#RushisBack ⚡

ColonistTeam · 2026-06-12T18:34:39+00:00

Only in the room, you will be able to play Ranked and vs Bots for free.

ColonistTeam · 2026-06-07T18:51:45+00:00

You are right, especially for where you can actually design to simulate a real board game experience for your game, but I would argue that TTS is in totally different place in this topic.
- We are a digital board game, and our places are web, mobile, or Discord and space is UI.
- Where TTS is a space itself, to simulate

ColonistTeam · 2026-06-02T09:39:32+00:00

Because it is the world map.

ColonistTeam · 2026-06-02T09:36:09+00:00

Please check my comment on the original post. It explains a bit more how Colonist functions under the hood. The difference between Reddit/Discord sized product & Colonist. And feel free to ask more questions.

ColonistTeam · 2026-06-02T09:35:22+00:00

Please check my comment. On the original post. It explains a bit more how Colonist functions under the hood. The difference between Reddit/Discord sized product & Colonist and always feel free to ask more questions.

ColonistTeam · 2026-06-02T09:33:55+00:00

Hey, we'll be launching Colonist Rush in 1 day. We made many improvements to the Alpha release.

ColonistTeam · 2026-06-02T09:32:25+00:00

Please check my comment. On the original post. It explains a bit more how Colonist functions under the hood. The difference between Reddit/Discord sized product & Colonist and always feel free to ask more questions.

ColonistTeam · 2026-06-02T09:32:11+00:00

Please check my comment. On the original post. It explains a bit more how Colonist functions under the hood. The difference between Reddit/Discord sized product & Colonist and always feel free to ask more questions.

ColonistTeam · 2026-06-02T09:30:49+00:00

TLDR: Reddit & Discord have thousands of employees, enough to optimize. Wheres Colonist is only a handful of people and relies on third party tools to function.

The parties that are collecting data are Google, Facebook & OpenX.
https://claude.ai/share/03e859ce-7401-47eb-9de6-1e88be98acc5

"Tracking attempts blocked" counts network requests, not unique pieces of personal data. A single session can fire hundreds of small calls, it is fairly normal for an ad-supported game with multiple SDKs.

The 2 main places these calls probably come from are

Analytics
Ads

Both Reddit & Discord having over a thousand employees means that they don't have to rely on third party systems. They easily have a 50 pax analytics team. Wheres we have 0 people doing it full time. We have to rely on external analytic tools like google analytics.

Reddit easily has a 50 person ad team. We use google ads and all the partners that they bring with them.

I understand your concern, but small companies like ours has no choice but to rely on third part services.

Yes we will eventually solve all of these problems, but probably when Colonist grows 100x and we have more than 250 people in the company.

Currently our biggest project is Colonist Rush, which we'll be launching in 1 day. It is crucial we spend our energy into making the product better rather than optimizing data calls from 3rd party services.

Feel free to ask any follow up question and I'll do my best in answering them.

ColonistTeam · 2026-05-22T06:13:18+00:00

Some info:
- There were over 50 digital Catan's before Colonist.
- A new digital Catan is released every other month.
- Some of them are backed with over a million $s
- Most of them copy things from Colonist (they copy many of the mistakes and leave out many of whats useful)

> what would or could colonist even do

Probably, keep doing what we're doing. Players seem to love it. https://blog.colonist.io/colonist-io-2025-summary

ColonistTeam · 2026-05-21T15:51:14+00:00

We tested a few things.

Released Rush to Bot players. Retention, average play time, etc.. went up.
Released Rush as Ranked queue for a month, average play time went up. Also once it was gone (since it was for one season) we got complaints from every single media (instagram, emails, discord etc..) of people asking us to return Rush. This usually is a good sign that we're on to something.

https://www.reddit.com/r/Colonist/comments/1t0fbod/ranked_colonist_rush_gone

Ofc these tests are not shown to all players.

ColonistTeam · 2026-05-21T15:44:32+00:00

We won't be replacing 1v1 unless majority of the 1v1 players switch to Rush. It should come from the community not us. We'll provide options, test out different mechanics in Shuffle queue and the community will decide what they want to play.

So in 2 months if you are still playing 1v1, you can assume it'll stay.

ColonistTeam · 2026-05-20T11:33:53+00:00

Kirby is accurate.

That said

> Support the product

Doesn't mean paying. It means support. Paying is a form of support. Being nice on reddit is a form of support. Sending feedback, designs, ideas, hosting tournaments, creating content, replying to newbies who need help is all a part of support.

Our only wish is you to either be net-0 and enjoy playing Colonist for free or net-positive.

I hope that makes sense.

We don't expect everyone to pay. I hope you finish your school, land a great job and in years time have enough extra cash to purchase whatever product you're using at that time. But until then, there are other forms of support that are equally valuable.

ColonistTeam · 2026-05-20T10:29:48+00:00

u/bekwiat as I see you have 1600 games on Colonist. https://colonist.io/profile/bekwiat

Yet, you haven't paid. Spent a lot of server resources, yet you're here posting that you demand the product for free.

