Roguelites usually have huge replayability, as their gameplay loop motivates players to come back to them over and over again. Indie developer a327ex, who created SNKRX, decided to compare his game’s playtime stats to similar titles on Steam.
a327ex’s post was highlighted in the latest GameDiscoveryCo newsletter. He created a spreadsheet to see how much time users spent in SNKRX compared to games like Slay the Spire, Nova Drift, and One Step From Eden.
Added play time stats for 3 more games: One Step From Eden, Slay the Spire and Nova Drift. Slay the Spire’s numbers are really impressive and I assume for the other big roguelites (Isaac, RoR2, Hades, etc) it’s the same thing. pic.twitter.com/HTRYGfansv
— ͏ (@a327ex) August 23, 2021
For example, 50% of users played SNKRX for at least 5 hours, with a median playtime of 5.1 hours. Those are pretty good numbers for a small game with replayable elements.
The absolute leader on the list, however, is Slay the Spire. It has a median playtime of 34.7 hours, which is quite impressive. 40% of users played it for at least 50 hours, and 22% of them played the game for 100+ hours.
“I sort of intuitively understood that for roguelites, retention mattered a lot but I never got to see it clearly laid out like this,” a327ex commented.”
Metrics like playtime, retention, and engagement, of course, might vary from genre to genre, so developers should compare numbers for their games with similar titles. As Simon Carless pointed out in his newsletter, “don’t be intimidated if you see these stats, compare them to your own game, and yours comes up short.”