Overview of 2022
It's time for us to take a look at 2022 and the stats we've achieved. Usually I do this before the new year but this time I'm a little late.
This year has been different as I've literally spent zero time on new features that I can recall. Which has actually been important as my focus has been on improving what we have and getting things where they need to be for new growth in the new year.
The changes have included design, structural and general optimisations So one of the major changes has been optimisations which I have focused on removing database calls as there isn't much else I can do for speed, other then remove functionality. Luckily for me, this change was very effective. Database calls hasn't been something I needed to worry about up until now but what actually turned out to be very important was the statistics being shown in the header of every page. This information can still be found across the site but isolated to pages that collects such data already. So for instance on the game page tells you how many games there are in total or on the dedicated stats pages that are now in the footer. These stats were previously having to do heavy database calls on every page. Actually it was even worse then that. It was also doing these database calls on every API call too. Creating a delay across the site. By stopping this retrieval of data it has made a huge difference across the site, especially pages that do not require any contact to the database.
This then brought on a redesign of the header. Something that hasn't changed from pretty much inception of the platform. Except for the complete overhaul of the design in the alpha. Although I don't imagine anyone saw that design? I also changed the structure to take the login form out of the header and into its own separate page and creating a layout specifically for the login forms. Also a recent redevelopment of the sitemap generation script have appeared to of gone down well with Google.
There's been a lot more then this and if you've been with us over the past year you'll of seen these changes being made. Although I don't usually talk in the overview about the games I develop, this time I think it is important for me to mention. As this year I took a step in a new direction and that has took up a lot of my time too. I decided to start pursuing game development within a new engine, cocos creator, which I'm interested in for its 3D capabilities and their focus on being the engine for web/mobile games. They have already had an interview with me which you can read here, I've spoke a lot about our platform as usual.
Ok so anyway. Let's get into the stats!
Unique Visitors - 74,360
Visitor Sessions - 93,309
Page Views - 255,877
Hits - 7,032,626
Members - 2,847
Games - 882
Tutorials - 25
Dev logs - 168
Total Game Play Time - 409 days 10 hours 57 minutes
Total Game Plays - 616,730
Over all the stats have improved over last years here. Most notably, doubling the amount of plays and play time!
It's been a great year for our platform and I think we are heading into 2023 in the best position possible. I think the changes of last year will spur on some amazing growth this year, only time will tell.
As always, congrats to everyone for their personal achievements in 2022. I have a feeling 2023 will be a great year for us all.
Happy new year all!
Thanks,
-iDev