The weekly retention digest
What the Monday retention email contains, how to read the new player and return rate numbers, and why it's the most important weekly signal for your server.
Updated 7 June 2026
The weekly retention digest is a summary email sent every Monday morning. It tells you how many new players your server saw and how many of them came back, with a comparison to the week before. It's the signal most server owners should be watching but rarely have access to.
What it contains
- New players this week: first-ever sightings on your server, as a count
- Return rate: of those new players, the percentage who came back for another session
- The previous week's return rate, for a week-over-week comparison
Reading the numbers
The return rate is the most important number in the digest. It answers: of the players who tried your server for the first time, how many came back? A return rate above 30% is solid for most server types. Below 15% suggests new players are not finding what keeps them engaged.
High new player numbers with a low return rate usually points to an onboarding problem: players find the server but don't stick. A high return rate with very few new players suggests the community is healthy but growth has stalled.
Why it matters
Raw player counts tell you how busy your server was. Retention tells you whether that activity is turning into a community. A server with 50 players a week and a 40% return rate is healthier than one with 200 players a week and a 5% return rate.
The week-over-week comparison in the digest shows whether your retention is improving or declining, so you can track the effect of changes you make to your server, such as new game modes, events, or updated spawn areas, on actual player behaviour.