A Reflection on 2013
2013 was an amazing year. Let’s start with what didn’t go so well. We had 3 major outages. I can’t remember the details of the few hours of downtime in the Spring, and there was an overnight outage in December when our database couldn’t keep up with zone updates. However it will be hard to forget August 8, 2013. This was my birthday. On the 7th my kids asked me what I wanted. I said, “For stuff not to break.” Sadly, I didn’t knock on wood.August 8-10 were 18-20 hour days of manually killing database deadlocks and furiously rewriting critical code features while completely removing less critical ones. It was the first realization that our systems were still running in “startup mode.” It was our Twitter Fail Whale. Over the next few months, we rewrote features, and added mechanisms to take the load off our database. For the most part, it forced us to completely put new features on hold while we worked to improve our scalability. The outages put a fairly big dent in our revenue for the next few months, and impacted our plans for growth. It was also the same week we lost our 5 star rating in the Windows Phone store, after maintaining 5 stars for more than 6 months.
For those of you who might not have been following QONQR for very long, you might be surprised to find out that QONQR is a tiny company. For 9 months of 2013, I was the only person working on QONQR full time. Well, not exactly full time. My timecard says I worked 3,215 hours in 2013, which is about 9 hours a day 7 days a week. I’m guessing that is probably below my actual time in chair by at least 20%. To say that 2013 was exhausting is an understatement.
We encountered delay after delay in Android due to the difficulty of the platform, especially in the areas of reducing the risk of cheating. The iOS 7 SDK caused us to rework much of the iPhone application to fix memory issues and comply with Apple’s new best practices. Windows Phone anomalies with advertising and purchasing created a distraction from more productive tasks.
Now that the biggest of the bad stuff is out of the way, let’s talk about what went right. We made two really smart decisions in 2013. We hired Christie (aka Gadgerson) in October. Christie was a friend of a friend and as I found out, a die-hard gamer with online media experience. I hired Christie for a few hours a week in early 2013 to manage our Facebook and Twitter accounts. By October, Justin and I had decided it was a bad idea for me to be spending 10-20 hours a week managing our support email. We hired Christie as our Community Engagement Manager to manage our online presence, support, and QA efforts. Christie has made a hugely positive impact on QONQR and helps make sure the developers stay busy writing code.The second smart decision we made was to hire an intern over the summer. We took a big chance here. Interns can be a blessing or an albatross. The biggest risk is that they would take more time in guidance than they would provide in output. Our intern, Cole, quickly proved to be a huge asset. He developed nearly all the new web portal features. In fact, the web portal would not have been created without him. We now have an alternate place to do many of the game features -and some portal exclusives- should we encounter a problem that causes features to break in the mobile applications. Now that he has graduated, Cole has accepted an offer to work for QONQR full time, and will start his career with QONQR in a few days.
QONQR players have provided great success for QONQR in 2013. By the end of 2013, our players had launched nanobots (and plasma) over 60 million times. Nanobots have been deployed in nearly ¾ of a million zones in over 200 countries and territories around the world. QONQR now covers approximately 20% of the populated earth. There are now over 30,000 posts in the QONQR player forums.
In 2013, we released the initial version of our public API. This super small API allows developers to poll for zone data on a limited schedule. We wanted to allow our developer players to get just enough data to coordinate major attacks and periodically pull statistics for tracking. We have seen some amazing applications come out of this little API and we hope to add more features in 2014.
2013 may be remembered as the year of GroupMe. There is a common adage in game development: if you don’t build something, the community will find a replacement. Our players did that when it came to private group messaging. GroupMe changed the dynamic of the game significantly this year. Massive attacks of many players from multiple states have occurred throughout the year. Unfortunately, this resulted in hundreds of emails to support, “These 5 accounts have to be multi-scopers!!!” Some had not discovered GroupMe yet, and could not fathom how so many players could attack the same zone at once, then move to a new zone in unison. By now, it is hard to find players that don’t know about GroupMe and we feel confident it is likely to be a QONQR player tool that is here to stay.
The QONQR comic books came to life this year. We were very lucky to find a talented artist that could bring our vision for a QONQR comic book to life. Thanks to your contributions in the “Save the Nanobots Campaign”, Joey Vazquez has been very busy trying to keep up with the pages that have been funded. The profile pics of Scott, Christie and Justin are just a sample of his talent. Be sure checkout the comics.
QONQR extended our part time contractor family by a few members in 2013. It is quite a juggling act to track a half dozen people who are contributing to QONQR 5-10 hours a week on various iOS, Android, HTML, marketing, comic books and other miscellaneous tasks, but it has worked out very well to have the help we need, when we need it. We don’t have the revenue yet to hire dedicated people to fill each role, but working with such flexible and talented people has made the chaos of remote part time development much easier. Many thanks to those who contribute their extra time and talents to QONQR on a part time basis. We appreciate your flexibility and willingness to help move QONQR forward.
Finally, I would like to send a sincere thank you to the many players that have spent money in the game. I received my first paycheck in March of 2013, after 15 months of living on savings and debt. Your contributions have allowed me to consistently draw a moderate salary every month since. You made it possible to hire Christie and Cole, and we believe the revenue will allow Justin to return full time in the first half of 2014. I know many of you feel that the cubers hurt the balance and enjoyment of the game, but those that spend money make it possible for us to continue working on QONQR.I close with a thank you to my business partner, Justin. QONQR was his idea, without which I would not have something to consume my every waking moment and many of my dreams while asleep. But seriously, although he is not at QHQ every day, he has always done an amazing job of balancing the needs of QONQR with his day job. I’m optimistic our revenue will continue to grow and we can finally bring Justin back to QONQR full time.
-Scott (aka Silver>
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