I launched games-by-will.com in late March with eight browser games. Six months later I have actual data instead of guesses, and this is what it says.
The numbers
A few thousand people found the site. Roughly half came back more than once. Average engagement time landed around a minute and a half, which is long enough that people were doing something rather than bouncing. I will take it.
Traffic is mostly direct -- about half of sessions arrive with no referrer. Reddit and GitHub account for most of the rest. At some point, a session arrived via chatgpt.com/ai-assistant. I am choosing to take this as a compliment.
What people played
Renter's Revenge was the clear winner, accounting for roughly a quarter of all game traffic on its own. A game about surviving as a renter in a city designed to extract money from you turned out to have broad appeal. I am not sure what to do with this information.
25th Amendment and Redundancy ran close behind it. The rest of the catalog spread out more or less evenly, with Math Blitz at the bottom -- though it has the longest tenure on the site, so it has had more time to accumulate dust.
Games with more mechanical depth, like Redundancy and Lich's Dungeon, showed longer engagement times even when they had fewer total visits. People who found those games stayed.
The leaderboards
Five games have live leaderboards. Here is what the best players have managed:
Renter's Revenge: The top tenant has survived 72 months. That is six years of tenancy in a game where the landlord is actively trying to evict you. The median player does not make it to six months.
Never Enough: The top score is in the trillions. The game is a critique of wealth accumulation under late capitalism. Someone appears to have won it.
Redundancy: Two players are tied for the most days survived on a performance improvement plan. The game ends when you get fired. They have not been fired yet.
25th Amendment: The top player has outlasted me. I made the game and I am losing to someone I have never met.
One player has made the top ten on three different leaderboards. That person is playing more of these games than I am.
A note on the data: some leaderboard entries show the same player appearing more than once. This is a residual artifact of a bug I fixed earlier this year. I wrote about it here.
What's next
The site is stable. The games work. The people who show up tend to stay for a while. I will keep adding games -- a ninth one is in progress -- and keep writing these posts.
If you have played any of these and have thoughts, the contact page exists.