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13 min read
#Data & Analytics

How to Plan and Track Events in Mobile Games

At one stage in your career you’ve begun to care about data. You decide that you want to know what your players are doing, so you start tracking gameplay events. You track everything. With a flurry of code your app is sending tracking events for every card combination, move, spell effect and battle stat! Pat yourself on the back, you have created terabytes of garbage. “Data is not information, information is not knowledge, knowledge is not understanding, understanding is not wisdom.” Clifford Stoll, Physicist Data collected without reason is just data. To be able to make informed decisions you need context, and only by understanding your player’s intentions will you start to be informed. There are a lot of similarities between mobile games and therefore there are some very standard metrics you might look at. We’ve created a simple tracking plan that you...
9 min read
#Data & Analytics

The Best Kept Analytics Secrets Of The Most Popular Games: Great Artists Steal

There’s an infamous quote that’s been ascribed to a variety of artists and creative minds over the years, including Pablo Picasso, but Steve Jobs may have been the most famous to use it when, while discussing the Macintosh, he said that “great artists steal”. However, the phrase applies to much more than just the iconic machines; it can also be used when discussing painting, composing, writing, and – naturally – creating amazing games. That’s probably obvious when it comes to the creative side of developing a game, but being able to recognize greatness, and not necessarily stealing – but adapting it for your own purposes – is valuable when it comes to the analytics side. Learning From The Greatest It should hardly be surprising that the best games tend to have great analytics – and smart analytical minds behind them...
18 min read
#Data & Analytics

Are Casual Games Maturing? Lessons from Angry Birds 2

This article was co-Authored with Michael Katkoff and originally published by Om Tandon here. Casual Games Casual games is a relatively new genre that was arguably kicked off by PopCap when Bejeweled launched on browsers in 2001. The true growth of the genre was enabled by Facebook and driven by Zynga’s FarmVille and other Ville-style games. The third and largely ongoing growth started in 2012, when King took its popular Facebook game Candy Crush Saga to mobile. Today, when we talk about casual games, we tend to mean games with relatively simple gameplay, substantial active user base and somewhat limited monetization potential compared to more advanced games. In short, casual games are generally targeted at people who may not traditionally consider themselves as gamers. Casual games like Angry Birds, Candy Crush Saga, and Temple Run are typically distinguished by simple rules, reduced demand...
5 min read
#Game Deconstructions

Top 10 Games to Keep you Merry & Cosy Over the Holiday Season

Christmas trees, decorations, presents, food, holidays, time off, drinks, family, friends. Stop. Start again. The holiday season is at the door and all the magic (and stress) captures everyone for 2 weeks. It’s also a time when you can find an opportunity to do things that you do much less the rest of the year; playing games is one! 2017 has been a great year for GameAnalytics, team growth, product improvements, and many new amazing games that have used our tool and reached some record numbers. The list is pretty long, and it wasn’t an easy choice, but here’s a list of our top 10 favourite games that we’ve enjoyed playing over the past year (and even longer for some!). I hope it helps with the Xmas dinner hangover… 10. Idle Miner Tycoon Developed by Fluffy Fairy Games OK. Christmas...
8 min read
#Data & Analytics

How To Determine Your Game’s Player LTV

It’s pretty easy to figure out how much a given player has spent on your game during the course of a set period of time. However, it’s much more complicated to figure out that player’s actual value to your community (and your bottom line). After all, you had to spend a certain amount to get that player to your game to begin with – marketing and promotions aren’t free! That’s where calculating player lifetime value or LTV comes in. The most basic definition of LTV is that player lifetime value equals the amount of revenue earned from an individual player throughout their lifetime – or the profit they will generate for you from their first moment playing your game until the last. We’ve talked about calculating player lifetime value before, and the standard simple equation holds true – the return...
11 min read
#Game Design

How to Make a Successful Indie Game

The games market is absolutely booming and will top $108 billion this year, growing at a CAGR of 19%. Mobile games remain its most lucrative segment and now account for 42% (or $46.1 billion) of the total revenue generated by app publishers. Want to grab a share of the pie? How to create an indie game: step-by-step guide to success Market research It all starts with an idea – and your idea has to be validated. Here’s what you should do: Study the App Store and Google Play download/top grossing game charts to see what game genres tend to perform better in terms of revenue and user engagement. As of October, 2017, the upper regions of the US top-performing iOS app charts are occupied by popular Match 3 games like Candy Crush, Puzzledom and Homescapes, the omnipresent Minecraft and occasional...
8 min read
#Guides

6 Tips for Hiring the Best Game Developer Talent

Starting a brand new indie game development studio is not an easy task. The main reason for this is the fact that finding the right people who will work with you can prove to be quite difficult. Not everyone is cut out to work in such an environment and put themselves on the line each day while not having a guaranteed income. An indie game studio is a huge mixture of business and passion and this means that you need to find people who are similar with each other to begin with. Compared to big corporate studios, the people in indie gaming have a lot of individuality and they all look to create unique games that will reach people across the world and leave a huge impact on them. In order to be successful in this world, you need to...
14 min read
#Data & Analytics

