Not sure I get this one right. For me, some growth is better than nothing. If your growth is linear, it means that you have something like n new users every week, which is probably because they found it through ads or something, but they don't recommend it to their friends - otherwise, you would have every week n+knumber_of_users[previous week]* and the growth would be exponential. I suppose that's why OP is saying this, but I think the real metric is not growth, but retention. Better to have a few users who stick with your product.
Yeah you're totally right, it's a huge over simplification. I was specifically thinking of the scenario where you add roughly the same number of users each period, where that number isn't really enough for it to be a viable business but because there are some users, it becomes really hard to say "this isn't working" and either radically change something or quit. Agree that retention is often a much better metric.
Kongregate always had decent-but-linear growth and very good retention (of registered users, not so good for guests). Worked for us: here's a graph of web sessions per day with the units taken off.
It flattened out as mobile took all the growth out of browser-based games. It took us a while to figure mobile out but now we're doing well as a publisher/marketer/funder of indie free-to-play games.
Not sure I get this one right. For me, some growth is better than nothing. If your growth is linear, it means that you have something like n new users every week, which is probably because they found it through ads or something, but they don't recommend it to their friends - otherwise, you would have every week n+knumber_of_users[previous week]* and the growth would be exponential. I suppose that's why OP is saying this, but I think the real metric is not growth, but retention. Better to have a few users who stick with your product.
Is that what the OP means?