The weekly retention digest

The weekly retention digest is a summary email sent every Monday morning. It tells you how many players played last week, how many were new, and how many came back from the week before. It's the signal most server owners should be watching but rarely have access to.

What it contains

• Total unique players seen last week
• New players (first-ever sighting on your server) as a count and a percentage of total
• Returning players (seen in any previous week) as a count
• Return rate: of the players who were new the week before, what percentage came back
• Week-over-week comparison for all four numbers, vs the same week one month ago

Reading the numbers

The return rate is the most important number in the digest. It answers: of the players who tried your server for the first time last week, how many came back? A return rate above 30% is solid for most server types. Below 15% suggests new players are not finding what keeps them engaged.

High new player numbers with a low return rate usually points to an onboarding problem: players find the server but don't stick. A high return rate with very few new players suggests the community is healthy but growth has stalled.

Why it matters

Raw player counts tell you how busy your server was. Retention tells you whether that activity is turning into a community. A server with 50 players a week and a 40% return rate is healthier than one with 200 players a week and a 5% return rate.

The week-over-week comparison in the digest shows whether your retention is improving or declining over time, so you can track the effect of changes you make to your server, such as new game modes, events, or updated spawn areas, on actual player behaviour.