User game time now recorded and displayed on game pages

This is not a huge update but I have a couple of changes I've made recently which are worth talking about. Earlier this week I did tweet out about this change but I thought I would mention it here too in case you missed it. I've now improved the member list pages such as when you search for a profile or look at the last online or latest members. This now includes the logo, profile type, the user's level and when they were last online. I feel this is some quick information that was needed and looks nicer too.

Although I have just made a different update that I wanted to quickly talk about. The update I have just made I think has been a missed opportunity until now. As I've mentioned in the past I find the statistic of time so important to gauge user engagement. It's great to say you have 200 plays on your game but realistically that could have been 2 minutes worth of game play. As a developer that doesn't gauge it's worth very well. So for me I like to say if I spent 8 hours on the weekend creating a game. If it get's 8+ hours of players playing it, it feels like the game was worth building. Although it sounds silly, as a developer I find it a great metric. Which is why I added it in the first place. Which explains why we have our total game play time displayed in the footer of the site. This to me, is a badge of honor for our community. I find it hard to believe when I added this metric to the footer I was shocked to find we had only delivered just under 3 days solid of game play to our players. I mean we had to of been recording this data for 1 to 2 years at this point. I expected it to be a few days higher at least.

That being said we have at the time of writing this delivered 63 days! That's 2 solid months of game play delivered and sure we may be talking about 10's of 1000's of players across 400+ games but that would have been over the space of 1 to 2 years since adding it. Which really puts it into perspective as the previous time had been over a similar period with a time of only 3 days delivered. As I said, I find this metric to be important but until now I only considered it from a developers point of view. 

So now we have started to track time associated to a signed in user. Meaning when you play a game you will now see displayed under the game title the time you have spent playing that game. If you haven't played that game before then you won't see any time for the game. As we were only tracking the time without associating to your account before it will mean this will come into affect from now. Which means you won't have any time displayed for previously playing the game up until today's update. 

The importance of this will be bringing perspective for individual users to know how much time they spent playing a game. We can also use this data in different ways. We could start recording when a member starts playing a game as well and add it as a list on the profile ordering by time spent playing the game, like steam does.

It's a small update for now but hopefully we will see more small updates like this while I work on dungeon deathmatch, a game I have in the works!

Thanks,

-iDev

Edit: I decided to go ahead and add a profile page for played games. It will now add any game you play to this tab in your profile and list them by time played. This will also be the new default page for when you visit a gamer's profile.