Thanks a million!

It is with great pleasure that I can reveal that at 6.23am this morning, the Restaurant Story Adventures blog enjoyed its one millionth page view.

Total page view count

It's a rare occasion when words fail me. I've been eyeing this particular milestone for some time, but it still feels surreal to have reached it. I'm under no illusions, in the greater context of the internet as a whole it's not all that remarkable, but that doesn't stop me from being proud of my contribution to what is a fairly niche mobile game.

It's now been a little under four-and-a-half years since I made the decision to start this blog, with enough ideas floating around to keep me going for a few months. Never did I anticipate that I'd still be churning out posts years later, even after the game has started to experience a significant slowdown.

So I thought this was as good a time as any to provide you all with some of the numbers behind the blog, which can actually provide some insight into the dynamics of gameplay. We start with a timeline of page views (feel free to click on any of the following graphics to enlarge them!)

Page views timeline

It's fair to say it's been a rocky road! It all started in February 2013 with just 188 views, many of which were inadvertently my own as I got to grips with this new venture! But traffic soon grew, reaching a peak in October and November, probably thanks to a high level of interest in Halloween content.

Into 2014 and traffic was reasonably steady, with the monthly count typically above the 20,000 mark. Then in 2015 came the high point - July saw over 33,000 hits, the most in a calendar month to date. In comparison to the months around it July has always tended to be a strong month for the blog, presumably due to players (especially those in education) having more free time to spend playing Restaurant Story.

Over the last 18 months, the number of views has become increasingly erratic. The latter half of 2016 saw a distinct downturn which was reversed at the back end of the year thanks to the buzz surrounding Black Friday and Christmas. But following the lay-offs at Storm8 in February, numbers have been lower, dropping below those consistent levels in 2014. It's not a surprise really, and although sad to see, I'm still very appreciative of the support the blog continues to receive in spite of the slow down in game updates.

The next breakdown is of the most viewed posts, with the top 10 listed below:

Most frequently viewed posts

It is a list dominated by goal posts. There is almost always a spike in traffic when a new quest is released as players come looking for detail on how to unlock those padlocked items. The most viewed post of all is that of the Gran-Gran goals, released in May 2013, with around one in 20 hits. These are the starter goals that everyone gets when they first download Restaurant Story, so it's to be expected that there'd be plenty of interest in this particular entry. And yet I cringe when I look at it because it was one of my earlier goal posts and is really disorganised!

The only non-goals post to make the list is ironically in relation to another game entirely. The second instalment of my three-part review of the sequel title, Restaurant Story 2, has had around 4,500 views, and is the only top 10 entry released after 2014. Incidentally the first part of the review isn't far off the top 10 with close to 4,100 visits.

Now for a look at the leading locations of viewers:

Most frequent location of visitors

No surprise to see the US top this list, with nearly half a million page views coming from the nation where Storm8 is based. There's a massive gap down to the UK which is comfortably in second place, followed by Singapore and Canada which are separated by only 300 hits at the time of writing.

I'm more interested in the nations which didn't make the top 10. Given their populations alone I'd have expected to see China and India on the list, but alas they're absent. Unfortunately I don't have access to a full breakdown so can't comment on where these two countries do rank, but from what data I do have it does seem that India has become a higher contributor in recent times, just not enough to make the all-time top 10.

On to some technical information now, starting with the browser everyone uses to view the blog:

Breakdown by browser

At first it seems pretty close between Safari and Chrome, but note that Mobile Safari is separated out from the desktop version - add it in and Safari commands approximately 46% of all views. Likewise we should really add the Samsung Browser figure to that of Chrome to get a general feeling for the Android contribution, and that comes to 36% of the total, comfortably below Safari. With Safari being the default for Apple devices, this gives an indication of just how many players are likely to be playing the game via an Apple device.

Another observation is that Silk - the default browser for Amazon devices - contributes only 1.4% of the one million. I've been guilty throughout the history of this blog of overlooking Amazon device users, with analysis focused on the trials and tribulations of Apple and Android users, but luckily these statistics have justified that ignorance to an extent!

Of course not everyone uses the same device to play the game and visit the blog. I'm a good example of that - I play via an Apple device but write and publish posts using Chrome for desktop. Therefore caution should be applied when using these numbers to make conclusions about gameplay habits.

The same goes for this last breakdown, which looks at the operating system of visitors:

Breakdown by operating system

There's no precise breakdown for the various Android enabled devices, but there certainly is for Apple. The iPhone leads the way among Apple devices with 20% of hits, followed by the iPad and the iPod. Summing the Apple fleet (including Macintosh) gives 43% of the total, thus putting it definitively ahead of Android on 33%. But there's a third major player in this category - Windows has provided just over a fifth of all views.

And that concludes the flurry of stats and figures! I realise posts like this are probably not of interest to everyone, but hopefully it makes for intriguing reading for some of you!

Once again a huge thank you to everyone who has read and contributed the Restaurant Story Adventures blog over the past few years. It has been and continues to be a pleasure to provide my thoughts and hear yours whenever new updates are released in the game. Now it's onward to two million!