Overview of 2023

Every year we take some time to reflect on the achievements of the past year and the stats as a whole. Unfortunately this time around it's going to be a bit different. I relied on Google Analytics for some of these stats but as they stopped the Universal Analytics and forced the new version on everyone, I decided to stop using it. I did however create my own stats platform but this never got fully finished and became heavy with the processing of the stats. I also had to (due to hosting costs) merge all my sites under one account. Which became the deciding factor to not keep the stats platform due to how heavy it was, I did not want to take resource away from this platform with the merge. All the other sites weren't heavy at all so those didn't create any strain on the hosting. So this time around we will be using the internal stats instead.

One of the highlights I usually make in these yearly overviews is the developmental progress made over the year. This time around I can't say I've developed any major features (unfortunately the same situation as last year). There has however been a lot of under the hood changes as well as fixes and optimisations. I've always kept the discord up to date on these changes but nothing has been significant enough to update the whole site on. I do however want to be thinking more about the platform in the new year and making bigger updates. There are so many things that could be a reality on this platform.

However focusing on optimising the site has been a huge success because as far as growth goes, it has been a great year! So I started the year with doing something that did however cause us to suffer for several months at the beginning of the year and that was changing the domain name. We lost rankings immediately and for awhile, it looked like a huge mistake. Which is part of the reason my focus hasn't been there this year. However by the end of the year things have really picked up.

So let's take a look at the stats. However, keep in mind these stats are for only iDev.Games and not play.iDevGames.co.uk. Although I moved the domain in early February so only one month was missed. 

Unique Visitors - 232,669

Visitor Sessions - 335,501

Page Views - 1,899,331

Hits - 10,675,113

Members - 3,373

Games - 1,002

Tutorials - 31

Dev logs - 174

Total Game Play Time - 575 days 4 hours 47 minutes and 3 seconds

Total Game Plays - 1,088,871

Clearly we can see some very high numbers compared to last year and the majority of the biggest gains are from the visitors, sessions and views. These however will be more inflated compared to previous years due to using internal statistics instead of Google Analytics which has always been a little more refined. However hits have been done from the internal stats for many years and this is an increase of 3 million! This can at least indicate what kind of increase we have had. The internal stats could also be picking up pages like game content etc that wouldn't be picked up by Google Analytics usually so we can keep that in mind also. 

We hit the 1,000 games mark and the 3,000 members mark this year which is a fantastic achievement and shows steady growth. However I think the stats show that this year instead of it being popular with game developers (which is usually the case) it has instead been the players that have been increasing heavily. I also do think this is due to the domain name. Below you can see the clicks from Google alone this year but keep in mind that the beginning of the year wasn't the usual search volume as the site had a big dip from the domain change. We can get an idea of the progress in rankings though.

Not just this we also hit the milestone of 1 million game plays which is a real amazing achievement. Game plays nearly doubled this year when it took us 6 years to hit 600k game plays. That really is a strong point to end on.

Everything is looking like next year will be a great year! So happy new year all, let's make it the best yet!

Thanks,

-iDev