Key points
- Arizona RP's peak audience grew from about 6,000 to more than 33,000 concurrent players between 2018 and January 2025
- The growth came from loops — creators, community and word of mouth — not from buying reach
- Segmenting players by motivation mattered more than segmenting them by age
- Expanding capacity in step with demand protected the experience that drove referrals
- The same principles now run a Los Angeles body shop
When I joined Arizona Games in 2018 as Chief Marketing Officer, our flagship roleplay server, Arizona RP, peaked at roughly 6,000 players online at the same time. It was already the most popular project in its niche, built by a small team that had started with a single server in 2014.
By January 2025 the same project peaked at more than 33,000 concurrent players on PC. Public SA:MP server statistics (samp-sc.com) show it as the largest project in its category by a wide margin — the next competitors stayed in the low thousands. In 2023 we brought the world to phones: today Arizona Online and its sister title Rodina Online have more than 9.4 million Google Play installs combined, and the team has grown past a hundred people.
None of that came from one big campaign. It came from loops — and from learning, sometimes the hard way, how to keep them turning. These are the five lessons that became the core of ILGI, the framework I published this month.
1. Study the product as a player before you market it
The usual sequence in marketing is: define the audience, buy ads, fix things afterwards. We reversed it. Before any campaign we played — not as marketers checking features, but as players living a second life in the city. Where does a new player get stuck on day three? What makes someone log in again tomorrow? What would make them tell a friend?
That habit is the reconnaissance phase of ILGI. The most valuable insight never came from a dashboard alone; it came from combining the dashboard with the experience of actually being the customer.
2. Segment by motivation, not by age
Our players looked similar on paper: mostly young men, mostly in the same few countries. Treating them as one audience produced generic messages and average results. What actually separated them was why they played. Some wanted status and a career inside the world; some wanted belonging and a crew; some wanted an escape from routine; some wanted to create and be seen.
Once we wrote for each motivation separately — different stories, different creators, different moments in the player journey — the same budget went much further. In ILGI this is the three-layer segmentation: who they are, what they do, and why they do it.
3. Creators of every size are a loop, not a channel
Early on we learned that a network of many small and mid-sized YouTube creators outperformed occasional deals with a few big names. Small creators speak to tight communities that trust them; their audiences convert better and stay longer. And the players they brought in started making content of their own.
That is the propagation phase of the Chain Impulse Loop: every converted player becomes a potential source of the next one. We stopped thinking of creators as advertising inventory and started treating them — and the community content they inspired — as part of the product's growth system.
4. Grow capacity in step with demand
There is a period in a growing online game when you cannot open servers fast enough. It is tempting to see that as a nice problem. It isn't: an overcrowded, laggy world breaks the experience that drives word of mouth, and a loop with a broken experience in the middle stops turning.
We expanded servers and platforms in stages, matching new capacity to demand so that every new player arrived in a world that worked. Infrastructure is not the boring part of growth; it is what lets the loop survive success.
5. Plan for ten years, adjust every month
The roleplay genre is old by internet standards. Arizona RP runs on a 2004 game, and every year someone predicts its end. What kept us growing was a long horizon — a ten-year view of where players, platforms and technology were heading — combined with short, flexible cycles of execution. The mobile launch in 2023 was the result of that long view; the monthly tuning of what we said and where was the result of the short one.
What carried over to a body shop
In 2024 I co-founded GLG Auto Collision in Los Angeles. A collision repair center has nothing in common with an online game on the surface — and almost everything in common underneath. Customers arrive at a stressful moment; trust decides whether they come back and whether they refer a friend; reviews are the community content; and the process behind the counter decides whether the promise holds. The shop was profitable from its first month.
Running it also showed me how much of a traditional business still runs on paper, phone calls and memory. That gap — the infrastructure layer — is what we are now building into BodyShop ERP, an operations platform with an AI assistant for collision shops.
The short version
Growth that lasts is rarely a campaign. It is a set of loops: the right segment, reached at the right moment, given a reason to bring the next person — running on systems that keep working when you are not in the room. I wrote the full framework down as ILGI 1.0; if you want to apply it to your company, let's talk.
