See who played: private analytics for your arcade

Your arcade has had an address since the day you claimed it. As of this week it also has a counter. Open the studio and, above your games, there is a panel that says how many people opened your arcade, how many of them started a game, which games they chose, how long they stayed, and whether they were playing in a browser, on a Windows build you exported, or on a phone. Only you can see it. The arcade itself shows nothing.

This post covers what the panel shows, where every number comes from, and the list of things it was deliberately built not to do.

What you can see

The panel reads over the last 7, 30 or 90 days, and the whole thing fits in one glance:

• Views. Times your arcade page was opened.
• Players. Distinct people, counted once per day. Two hundred reloads by one bored friend is two hundred views and one player.
• Plays. Games started, wherever they were started: on the arcade, from a link straight to the game, or in a desktop or mobile build.
• Played. Total time people spent inside your games. Hours, once there are any.
• A daily chart. Plays as bars with views washed in behind them. No axis, on purpose: it answers "is this going up", and the numbers above it answer the rest.
• Your top games. The five most played over the range, with plays and playtime each. Every game card in the grid also carries its own small play count, so reordering your arcade becomes an informed decision rather than a guess.
• Where they played. Arcade, direct link, Windows, macOS, Linux, Android, iOS, split out.

An arcade that has had no visitors yet says so, with the link to share. Every number here is real from the first visitor: nothing is estimated, sampled or modelled.

Where the numbers come from

Two things report in, and they never overlap.

The arcade page counts its own views and the games it launches in its player overlay. When someone closes the game, or closes the tab with the game still open, the page sends how long the session ran.

The game itself covers everywhere else. Every build the studio makes now carries a very small reporter, a few dozen lines that ship inside the game the way its controls and its cover art do. When the game boots outside the arcade page, it reports one play, and every couple of minutes while it runs it reports another slice of playtime. That is how a game opened from a link someone pasted into a group chat gets counted, and it is how a Windows, macOS, Linux, Android or iOS build from the Publish pane gets counted: the same reporter, with the platform's name attached. Inside the arcade page it stays quiet, because the page is already counting that play, so nothing is counted twice.

Playtime arrives in slices rather than as a total at the end for a plain reason: no platform lets a program send a message while it is being closed, and most game sessions end by closing the window. Reporting every couple of minutes means a session loses at most its last slice.

Two more exclusions keep the numbers honest. Your own previews inside the studio are not players, so the reporter ignores them. And the browser the studio uses to test every build before you see it plays the game too, so the reporter ignores that as well. What you see is people.

What it deliberately does not do

The easiest way to build this would have been to paste a third-party analytics script into every game and every arcade page. That script would have set cookies, followed your players across every other site that uses it, and handed the data to a company whose product is knowing who those people are. So the arcade uses none of that. Instead:

• No cookies, no consent banner. Nothing is stored in a visitor's browser.
• No addresses kept. To tell one hundred people from one hundred reloads, each visitor is reduced to a hash of their network address and browser that changes every day. Yesterday's hash cannot be matched to today's, so a player cannot be followed from one day to the next, and the hashes themselves are discarded within days.
• No profiles. There is no per-player view, no list of who played, and no "this player came back". The counts are the data. There is nothing else.
• No public numbers. The arcade page does not show play counts, and the games are not ranked by them. The panel is yours. This is the same decision as not having a feed: the moment a number is public, it starts deciding what gets made.
• Nothing about the game. The reporter sends "a game started" and "two more minutes". Not what happened in the game, not the score, not the inputs, not the device beyond its platform name.

The whole reporter is a handful of counters that go up. That is a smaller surface than almost any analytics product, and it is the reason the arcade can offer this without a privacy policy the length of a novel.

How to read it

A few things worth knowing so the numbers say what you think they say.

Views, players and plays are three different questions. Views is how often the door opened. Players is how many people came through it. Plays is how many times someone sat down at a machine. A healthy arcade has plays higher than players, because people try more than one game.

Days are in universal time. Everyone's arcade uses one clock, so a play at 11pm in one place and 8am in another land on the days you would expect after a moment's thought, and yesterday's numbers never move.

A single sitting is capped at four hours. A tab left open overnight is not playtime, and the cap keeps one forgotten window from adding a working day to your total.

Older builds report from their next build. The reporter ships inside the game, so a desktop or mobile export made before this week does not carry it. The next export does, and the web build is refreshed the next time you change the game. Plays on the arcade page itself count from today regardless.

A flood is not traffic. Each visitor can contribute a generous but finite number of events per day, and anything past that is dropped. A script hammering your arcade will not inflate it, and neither will a friend who thinks it is funny.

Why it lives in the studio

It would have been easy to put a play count under every cover on the arcade, and there is a version of this product where that is the obvious move. It was not built, for the same reason the arcade has no feed. A public number is a ranking, a ranking is an incentive, and an incentive is a collaborator on everything you make afterwards. Your arcade is a place you send people, not a chart they vote on.

The number you see privately is different. It tells you the link you put in a bio is being opened, that the game you were unsure about is the one people keep choosing, that someone in a time zone you do not live in played for forty minutes on a Tuesday. That is the feedback a maker actually wants, and it does not need to be anyone else's business.

Try it

Open the studio. If your arcade has been shared, the panel already has numbers in it. If it has not, send the link to one person tonight and look again tomorrow morning.