Player Retention for a Week Long Game (Subterfuge)

For a while now, we’ve been curious about Subterfuge’s RETENTION. And yes, we puke in our mouths a little when we say that word. This is just a quick post about some numbers we ran yesterday out of curiosity.  

First, we got a list of all players who have played a game of Subterfuge, along with how many games they’ve played. Here are the top 10 most “addicted” players:

RickA 35
ShadowDragonz 33
EricAnderson 26
sleepygirl 25
AshrafSal 23
Stannis_Baratheon 21
Key Lime 17
TheStash 16
AdmiralAdama 15
Camopy 15

We salute you, ladies and gentlemen!

Next, we wanted to see what percentage of players play only 1 game? How many stick around for 2? 5? 10? etc.

Here’s a graph to answer this:

No big surprises there, obviously. We’re guessing this is a pretty typical “retention curve”.

Being problem solvers, one of the thoughts that popped to mind was “how do we lose fewer players over time?”

We’re not going to go there, though. We know this is not a mass market game. Those who love it will happily stick around and those who don’t are better off not playing. 

Our hope is that there are enough people out there who share our taste that we can keep working on this game. We have a long list of ideas we’d like to explore in this game if it makes financial sense to do so (which we will get a good sense for only after release).