Retention: The Most Important Number You Are Not Paying Attention To

Player retention, measured primarily through median playtime, is argued to be the most overlooked metric in game marketing, because promotion is wasted if players quickly abandon a game. The author compares marketing a poorly retaining game to pouring milk into a leaky pail, and contends that bad retention leads directly to bad sales. While mobile developers track daily return rates, PC players engage in longer sessions, so playtime is the more relevant measure. Longer playtimes also encourage streamers to produce multiple videos, and Steam's systems, including friend-activity popups, hour-stamped reviews, and review prompts after set playtime thresholds, quietly reward games that hold attention. Multiplayer titles depend on retention even more to sustain concurrent player pools.

Developers can find median time played in Steamworks under Financial Info, with a breakdown showing when players stopped. The author's early, informal survey of 26 games with demos found a median playtime of just 14 minutes, with the bottom 30% at 10 minutes or less. Games with longer median playtimes tended to have more wishlists, though the sample is too small to establish correlation. Peglin, with a 67-minute median and over 44,000 wishlists, illustrates the effect: streamer coverage produced multiple videos, including one with 154K views and a follow-up with 61K.

For linear narrative games, raw playtime matters less than the gap between intended and actual playtime. Do NOT Buy This Game, designed as a 15-minute demo, showed a 17-minute median and about 42,000 wishlists, suggesting players completed it and sometimes replayed it. A Short Hike and Unpacking are cited as short games that sold well.

For low retention, the author recommends three diagnostics: adding analytics events to locate drop-off points, observing playtests with unbiased strangers, and taking critical beta feedback seriously rather than dismissing it. The author closes by urging developers with demos to contribute to the ongoing survey, and stresses that retention deserves as much attention as wishlists, particularly when building a pre-launch community.