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What do you want to achieve?
My Zombie game, Dead Slate, has achieved over 5.6 million visits and gathered a Discord community ~2.5k members strong, and would have concurrent player counts around 700-1000 during it’s peak lifetime activity back in late 2022 through to early 2023. Lately however, even with consistent and major updates adding new player-requested features and content (such as a story mode as of 01/23/2024), the player count has continued to plummet down to single-digits, despite my best attempts to gather community feedback through surveys, questionnaires, polls, etc. and directly address them in new updates. I am hoping to look for new ways that I may have not considered to better control and implement player feedback, as well as look for new ways to not only retain existing players, but to outreach and introduce new players. -
What is the issue?
My real problem is that I wonder if polls/questionnaires are far too biased to give reliable, accurate information of what the average player thinks. Since only people who are deeply invested in the game will bother to join the Discord, find a survey form, and take the time to fill it out. It may not accurately represent what the average player desires or considers valuable.
Therefore, with this post I hope to reach out to completely unaffiliated people who have no attachment or investment in the game to give feedback, and potentially help give me pointers on how to better manage and consider feedback from the game’s core user base, as well as some ideas on how to reach out to other users to get new, excited users to play the game.
- What solutions have you thought of so far?
1 - I have run multiple “sponsorships” on the game in the past, but the return-on-investment was utterly lacking to make it viable, especially given the game’s low revenue in it’s current state. They would only increase the game’s average player count by about ~5-10 users whilst active. Ideally, I had hoped it would increase by at least ~50.
2 - I have changed the icon a few times in the past to something more visually distinctive and eye-catching, but it also similarly had no effect, even when done in tandem with a sponsorship.
3 - I have wanted to try running advertisements, but with the sheer amount of money needed to compete with larger front-page games, I doubt it will be financially viable for me. The prevalence of adblocker today also presents a potential hurdle.
- Concerns.
I do wonder if this is simply due to the game’s age; it was released in a sort-of “early access” alpha state since 2020, receiving updates over-time, usually shipping a major update every 2 months. It could be people are simply growing “full” of the “zombie infection” style of gameplay and are moving on to other genres, and I especially feel this is reinforced by the fact that many other similar “zombie infection” type games across the platform that once had similar activity are now seeing low player numbers much the same as my own game.