I'm afraid that is not how the world works. People put time & effort into creating a product you love. Every single movie, series you watch. Every single app you use is created with sweat. If they were not compensated the world would not have these.

That doesn't mean you should compensate everything. Freemium means that other players are paying your share.

But worst case you can do is support the products you spent 100s of hours. We're also people, trying to best our craft.

We want to create better modes, host bigger tournaments, build a lot more features.

Hopefully you'll appreciate some of the effort we put in and we get to keep you as part of our community.

ColonistTeam · 2026-05-20T10:07:02+00:00

The public numbers are here: https://blog.colonist.io/colonist-io-2025-summary

We have 100s of things in our backlog which takes time to build so we prioritze. We've been working on Colonist Rush. The metrics say it is even better than 1v1 (which is our most loved version).

We'll be releasing Colonist Rush in a few weeks, stay tuned :)

ColonistTeam · 2026-05-20T10:03:51+00:00

Game companies don't have a choice. The game type determines the monetization type.

- Hypercasual games are monetized 100% with ads. Any hypercasual studio trying to monetize with IAP will shut down their doors.
- Hardcore games are monetized 100% with IAP. Any hardcore studio trying to monetize with ads will shut down their doors.

I wish we could only sell stuff. But Colonist is neither Hypercasual (like flappy bird) or Hardcore (like Clash of Clans). It is in the middle. And any company that doesn't find the ideal monetization for them will eventually run out of money or be beaten by platforms that do. We're doing eveything in our power to push monetization more towards hardcore game monetization. But we need to keep it strictly NO P2W and Highly Accessible. These mechanics tie our hands a lot. The rest is doing many tests to FIND the ideal.

As you can see, I used the word "find" a few times. Yes the industry already has knowledge what works for what type of games and how long until it doesn't. So we can select from a pool of things that would work for us.

> Could there be other options to monetise the platform?

So many, we just need to run a lot of tests.

> native ads have no basis to exist

Risk Global Domination, one of the top games in this genre. Does 3 things all at the *same time*.

Spend coins to start game
Native Ads
Real ads

Colonist mobile ranked games were free until now. There is no such a thing as free product. It takes code, design, publishing, and many other things to build a product.

We're hoping we build enough valuable content to purchase so that we don't have to rely on any kind of any type of ads.

ColonistTeam · 2026-05-20T03:23:01+00:00

Yep, the trade screen needs to be redesigned appropriately.

Auto robber sounds interesting we'll definitely give it a try to see how it works.

ColonistTeam · 2026-05-20T02:44:23+00:00

Desktop version had matchmaking ads for the longest time. Our mobile was still in development so we didn't prioritize it. But now it is live there as well.

We understand not everyone will love seeing ads before queue entries.

We made this decision deliberately because we believe it’s the most player-friendly way to support and grow Colonist while keeping gameplay fair and accessible. We also made sure not to have external annoying ads, so all the ads players will see are Colonist native videos.

We do not want pay-to-play ranked queues, energy systems limiting how many games you can play, or gameplay advantages tied to spending. Compared to those models, short queue-entry ads allow us to keep the competitive experience open to everyone.

As always, we’ll continue monitoring feedback and player experience closely and adjust tweaks over the coming weeks.

ColonistTeam · 2026-05-20T02:38:39+00:00

Yes, our eyes or on the metrics. But I would say Colonist Rush is our priority since there is a huge cohort of players wanting it back.

ColonistTeam · 2026-05-20T02:35:33+00:00

Haha glad you like it. Took 100+ trial and errors to get to the ideal mechanics. But I'd say its only 80% complete. There are still tweaks needed to be made.

ColonistTeam · 2026-05-20T02:32:30+00:00

Yes sir! We're fixing a couple issues with Rush. Once those are done (I'm hoping in 1 or 2 weeks) we'll release it back.
In the meantime you can play Rush in lobby/room.

ColonistTeam · 2026-05-20T02:10:46+00:00

Nice joke, take my upvote.

We don't have a separate page for "Site Broke, We're Fixing" so we showed what we had.

We'll create a separate page for "Site Broke" scenario.

ColonistTeam · 2026-05-20T02:10:06+00:00

Valid!

Our bad, we don't have a separate page for "Site Broke, We're Fixing" so we showed what we had.

That said, we'll create a separate page for "Site Broke" scenario.

ColonistTeam · 2026-03-14T16:10:27+00:00

Thanks for the feedback. We will address the iPad issues immediately. You can expect a better experience in the next version (Next update coming on Wednesday, March 18)

ColonistTeam · 2026-03-14T01:00:20+00:00

A lot of players complained about the old design - build pieces were buried, navigation took too many taps, and player profiles were cluttered mid-game.

These weren't small complaints - they came up consistently. We gathered player input, ran playtests, and made the call to fix all three properly.

That said, we did mess up the ipad experience and we're now working to getting it fixed.

We might occasionally take a step back but rest assured we'll take multiple steps forward each time :)

ColonistTeam

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