I share usage numbers for Shmeppy on Discord fairly often, but I can’t really compare them to other VTTs because I haven’t seen those VTTs publish those numbers.
Roll20 mentions that they have 5 million “users” on their homepage, but that doesn’t take account activity into account (like I think I have 3 accounts on Roll20 and I haven’t used any of them for a very long time), so it’s a pretty meaningless number. I haven’t seen usage numbers for any other VTTs.
Why not? Is there some reason for not sharing these numbers that hasn’t occurred to me?
Also, in case you’re curious, here’s the latest numbers for Shmeppy. Though a couple notes for understanding these graphs:
- A convocation is defined (roughly) as a session with 2 or more people actively using a map for a contiguous period of at least 30 minutes. Essentially, a convocation is intended to be an actual game being played with Shmeppy, and excludes folks who’re just messing around with Shmeppy (or even just designing a map for a later game).
- The two convocation bar charts are “in progress” charts, so the rightmost bar is the in-progress partial data for this month (which is why it’s much smaller).
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I posted this to Reddit and some other VTT maintainers weighed in a bit.
I’m definitely part of that quarantine uptick and I’m here to stay. Shmeppy might just replace my physical wet erase mat even when we’re all back at the table, I enjoy it that much.
With that said, I’m sure the general trend in your graphs is right but I don’t know how accurate the individual numbers are, for two reasons:
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I have been making maps with my main account on one screen and a dummy player account on the other just to make sure fog/edging looks as intended. This is obviously no longer an issue with “view as player” dropping this week, which I’m very excited to see, but it’s something to consider for the timeframe you’ve got here.
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Not all of my players have their own account, and I’m sure that’s the case for anyone else who is quarantined together. Moreover, once we are back at the table, I will be using just one player account to show the map to the table while I run the game from my main account behind the screen.
Ultimately I think you’re going to have the same issue as the Arkenforge people in that reddit thread; it’s just impossible to extrapolate reliable numbers given the way(s) people use this service. But I hope the trend continues and you hit all your development goals because I’m really enjoying my experience so far.
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