Colonist.io 2021 Summary
In 2019 Colonist was a niche game with a single game mode and only the most hardcore Catan players played. In 2020 Colonist had 4 expansions and was played by many casual players. In 2021 Colonist had 8 expansions, 12 maps and most of North America knows a Colonist Player.
Hey Colonists,
We're grateful for all the support the community has provided for Colonist.
- In 2019, Colonist was a niche game with a single game mode and only the most hardcore Catan players played.
- In 2020, Colonist had 4 expansions and was played by many casual players.
- In 2021, Colonist had 8 expansions, 12 maps, and most of North America knows someone who played Colonist.
In 2022, let's make that global.
Here is a recap of 2021 and our plans for 2022.
Game Stats:
| Category | Jan 2020 | Jan 2021 | Jan 2022 |
|---|---|---|---|
| Yearly Unique Players | 🤷 | 1,669,863 | 1,972,919 |
| Monthly Active Users | 53,471 | 701,851 | 714,110 |
| New Registered Players | 6984 | 287,733 | 182,259 |
| Games Played | 🤷 | 13,833,827 | 19,334,709 |
| Years of Game Time | 37 | 461 | 535 |
| Average Minutes Per Game | 🤷 | 17 | 15 |
This year we’ve released 28 versions with lots of fixes & features.
The pandemic slowing down decreased our traffic. This year at our peak we had 5200 concurrent users, compared to 9000 last year.
This year Meron, Mayla & Sam joined our team increasing the speed and quality of our work.
We did our first Colonist Con online and streamed it, here is a video if you missed it.
Some of the big things we did in 2021:
- We completed the most requested feature which was the Cities & Knights expansion and other variants of the expansion
- We stabilized the server and connections
- We added matchmaking
- We redesigned the landing page and lobby
Development Stats:
| Category | Jan 2021 | Jan 2022 |
|---|---|---|
| Days in development | 830 | 1,195 |
| Public release versions | 97 | 122.1 |
| Lines of TS code | 55,042 | 81,709 |
| Lines of TS tests | 20,752 | 24,442 |
| Total lines of TS Code | 75,794 | 106,151 (10 average books) |
| Words in patch notes | 9,136 | 10,481 |
| Suggestions done | 219 | 268 (Worked on big suggestions this year) |
| Team size | 4 | 7 |
This leads to different kinds of comparisons:
| Category | Jan 2021 | Jan 2022 |
|---|---|---|
| Lines of code per user | 0.26 | 0.14 |
| Years of game time per resolved suggestion | 2.1 | 10.9 |
| Days of game time for each line of code | 2.2 | 1.8 |
This shows that making changes, improving things, and fixing even small annoyances in the game is worth it. - Kovarex
Colonist Social Stats:
| Category | Jan 2020 | Jan 2021 | Jan 2022 |
|---|---|---|---|
| Discord Members | ~2,000 | 18,489 | 15,017 |
| r/Colonist Members | 36 | 574 | 1,034 |
| Twitter Followers | ~50 | 292 | 476 |
| Instagram Followers | ~50 | 325 | 2,432 |
| Youtube Subscribers | 16 | 72 | 941 |
| Twitch Followers | 0 | 400 | 757 |
We received huge support from the community, helping organize tournaments, find bugs, give support, and so on.
Colonist Community Stats:
| Category | Jan 2020 | Jan 2021 | Jan 2022 |
|---|---|---|---|
| r/Catan Members | 22,718 | 34,584 | 44,055 |
| DyLighted - Catan | 1,820 | 24,000 | 45,600 |
| Neonate Gaming | 2,310 | 3,150 | 3,230 |
| Treeckosaurus Gaming | 429 | 1,800 | 2,710 |
In 2021, the first 2 Colonist/Catan YouTubers made it their full-time job. In 2022, we're expecting at least a few more people to pass that milestone.
2022 Plans:
Here is our public to-do list. This year we'll work on improving the game experience, the end game screen, adding ranked mode, friends system, toxicity management system, and translations into other languages. We're unfortunately not going to do a mobile version until we make the web version perfect.
Want to help us accomplish these goals? We're looking to increase the size of our team.