If you haven’t read my previous post about Death By Scrolling way back in February, I suggest you do.
Of course this is my lazy way of doing the 2nd promised blog post for Death By Scrolling.
In all fairness, I started to write it and it seem awfully familiar so I went back and checked and sure enough I had already written about it.
But, I’ll do another real post…
I asked for beta testers on Mastodon and got close to 300 sign-ups. I didn’t want to invite everyone all at once. There is an old saying that you can only make a first impression once.
Every time I make a new beta version I invite 25 more people.
Couple of stats:
About 25% of the people never redeem the steam key. Or they redeem it weeks later. This is a little surprising, but maybe it shouldn’t be. People are busy.
Of the people who did redeem the key a third play the game once or twice and never again. This is not surprising. Death By Scrolling is a rogue-like and you die a lot. I do mean a lot, it’s right in the title. Some people do not like this type of game, and I’m OK with that.
Maybe half the people who play the game never visit the Discord. We can get only so much info from analytics. Having a conversation about what you like and don’t like is very helpful. Again, this isn’t too unexpected.
The players that do play more than a few times play a lot and that is good to see. It’s nice to see strategies emerge that we, as the designers, didn’t think of. That is always a good sign.
This is the first time I’ve done large-ish beta test for one of my games and it’s been fascinating and very insightful.
I’m about to invite the next group of 25 testers. If you’re among this group, please visit the Discord.
– Ron