Member-only story
User numbers, you and the fail whale
I haven’t written a blog in a long time because things have been a bit crazy around here — in a good way. In six months, user numbers for Forgotten Trail are up 400%, for Making Camp Premium, 600%, for Making Camp Bilingual, users have doubled.
Every day something new pops up. It reminds me of when I joined Twitter, back in 2008. Maybe you haven’t been on twitter for that long, or maybe all you know about it is that it helped someone get enough visibility to be elected president. Well, those of us who were on Twitter in the early days remember the “Fail Whale”.
Why the Fail Whale Was a Good Sign
The ‘fail whale’ -a picture of a whale being held up by a bunch of birds and nets — is what you saw when there were so many people trying to get on Twitter at the same time that there servers would get overloaded and you couldn’t get on the site. It annoyed a lot of people, including me, but it also showed how many people wanted an app that was easier to use than blogging to connect with a lot of people.
These days, I feel as if 7 Generation Games is in the same boat. When you have four or six times as many people using your products you need to increase your staff, and quickly.
