Hey all,

After doing another round of adding games last night, which followed a month-long hiatus, which also followed an almost 2 month long hiatus, which also followed a whopping four month long hiatus, I decided to look at the analytics for the site to see if anyone is actually using it. It turns out, it's getting around 4,000 unique visitors per month, so it seems like a lot of you may have been let down by the gaps in adding new games, so I think it's time to address what's going on and why this has been happening.

As some of you may know, a month after the site was launched in October 2016, my daughter was born in November. This didn't really change anything though about the site's continued updates, and new content was added weekly at minimum for nearly a year following the site's launch. It was when I got a new job in September of 2017 that things started getting fewer and further between.

My new job is very demanding. The company I work for does most of the websites for Sony Music, and we handle most of their individual label websites, many of their major internal web application tools, and pretty much all of the websites for artists signed under any of the Sony labels. We do all of this with 3 developers including myself, and one is designated solely to Sony's internal tools as well as those of Ticketmaster, so there are two of us handling everything else (including the maintenance of all the existing websites we've done). I believe our average throughput is around 300-350 website launches per year, with about 35% of those being custom WordPress builds, and the other 65% being static.

Doing work within the music industry is cool, but because the turnaround time has to be so quick, there's a lot of overtime. I personally average about 3.5 websites built from scratch and launched per week, and that's while about a third of my time is also spent providing updates and support for sites I've already built previously. Also, if anything goes wrong at any time day or night, holiday or weekend, it's an emergency that needs to be dealt with immediately. When I'm not working, I try to spend as much time as I can with my daughter - as she gets older and each milestone comes and goes, I realize that there are so many stages that come and go very quickly, and you can never get them back. You have to enjoy every moment before it's gone forever.

So what am I saying? Is this the end for PlayPico? No! In fact, last month I just renewed the domain for another 2 years! The hosting is on the same VPS I use for my personal website, my email, and the websites of two nonprofit organizations that I am paid to host/maintain, so I'm not going to cut off the hosting either (even if the NPOs cancel for some reason, it's been my personal email server for almost a decade, so it's not going anywhere).

The reason for this post was because I had no idea how many people were using the site. It's been more than half a year since the last time I looked at the analytics, and back then it was getting about a tenth of the traffic it does now. I feel like I owe a lot of people an explanation as to what's been going on. This is also a pledge that I will do what it takes to keep up with the site better and resume adding new features and improvements. I'm going to set a weekly schedule, one night every single week, where new games will be added, and I'm going to work on overhauling the UI/UX completely to give a far better experience.

If you read all this, and you've used PlayPico, please take half a second to give this post a star. I need to know how many of you are out there and how many care, that's a big motivator in all of this.

Cool thanks for the update, I've found many of my favorite pico 8 games via your site. Thanks for your work on it!