I sped my strategy game up to respect players' time. It backfired.
TL;DR: A month ago I was at 400 visitors and 15 daily players, and set myself a target of 20. I hit it. A marketing push held it around 50 for a few weeks, then it slid back to 20. I ran an anonymous survey to work out why, and the option people kept picking was “too demanding.” I’d sped the game up to respect people’s time. It turns out I’d built anxiety into it instead, and I never felt it because I play casually.
The update first
Last time I posted an update I was a month in. 400 visitors, 15 daily players, and a goal of getting to 20.
I got there. Then I pushed harder, ran a marketing push, and held daily players around 50 for a few weeks. That’s the good news. The honest news is it didn’t hold. It drifted back down and is now sitting around 20, which is exactly where I set the original target.
So I hit the target twice. Once by overshooting it, once by sliding back to it. The number is fine. The trend is the thing I have to deal with.
I’d already seen the shape of it earlier and not understood it. New players would take their first island after a few days, then rush to a second, a third, and then tumbleweed. Gone. I didn’t expect that, mostly because I don’t play like that myself, so it didn’t occur to me that the game was pushing people to.
The challenge: why won’t it stick?
A spike that decays isn’t something you can guess your way out of, so I ran a survey. Anonymous, with a set of reasons people could pick from. One of the options was that the game is too demanding.
People picked it. And a few said it to me directly, in plain words: they don’t have the time to play it.
That landed hard, because of what I thought I’d done. The game is built in the spirit of an old browser strategy game where things took a full day. I sped that up. At 1x it felt slow and boring when I was beta testing it on my own, so about a week in I sped the whole thing up. Builds and timers that used to take a day now take a few hours. In my head that was a kindness. Busy lives, so make the game ask less.
The thing I got backwards
The audience that turned up is mostly people who played the original twenty-odd years ago. They’re in their 40s now. Jobs, kids, the dog.
Speed and time pull in opposite directions, and I had it exactly wrong:
- The original was a true slow burn. Set a build going, log off, come back tomorrow. One check-in a day. It fit around a life.
- My faster version resolves things in a few hours. So the best way to play is to check in every few hours. It asks for more sessions, not fewer.
I’d sped the game up to respect people’s time, and what I’d actually built was a game that quietly demands you keep coming back. I never felt it, because I play casually and drop in when I feel like it. The survey told me what I’d missed. For players with the least free time of anyone, I’d manufactured FOMO. The nagging sense that you’re falling behind if you put the kids to bed instead of checking your island. Faster didn’t mean lighter. Faster meant needier.
The fix isn’t “make it slow again”
The easy read is “revert to the original speed.” I don’t think that’s right. A pure slow burn would lose the other half of the players, the ones who’d quit out of boredom before the first war. So I’m not touching the global speed.
Instead I’m working through a backlog of balance changes, each tagged and released a few at a time so I can see what each one does. The direction is to make stepping away cost less and make a loss actually weigh something.
A couple of the concrete moves:
- Troops were too cheap. You could throw catapults at a problem and not think about it, which means a war costs almost nothing and the game never lets up. I’ve started capping them to your barracks level. Still monitoring whether that’s enough.
- I might slow ship speeds next. Long fleet times are one of the honest ways an old browser game made you put it down and come back later. Worth getting back.
Not every change lands the first time. I rebalanced the coins in the bazaar so people had to choose what to spend on instead of buying everything and still having coins left over. Some players didn’t like it and said so. I’d actually tuned it so higher levels earn more, it just costs more too, which is hard to feel from the inside. So I left the complaints alone and looked at the data a week later. Bazaar purchases were down, but coins were being spent elsewhere, and the marketplace was starting to work the way I wanted. Data decides that one, not the loudest message.
What I took from it
The lesson I didn’t expect: “respect the player’s time” and “make the game faster” are not the same sentence. For a busy audience they can be opposites.
Speed sets your check-in cadence. A fast game quietly demands attention while telling you it’s saving you time. The way to actually respect a player with a full life isn’t to make the game quick. It’s to make stepping away from it cost nothing.
I’d rather have a game my players can fit around bedtime than one that punishes them for putting the kids to bed.
Inselnova is a free browser strategy game. Play here.
