100,000 users later: the story of DailyMetro

1 user - The beginnings

Honestly, you were probably never supposed to see this game. It all happened because my best friend is a true Paris metro fanatic. One of his favorite games: placing every single station on a map in as little time as possible. Let's just say that for me, having arrived from a small village in eastern France three years ago, it seemed… original.

One of his recent obsessions was filling in a daily grid with nine stations to find, following set criteria (hi Metrodoku). He loved it, and it made me think of the daily games I play myself: Wordle 🔠, Worldle 🌍 or Loldle (recovered ex-addict 🙏). That's when I got the idea of a mix between the two, a metro Wordle, maybe he'd like it…

100 users - The first players

Within a day, I had a "working" version (or so I thought at the time). I have him test it: he loves it. I send it to a few friends: they're crazy about it, they want to play again.

OK, maybe there's something here. I clean it up, add a few cities, translate the interface and, on Sunday, I talk about it on Reddit. It works. That day, more than 600 people connect to the available cities (Paris, London, New York) and give me overwhelmingly positive feedback. But by evening, most of the users were already gone. No big deal, I wasn't expecting much more for a little game about metros.

10,000 users - Going viral

The next day, I go back to work and tell my colleagues at lunch, they find the story funny. Right after, I show them the stats: 600 players the day before, and 200 more during the morning. That's the exact moment things went wild.

At first, it looks like a small spike on the player curve. We see five people online at the same time, it makes us laugh. Then we refresh: 10 people. Then 20, 30, 50, 100.

We don't get it, it seems to come out of nowhere.

But no: it was coming from Twitter. I managed to find the tweet that started it all: "@PierreBs13 Yet another crazy metro game omg!! …" 30,000 views.

In a single day, 10,000 people would connect to find the station of the day. 10,000 people. Needless to say, the site absolutely did not survive the load, and I got a good hour of blank page (and panic :)) before finding a way (paying more) to fix the problem.

It was crazy. I was getting notifications from everywhere, I was completely euphoric: the game was taking off.

100,000 users - One month later

From that moment on, it was a rollercoaster. Lots of players means lots of user feedback. I spent more than a week working through everything: bugs, feature requests (difficulty, name origins, statistics, map…), and some surprises too.

There are about 2.6 million colorblind people in France. Did you know there were that many? I didn't. But it turns out that on a game that relies mostly on red and green, you hear about it pretty fast!

I also added new cities you asked me for: Lyon, Madrid, Berlin and Washington. And more are on the way…

In total, I spent more than fifty hours doing it all, but it was worth it.

From there, the number of users gradually settled at around 3,500 people every day. And this week, one month after the game's release, we passed 100,000 unique users. I still can't wrap my head around what that number represents…

If DailyMetro, surely one of the most niche games I've ever made, got this far, it's thanks to you, your shares and your messages!

I'd like to finish by showing you one of the pieces of feedback that touched me the most, both in its simplicity and because it arrived at a moment when things weren't going great:

u/TwizzyGobbler just coming back to say I really love this game! play it every day :) proud of the reach it's gotten!

Thank you ❤️

What's next

So, what now?

I'll of course keep updating DailyMetro. There are still plenty of small improvements to make, a few cities to add and surely some bugs to fix. But I also feel like the game has reached a fairly stable, lasting shape. The mechanics work, the community is there, and thousands of people keep playing every day.

So part of my time now goes into experimenting with new ideas. This project made me want to create other daily games built around communities and passions.

The latest one is a Metrodoku for the football World Cup: DailyFoot ⚽️. If you like daily challenges, you can already try it here: dailyfoot.live/worldcup

We'll see how far this one goes :)

If you want to send me a little message, you can do it at dailymetrolive@gmail.com or on Twitter 😄

Have a nice day,

Eliott