Game Jolt is propelling forward as one of the biggest gaming sites in the world, all while focusing solely on indie games. We’ve been around in one form or another since 2002, as one of the first indie platforms in existence. If you’re not sure who we are, or what Game Jolt is, check out our about us page.
In-depth stats with commentary start here, so if you’d rather just see the raw numbers, scroll all the way down. Don’t worry, you won’t be hurting any feelings.
Let’s Begin…
Since 2009 (when we started tracking traffic), Game Jolt’s page views have been growing at an average annual rate of 45% and unique users at 41%.
In 2016 we had ~330 million page views. An average of 5.42 pages were viewed per visit, and each session lasted for about 4:57 minutes. ~130 million of these views were of game pages. We don’t log game views from the same IP for 5 minutes and we weed out traffic from bots.
For developers, we released a better analytics system in 2016, so if you’d like to see detailed data for your own games, be sure to check it out in your game dashboards.
Another key takeaway is the bump in pages/visit we got after launching the full rebuild of the site mid-2015. On average, across all visits, we grew by an extra page/visit. Users are interacting more with the site than they ever have been because of the changes we’ve made.
In 2016, 30 million unique visitors visited the site. This resulted in 48 million game downloads/browser plays for 2016 alone.
A membership is not required to play and discover games on Game Jolt. Even so, we gained 600k new members in 2016, compared to 400k new members in 2015, an increase of 31% new members gained in a year. This is exciting because Game Jolt members, in contrast to all traffic, visit twice as many pages and stick around twice as long per session at 9.34 pages and 9:22 minutes.
Interaction
Our key goals are to get more gamers interacting with developers, to build communities around indie games, and to create a culture of supporting one another.
In 2016, members followed 1 million new games to receive updates and news about their development. There’s also been 1 million comments on game pages, in 85 different languages. This would normally be a hassle for developers and users, but in 2016 we released a translation feature to translate all comments into your current language.
150k new playlists were added, and 250k games were added into playlists. People are using Game Jolt to organize their libraries and keep track of games.
Games
There are nearly 80,000 total published games on Game Jolt now.
However, if we were to include unpublished and removed game pages, we’ve had 128K games added to Game Jolt in 2016 alone!
As a random aside, 410k soundtracks were downloaded over the year. That’s a lot more than I would’ve thought and shows that even the “additional” features on Game Jolt can get a lot of use. We didn’t track the number of songs played, but now I wish I had.
We now store 22TB of games, and transferred 6.4 petabytes of data in 2016. I gave up trying to measure that in tons of pizzas…
Let’s Players
At the end of June last year, we enabled YouTube account linking for let’s players to cross promote their videos on game pages, which resulted in 20k new video comments. This feature allows Game Jolters to discover new let’s players who in turn send traffic back to the developer’s game page.
If you’re a let’s player and aren’t using this yet, you should consider it! There’s been 430k YouTube videos viewed through video comments. This is more than I thought there’d be, especially considering we just launched it in the middle of the year.
Devlogs
We released devlogs in early August for developers to grow an audience while working on their games by easily sharing screenshots, updates and videos. I really want this feature to be used since it can be an amazing way to build a community and audience around your games before they’re launched.
Well, looks like it’s working! There have been 43.6 million devlog post views and 5.4 million interactions (e.g. clicks on something in the post, expanding to read more, etc.)
I’m looking forward to getting these numbers up even more in 2017. Building an audience is a huge challenge for many developers. The more developers using something like Game Jolt devlogs for their development, the more gamers will come, and the traffic resulting from popular devlogs will overflow to highlight smaller devs.
Game Jolt Client
We launched our desktop application, Game Jolt Client, December of 2015. Since then, we’ve had over half a million downloads of it and about a million games installed through the client. We’re projecting to hit a million Client downloads in just a few months!
Game API
Our Game API enables developers to add trophies, leaderboards, cloud data storage, and sessions to their games. In 2016, there were 128,779 hours logged in game api sessions. This is pretty cool, considering it’s a completely optional feature that developers can implement into their Game Jolt games. 352,653 trophies were achieved by gamers during the year, 198,345 new data store items were added, and a whopping 6,027,154 new scores were added.
Discoverability
Game discoverability is a constant and ongoing focus for us. For example, in July we encouraged traffic to more games by improving the recommendation feature on game pages, better tailoring its suggestions to an individual gamer’s interests. Since then, there’s been 724K clicks per month to other games through recommended.
So, why is any of this a big deal? Even though Game Jolt isn’t some huge company and largely flies under the radar of press, we managed to help developers get Kickstarted, Greenlit, published and even hired by celebrities. Being an inclusive and open platform—obsessively focused on all indies (big and small) allowed us to accomplish all of this. A look at 2016’s stats show that with a supportive community we have a massive potential to help indies make a living. That’s what 2017 will be about.
What’s next?
In 2017, with your help, we’ll work on converting these massive numbers into sales on the marketplace so that indie developers can stay indie. We also have many new/requested features, fixes, and improvements lined up, so stay tuned for more information on those!
Since our marketplace is very new and was only accessible for most of 2016 by a select group of folks, check back for a later review for marketplace stats.
We’re still sorting the overwhelming requests from 1,300+ YouTube and Twitch let’s players for the Partner Program we launched during the holidays, so we’ll have numbers to share next year!
2016 was a special year for us at “HQ”. While Yaprak and I ran Game Jolt from a different country each month, we got to meet a lot of you. Thank you for sharing stories on how Game Jolt has touched your hearts and for your contagious enthusiasm for what we do. We work tirelessly and your kindness is the fuel that keeps us going.
If you like what we’re doing and want to help us support more developers financially, add your game to the site! And if you’re a gamer, consider supporting games on the site by buying them! We give at least 90% of each game sale to the developer. On Game Jolt, indies get more money per sale than most platforms.
Just the numbers
This is a lot of info to take in all at once, so here’s a cheat sheet:
330M total page views
130M game page views
30M unique visitors
5.5 pages visited per session (avg)
4.57 minutes per visit (avg)
48M game plays
128K games added (including hidden and removed pages)
80K total published games to date
22TB total data stored to date
6.4 petabytes of data transferred
410 game soundtracks added
430K video comments viewed
562 games removed by Nintendo DMCA: 562
Game API
128,779 hours logged in 2016 for game api sessions
352,653 trophies achieved via game api
198,345 data store items added
6,027,154 scores logged
Game Jolt Members in 2016
Note: Membership is not required to play and discover games on Game Jolt.
31% increase in signups from 2015
70M page views in 2016
9:22 minutes session duration
9.34 pages viewed per session
1M game follows
1M comments
20K video comments from linked YouTube and Twitch accounts
150K playlists created
250K games added to playlists
Devlogs
Launched August 2016
43.6 million devlog post views
5.4 million post interactions: clicks/expands
Game Jolt Client
538K downloads
Features shipped in 2016
Simplified upload process
…and a bunch of features that I was too lazy to write a post about (sorry).
Stay indie, my froggie friends!
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