Posts tagged "Milestone"


2023 traffic stats

January 1, 2024-

Every year I post some traffic stats here. It's a fun tradition because the numbers keep going up. I'm sure that won't last forever, but it did for 2023. For the 11th consecutive year, my games have grown in popularity!

Total play time was 453 years. That means that every day, more than a year's worth of time was spent playing my games. Or another way to look at it is that, for the entire year, every second of every day, an average of 453 people were playing a ZenGM game.

Basketball GM is still by far my most popular game and grew the largest in absolute terms (number of users or amount of time played), but the small ones ZenGM Baseball and ZenGM Hockey grew at the fastest rate. Overall, play time increased by 15% over last year.

I am very grateful for the love and support you guys constantly show me. Thank you for helping ZenGM have yet another successful year!

2023 traffic stats:

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2022 annual recap and traffic stats

January 1, 2023-

Every year I post some traffic stats here. It's a fun tradition because the numbers keep going up. I'm sure that won't last forever, but it did for 2022!

Some nice milestones that were achieved last year:

In addition to record traffic at all the games, 2022 also saw the release of the new ZenGM Baseball game and many updates to all of the ZenGM games. What will next year bring? Updates to the existing games, of course. But I've also been working on a new game that is pretty different from my existing games. Sadly it's still a bit too early to say more!

And as I always say, I am eternally grateful for the love and support you guys constantly show me. Thank you for helping ZenGM have yet another successful year!

2022 traffic stats:

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ZenGM Baseball

June 22, 2022-

When I was a kid, I was obsessed with baseball. My dad says this dates back to watching the Mets win the 1986 World Series when I was a baby, but I don't remember that. I do remember my favorite childhood book. This was back before normal people had the Internet, and sites like baseball-reference didn't exist yet. But I had this giant book of baseball stats going back to the beginning of professional baseball. Just page after page of tables - standings, stats, playoff results, awards, etc. I would sit there reading those tables of stats without ever getting bored.

Baseball simulation games are the type of thing that a kid like me would get obsessed with. Except, they didn't exist yet. Well, they did exist even before computers as tabletop games, but I didn't know about them. The first real baseball simulation game that I heard of was Baseball Mogul back in the late 90s. It's still being updated today, you should check it out. I've talked about Baseball Mogul before as a big inspiration for Basketball GM, since as a got older I grew to like basketball more than baseball and I wanted a similar game for basketball.

And yet, baseball still exists, and there's still nothing quite like watching a good baseball game. After making football and hockey versions of Basketball GM, it's only natural to use that infrastructure for my first love, the only remaining major American sport.

So here it is: ZenGM Baseball

I've been working on this the past few months, which is why updates to the other games have been slow. Expect those updates to return to their normal pace soon.

ZenGM Baseball is definitely not perfect. But I did get a lot of help beta testing it from users on Discord, so hopefully it's at least somewhat good. As always, feedback is welcome.

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2021 was another great year for ZenGM

January 1, 2022-

Happy New Year!

2021 was the year of the variants. Here at ZenGM a new hockey variant escaped from our lab, and the existing basketball and football variants continued to evolve and spread throughout the population:

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Basketball GM is now my full time job

January 29, 2021-

I started working on Basketball GM back when I was in college, in 2008. It was an on-again off-again hobby until 2012, when I got this crazy idea to make the whole game run in a web browser. In 2013 it got its first bit of publicity. That felt incredible at the time. I went from basically no users for years, to thousands of people trying my game in a single day! Sure, within a few days almost all of that traffic disappeared, but still! Thousands!

Social media buzz is a crazy thing. Even crazier is that in 2021, every single day BBGM gets more traffic than it did on its first "big" day in 2013.

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2020 was horrible, but not for Basketball GM

January 1, 2021-

Happy New Year!

I know, everybody's talking about how 2020 sucked and how they hope 2021 will be better. But it's also true that 2020 had at least one redeeming quality - it was a great year for Basketball GM! COVID lockdowns left me with more time to work on development, and it left many of you with more time to play. The end result has been a ton of new features that I won't even try to summarize here, and new records in all usage stats:

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2019 was awesome

January 1, 2020-

Happy New Year!

