Making a game 10x faster changes how people play it
Basketball GM 4.0 was released a week ago. It made game simulation about 10x faster. After releasing it, I was very curious how players would respond. If they played the same amount of time, they could simulate 10 times more seasons. Or they could play 1/10 of the time, but simulate the same amount of seasons. Or something in between. Or maybe they'd even change how they play, like focusing more or less on the details of the game.
Let's look at some numbers.
| Last Week | This Week | % Change | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Users | 7,567 | 8,542 | 12.88% |
| Sessions | 28,595 | 31,488 | 10.12% |
| Pageviews | 2,015,921 | 2,834,360 | 40.60% |
| Pages / Session | 70.5 | 90.01 | 27.67% |
| Avg Session Duration (minutes) | 30.25 | 27.5 | -9.09% |
| New Leagues | 10,172 | 15,360 | 51.00% |
| Completed Seasons | 37,145 | 70,436 | 89.62% |
The biggest change is that nearly twice as many seasons were played. And since the number of new leagues went up only 51%, it suggests that people are playing more seasons per league, which makes sense.
The other interesting thing is that while pageviews per session are up 28%, suggesting that users are doing more stuff per session, the actual time played per session is down by 3 minutes. So more is being done in less time.
How has version 4.0 changed how you play? Let me know on Reddit.
