The items for you to take this up a notch are the following: 1. Update things from time to time to make it newer-ish. The game does not feel like it has changed any of the times that we have played it over the four years (has it been that long)
2. Turn based for the die-hard workers.
3. Figure out the Iron Key for paying to play for a period of time. That really worked out for getting us to have one person pay for a key and then we could all play. If a person wants to get new friends to start a separate game, then you have an in for a new key purchase.
4. Ask your users, send an e-mail out to everybody and ask them what their issues are. Ask those that love it to post on their facebook / twitter / etc.
The new Blight of the Immortals is an all new game built on the ashes of the old game.
The game infact didn't change from about 2010 when I stopped working on it till just a few months ago when we opened up a beta of the new game.
We haven't reached out to the players of the old game because we're still fleshing out the content and adding new features. We've started doing a little advertising to see how well things like the home page and tutorial are working.
When the only traffic to the site is ads, you can get a good idea of how the game stands on its own.
The only way the game will be big "success" is if we generate enough cash to do paid user acquisition.
From my perspective, the game looked interesting, but I also had a bit of trouble figuring out what the gameplay would be like - I can kind of guess from the screenshots, but it's not really enough. The trailer (while very nicely done), didn't show anything from the game as far as I can tell, and the "play now" button takes you to a registration screen. I suspect this causes a lot of potential users to bounce right there - edge cases who might be persuaded to stay if the "play now" button just dropped them as anonymous into a game (and asked for their email a few minutes in).
Congrats on the 50 active users :)
Blight of the Immortals only has about 50 daily active users. We would like to grow a little to get a better idea about what people like and don't like about the game.
https://blight.ironhelmet.com
We've run some Facebook and Google ads and it looks like it costs around 35 - 40c a click. We only get about 10% sign-up so we are paying about $4 a user. (From what I have read that's about what to expect)
We still have a lot of cool stuff to add, but we make about $2 per new account, so I guess that means we are about halfway there :)