I would like to ask everyone’s opinion on D1 Retention’s ups and downs, especially downs.
My question here is how did D1 retention fall when we didn’t make any change around onboarding and/or early stage of the game.
D1 retention is for new users, so I don’t really understand why it fall unless there’s crucial bug or onboarding experience has changed.. And as long as we know (or users’ report), there’s no such bug nor updates around early game experiences…
So if anyone has theory on how D1 retention up and down, I’d appreciate if we could hear it!
(Also we felt like when we had more users in our game, retentions were almost automatically gone up, we felt like metrics went up AFTER the influx.)
Fluctuations in D1 can happen even without changes. Sometimes it’s the type of traffic (where new players are coming from), or just outside factors like weekends/holidays. Bigger influxes usually boost D1 since players are more likely to return when they had a social experience. If there’s no bug or onboarding issue, it’s probably just natural variation. Keep an eye on your traffic sources + long-term retention (D7/D30) for the real picture. If your game got surfaced differently (like showing up on a new discovery page, sponsored slot, or trending organically), the audience type shifts. New players who aren’t your “core horror fans” might bounce faster, dragging D1 down a bit.
Thank you for your reply! This is very constructive and convincing explanation. It may exactly be an our case. I will leave this comment open for discussion sake but I will definitely look into our traffic source transition.