2019 was a great year for Basketball GM. The game is better than ever. Well of course I'm a biased source, but it's not just me saying that. The stats speak for themselves.

2019 set new records in all those categories! The last column is the craziest... you guys collectively spent over 136 years playing Basketball GM in 2019. A less impressive way of saying the same thing is that, at any given time during the year, there were on average 136 people playing Basketball GM.

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Basketball GM and world domination

October 19, 2019-

The Internet is a wonderful thing. Basketball nerds from all over the world can enjoy Basketball GM.

But where do these basketball nerds come from? On a whim, I wondered if it was possible that there are Basketball GM users in every country in the world. Crazy right? Turns out yeah, is not fully worldwide yet. But it's pretty close!

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Welcome to Football GM!

April 27, 2019-

Hello everyone! I am very excited to bring you Football GM. Football GM is an American football management simulator, where you are in charge of a team. You don't play the actual game of football, but you draft players, trade players, sign free agents, handle the finances, and set the lineup.

Football GM is based on my other game, Basketball GM. I spent a lot of time on abstracting the code such that most of the code is shared between games, meaning that both games will improve together. Fixing a bug or adding a feature to one will also improve the other. It's been a challenge, but it does work. Basketball GM has secretly been based on this shared code base for months.

While there are a lot of similarities to Basketball GM, there are a lot of differences too. Football is inherently a more random sport - it's lower scoring, there are fewer games, and the playoffs are single elimination. This means it's easier to get lucky and win, but it's harder to have sustained success. Team building is also more complicated in football, since there are more players, more positions, and the positions matter a lot more - you don't have players like LeBron who can do everything. Finances are also different. Football GM operates under a hard cap like the NFL, but Basketball GM uses a soft cap like the NBA.

One of the fun things about simulation games is that all of those differences are customizable. If you enable God Mode, you can make the Football GM season last 82 games, have best-of-7 playoff series, and increase the length of games so that the number of touchdowns in a football game is more similar to the number of field goals in a basketball game.

That's just one silly example of what you can do with a sports simulation game. Really, it's up to your imagination. That's been the best part of Basketball GM for years, and I hope Football GM brings people the same kind of fun.

Football GM is a lot better than Basketball GM was when it was first released, but it's still rough around the edges in many places. I know that. I'm working on it. But I think it's good enough to be fun now.

Feedback is always appreciated. Even more so since it's new. Please let me know what you think.


2018 was awesome

January 1, 2019-

Happy New Year!

2018 was a great year for Basketball GM. The game is better than ever. Well of course I'm a biased source, but it's not just me saying that. The stats speak for themselves.

2018 set new records in all those categories! The last column is the craziest... you guys collectively spent over 100 years playing Basketball GM in 2018. In other words, at any given time, there were on average 100 people playing Basketball GM.

If these trends continue...

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Ten year anniversary of the first commit to the Basketball GM code base

June 22, 2018-

Check it out. Damn, nostalgia. I had just graduated from college and was trying to learn both Python and GTK+ (both technologies long since abandoned by BBGM) while pursuing this crazy idea of making a basketball management sim.

Looking at the code, some of it has totally changed, but other parts still have a direct lineage to the code today. For example, the ridiculously simple initial implementation of game simulation is not that different than the only slightly less simple implementation used today. The overall structure is the same, and many of the functions remain quite similar. Example:

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Three million seasons and one million leagues!

August 16, 2016-

On March 18, 2015, Basketball GM passed 1 million seasons played.

On December 28, 2015, Basketball GM passed 2 million seasons played.

And today, we have crossed the 3 million seasons threshold!

Here are some interesting statistics at this milestone:


Two million seasons!

December 28, 2015-

Just 9 months ago, Basketball GM crossed the one million seasons played threshold. Today the two millionth season of Basketball GM was played!

Here are some interesting statistics at this milestone:

So it took 2 years for the first million, 9 months for the second million... how long for the next million?


One million seasons!

March 18, 2015-

Today the one millionth season of Basketball GM was played! This is incredible! So far beyond what I ever imagined possible.

Here are some interesting statistics at this milestone:

I started tracking the number of seasons played about 2 years ago. But I don't think it will take another 2 years to get another million seasons!