We are nearing 1000 players that at least finished level 1 in our game Fluffensnuff, which i think is a great moment to share something interesting with you.

So basically, this is how the players came in through fluffensnuffs lifetime As you can see we got a little traffic from my blog posts, and a lot from the great gamejamcurator and randomize user, who amazingly showcased our game.

So, i was very surprised when we suddenly hade a huge spike in players, amounting to 200 players on 24h, without us having done anything. It was even more surprising, that they didn't show up on our itch io dashboard. This means the players did not get the game from itch.io.

I wondered what could have happened. Someone must have shared our windows build. But 200 players is insane, this would have to be a huge community. After half a day, google provided the answer for me: the web version got "ripped" and uploaded to another site! Specifically this one http://www.freewebarcade.com/game/fluffensnuff/ And a few others, mostly embedding the first site as an iframe, thus avoiding traffic they'd have to pay for. A few sites also made new logos, described the controls or even wrote a few really pretty paragraphs of backstory. * http://cu.game-game.com/198867/ in spanish * http://game-game.fr/198867/ in french * http://game-game.hu/198867/ in hungarian i think * http://mail.sugar-free-games.com/playgame.php?game=19886 * http://games.allmyfaves.com/fluffensnuff/ * https://www.minijuegos.com/juego/fluffensnuff

I also saw a lot of fellow jam games on the site, shoutout to @le-slo @oultrox @telepinu @veryeviltomato @reuno @daniel-moreno @ditto @joemanaco @xellaya @ddrkirbyisq -> http://www.freewebarcade.com/latest/1/

I have no doubt that this happens with each jam, not limited to LD 44 or even LD.

So, what do you think about that? How do you feel or would you feel if your game got rehosted without your knowledge?

Personally, i find it pretty cool on on hand, as we get a lot pf plays. On the other, i do not like that i have no way to update the game, to deliver new content or better balancing. In any case, a pretty interesting process. I did not expect such a "machinery" rehosting free web games.

Bonus, few trivia numbers :D * 30 players finished the last level (17), which is a bit more than 3% * The game can be played through with en estimated 400 moves, the best player right now has 431 moves * The most moves a player has made in a single (!) level was 1383 * The fastest playthrough was from @AVAVT in 15 minutes, while 10 people took more than one hour to finish the game