Publishing lessons

Every year I send out a demographic survey to learn more about my community and today I’d like to share some of the results from 2023.

You can find the 2022 results here.

The survey is sent to people who subscribe to my newsletter, and this year 1,718 people completed it.

Please keep in mind there was an incentive to complete the survey with 5 people receiving £75 vouchers for The City of Games store.

The goal

The survey has 2 purposes:

• I want to better understand the people who are buying my games.
• I want to better understand what my community would like to see in the future.

This helps me to make sure my games are widely available to as many people as possible, and also helps steer the direction I move in the future regarding new games, expansions, and other items.

The people

This year there were 2 noticeable differences in the people filling in the survey:

• The average age increased by 5 years, with over 50% of people being over 40.
• The average collection size increased with 10% more people choosing 101+.

There was no noticeable change in gender, location, or player counts from 2022.

Social platforms

A new question in 2022 asked people which social platforms they were currently using. As I look to increase my efforts in social media this year, it made sense to see where to put the most effort.

A few thoughts:

• While I currently have a YouTube channel, I typically only produce content around my game releases and with so many people using YouTube maybe this is something I should look into changing.
• Instagram is considerably more popular than Twitter, yet I have focussed more on Twitter over the years. For 2023 I plan to revisit the way I use Instagram and start using it more frequently.

Other takeaways

• The biggest surprise in the survey this year was 94% of people who owned The City of Kings said they would like to see a new expansion. For other games this was much closer to 50%.
• A lot of people suggested they would like to see a new co-operative game which I hope Race to the Raft (releasing soon) will accommodate.
• There were a number of requests to learn more about The City of Kings universe as a whole.

Overall, it was great to see so many positive comments and I look forward to being able to provide some of the requested items during 2023.