have left us. That's a pity, of course, but it's part of the course of time. The fact that we only have 427 registered teams on server 1 looks more dramatic than it is, because it is now a bit more balanced with server 2, which almost reaches S1 with 334 teams.
These absolute numbers are not very meaningful, because what is important is the number of active players, and S1 is still clearly ahead. This is because a few months ago I redirected new registrations to the S2 so that it would not die out. Since the bounce rate is very high, the number of registered teams is only a snapshot. Basically, I'm still very satisfied with the activity of our players, especially since I'm seeing drops in other manager games.
Page views compared 2022 to 2021
To illustrate the whole thing with numbers and a graph, here is the overall comparison of page views in 2021 and 2022 in Google Analytics:
As you can see, the number of page views is almost identical to the previous year at -1.56%.
I can only speculate why the average session duration fell by almost 20%, but the -9.11% of new users shows that we had fewer new visitors this year. This is probably due to the end of the Corona measures as well as reduced advertising expenditure on my part.
The 19.51% increase in sessions per user shows that the game is supported by regular users.
Inflation is also making itself felt in the game
Inflation has hit full force and I feel it clearly. Some Premium Accounts have not been renewed, money is not as loose as it used to be, server costs have been raised due to the energy crisis and I personally have to cut back due to the increased cost of living, which limits my budget for advertising and programming expenses.
I briefly considered adjusting the prices of the TTM to inflation, but I immediately dismissed the idea because I don't think a price increase would do the game any good.
Updates more difficult
Communication with the programmers is difficult at the moment, as they simply have other things on their minds. Nevertheless, I will make sure that the TTM will be developed further and that you will get new updates in the future. ach_ja is a big bright spot here.
I still have a few ideas I'd like to implement at some point and the tactics adjustments we discussed continue to sit deep in the back of my mind. I hope we get these implemented in 2023, but I can't promise it.
3-day suspensions deleted
Apropo, after a renewed discussion about player suspensions, we have removed the 3-day suspension from the game completely! But for this, it may be very rare for a suspension to occur 3x per season.
The bad start into 2022 with the hardware failure of the old server and the resulting move to a new server feels very positive in the meantime, because the calculation times are crazy fast and a few of the inexplicable problems from 2021 have simply disappeared into thin air.
Anniversary with record participation
December 2022 saw the 10th anniversary of Server 1 and the associated anniversary speedgame had a record-breaking turnout of 54 teams on S1 and 19 teams on S2, which made me very happy!
We've had three new languages (Spanish, Portuguese and Japanese) in the game for a while, but I haven't bothered marketing them yet. That's on my personal agenda for 2023, because with this I might be able to lure a few more players into the game without a big advertising budget. So much for my thoughts on the game.
I wish you a Happy New Year, remain loyal to TTM and keep my fingers crossed that 2023 will be a better year for us and the world, without war, crises and pandemics.