Understanding Your Audience – Bartle Player Taxonomy

Type of players We all know that every player is unique and special, with their own motivations for playing any given game and developing a personalized approach to its ecosystem. However, it’s nearly impossible to assess and cater to each type of personality with every aspect of your game, so it’s necessary to step back, organize, and plan things out a bit. And that starts by understanding what you’re dealing with in regard to your site’s community. Bartler’s Hence the need for a taxonomy and some kind of assessment system. The Bartle Player Taxonomy or Bartle Player Types are based on character theory and player behavior; the classification is meant to establish player personality types based on behavioral patterns and their goals and motivations for playing the game. Note that no player fits into one particular category; rather, most players...
User Analytics Persona
14 min read
#Data & Analytics

Maximizing The Value Of Player Data

There’s one key ingredient that’s the most valuable part of any game for developers, and it might not be the most obvious element or the first thing that you think of. It’s not the source code, database, live ops strategy, or anything other than the players themselves. Or more accurately, the data they generate. What’s more, maximizing the value of that data might be the most valuable thing that you can do as a marketer or game developer. And there are plenty of ways to accomplish that, starting with understanding and organizing the data itself. In fact, there are five groups of activities or sets of actions that you’ll take during your data collection or journey through the realm of gaming telemetry: Understanding Telemetry As It Applies To Your Game Knowing Your Objects And Attributes Defining And Name Your Features...
6 min read
#Marketing & Publishing

Exploring Motivation & Retention for Popular Games

Retention is the most important metric for a free-to-play mobile game’s long-term business outlook. If you want to understand the link between a player’s lifetime value (how much money they ever spend in the game) and how long they continue to play your game, Emily Greer gave a GDC talk in 2013 absolutely packed with web data. This post will expand on that talk by highlighting some game systems in Kongregate’s mobile publishing portfolio that we’ve seen successfully drive long-term player retention. It will also highlight the core motivations created by each game and discuss how that system ties into that motivation. An excellent resource on the subject is Quantic Foundry’s 2017 GDC talk on the anatomy of player motivations. AdVenture Capitalist offers a simple promise that any fan of idle games can appreciate: click more, get more powerful. Quantic Foundry’s talk highlighted idle...
10 min read
#Marketing & Publishing

10 Tactics To Drive Game Downloads On A Low Budget

Editor’s note: a little while ago we discussed how to market your game on a $0 budget. It was a popular post with a lot of useful tips. We thought we’d get more advice from another industry expert. This time it’s from TheTool’s ASO and mobile marketing lead, Katerina Zolotareva. Overview Getting a mobile game discovered by users is a tricky task and many developers have a perception that it will inevitably cost a lot of money. However, this doesn’t have to be true! There are many ways to promote an app on a low budget. App Marketing is all about creative approach! Good communication with potential players and existing ones is essential to achieve visibility and help your game to achieve maximum exposure. Today we will share some tactics that will make your life so much easier when you need...
12 min read
#UX & UI

UX Review: Slotomania, the hooks & baits of social casino gaming.

10 out of  50 US top grossing games are social casino giants, an indication of how dominant this genre is with an massively loyal target audience.   Superdata research predicts massive growth in this segement You may wonder, why people are sinking millions of dollars in to these games which can not be played for real money! give no cash returns, unlike the real life casinos! & online gambling counterparts! I remember in 2010 while working at slot machine giant WMS (acquired by scientific gaming for $1.5 billion). When they launched a variant of their popular flagship (online real money) brand ‘Jackpot Party’ as an F2P game on Facebook, everyone was genuinely surprised, it racked up 25K overnight!! Traditional casino gaming manufacturers could not fathom what would drive people to play these no real money counterparts? Have they discovered another virgin goldmine waiting to be explored? Flash forward 2016,...
Black Snowflake Games Interview
7 min read
#Game Deconstructions

The Viral Potential Of HTML5 Games – Black Snowflake Interview

Hi Filipp, thanks for chatting with me. Could you share a little about yourself and your studio? Sure. Black Snowflake is a specialist developer of HTML5 games. This really became our core focus after 2013. Since then we’ve developed more than 25 mobile-first HTML5 games, working with big brands like Spil Games, DOCOMO and Nickelodeon. Personally, I believe in HTML5’s potential and promote it at events like Pocket Gamer Connects, DevGAMM and White Nights. So then, why HTML5? The first thing to state is that Flash can be considered obsolete right now. Adobe have said they will finally kill Flash in 2020. It’s pretty obvious that if you’re going to succeed in today’s mobile industry you need to stick to actual emerging technologies. Every mobile platform has already discontinued native Flash support. When speaking about mobile HTML5, I can’t not...