2021 in retrospect
What a year. It’s not over just yet, but Christmas is approaching at an alarming rate and there won’t be much time right before or after Christmas to publish anything, so I will do it now.
I’d like to take look back on 2021 and retrospectively examine some of the major mile stones, events we did during the year and some numbers and charts.
The “pay what you want” model
As you all know, geotastic is free2play and (currently) completely relies on a voluntary “pay what you want” model. This is one of it’s greatest strengths in terms of increasing it’s player base but also potentially it’s detriment. If not enough people are willing to support the game financially, it’s bound to fail.
Looking back at 2021, we can check whether or not the system actually worked for geotastic so far. Since the google API bills have by far the biggest impact on the monthly costs, we can ignore the rest for now.
As you can see by the diagram, I was barley able to cover the google costs with the donations from my players. Some months exceeded the costs, some did not not. December is still pending, but it doesn’t look like I can break even this month, which is already the strongest and most expensive month in the history of geotastic. I will go into more detail regarding this in some of the following paragraphs.
Discord, Twitch and Social Media
In 2021, I opened our official Discord, went deep into Twitch and created social media accounts with the help and support of the community. Especially discord and twitch did help a lot with general visibility and reach of the app. I’m lazy when it comes to social media (I only use twitter occasional) but I’m happy that there is some user interaction with those posts as well.
Our discord has 2,676 users as of the moment I’m writing this, new people joining every day. That’s roughly 7 people joining daily.
On twitch, the game does a perform steadily since it’s inclusion. It reached 208,402 unique viewers with a total of 97,736 watched hours. Those numbers are a but biased because of one very special incident, which I will go into more detail soon. The 6,219 broadcasted hours are more representative of the general performance of the game on Twitch.
Monthly community events
As the community grew during the spring, voices got louder to hold community events to play and have fun together. This was a great opportunity for me to not only get into twitch streaming to host them, but also to use the huge user base to test out how the game behaves with 100+ players in one single lobby. Usually, there are between 1 and 12 people playing simultaneously. With over 100, a lot of new problems become visible that need fixing. During the months, I used those events to identify and get rid of the most pressing issues at hand. And there have been quite a few!
The first event was in March and since then, we held a community every month, concluding this year’s event on the 23rd. This tradition will of course continue through 2022 as well.
#Geoversary birthday event
A very special event was the the first birthday of geotastic. Without much lead time, the core community behind geotastic and I planned an event to celebrate the first birthday of geotastic, which was on the 2nd of October.
Under the name #geoversary, we came up with a way to hold a 24h charity stream on twitch, splitting streaming hours between community members that wanted to participate. We chose a charity that fit well what geotastic was about: The beauty and health of our planet. With a huge following of Brazilian players, we wanted to support a charity that plants trees in Brazil to fight deforestation.
https://www.betterplace.org/de/fundraising-events/39293-geoversary-24h-geotastic-charity-event
It was a lot of work to get the event on the road in the little time we had but in retrospect, it was a huge success. We didn’t really know how much money we could raise for this cause, but in the end, we even exceeded the needed amounts to fully fund the charity.
How the second birthday in 2022 will look, you might ask yourself? No idea yet :)
Coverage by prominent twitch streamers
Having a game on twitch that can be played with your community so easily, there have been some prominent twitch streamers covering the game every once in a while or even regularly.
Aside from regular (geo)streamers like Lingualizer or Petery, geotastic was also featured by some of the Rocket Beans staff (TonyMarony32 or Grziwatzki) as well as the latest lfdw charity stream hosted by the SpaceFrages.
But the biggest surprise was the sudden geotastic stream by Gronkh, one of, if not the biggest and most influential streamer in Germany.
Every peak during the year represents a big streamer covering the game. You can try to identify the day on which Gronkh streamed the game ;)
A lot people still ask me if this actually had a noticeable impact in regards to the player base of geotastic. The answer to that is a simple No. Looking at the player statistics in geotastic, you couldn’t tell if anything special happened before or after this stream. Still, Gronkh’s community was very generous and helped getting the costs of this specific month covered with ease. And even if just a couple of players stuck after seeing it on stream, that’s already a success for such a niche game.
Self employment and financing
As of December the 1st, I’m in self employment trying to run geotastic in a way that I can cover all the costs and live off of the profits somehow. This is the most daunting task and the biggest change in my life so far. Leaving the warm and safe arms of a companies pay roll and in turn fending off bills, insurances and the German bureaucracy by myself is a scary thought but I’m still willing to take this risk and see how everything progresses during 2022.
Suddenly, just getting the google API bills covered wasn’t a feasible strategy anymore. That’s why I’m looking into ways to secure additional steady income by partnering with other companies and trying to provide additional services to companies that are in need of a remote game for special events that can be transformed and branded as needed.
One such partnership is the newly implemented wetter.de widget on the result screen of geotastic. I really love how this is not only not perceived as an annoying ad, but also improves upon the experience in general. The community perception regard this partnership is 100% positive so far. I wouldn’t want to add anything that tanks the enjoyment in any way, especially for players who support the game financially already.
2021 in a nutshell
Looking back at 2021, a lot has happened and my life has changed drastically. I’m really happy how things turned out during this year and I can’t wait to delve into 2022. I hope a lot of you stick around to see the platform grow and, hopefully, still alive and kicking even after 2022!
Merry Christmas everyone!
