Insights and tips about the games industry

Co-authored with Steven Gaston User experience design has become the mainstay of creating intuitive and rewarding offline, online digital experiences, be it across web, apps physical products or more recently GAMES. Most top tier gaming companies big or small (be it PC, mobile or console) like Blizzard, Riot, Sony, EA, Zynga, King, Ubisoft, Gameloft understand this scenery change and are now more readily hiring UX talent & integrating UX design in their development pipeline seriously. I remember finding a big void on this subject a year back and have been writing on the subject of UX design in games under the heading of UX Insights since last year. Analysing F2P games and deconstructing prevailing and upcoming games industry macro, micro trends. UX Walkthrough?…….What’s it about. This series takes the subject of UX in games a step further by sharing with you some of the methods and techniques used in...

Introduction Like any other software development team, the GameAnalytics SDK team invests time in team-building and in other activities that elevate the team spirit. We participated in a local game jam in late spring where we managed to imagine and implement a simple immersive game mechanic. With a little more work after the event, we managed to build a simple game, which we later named Swivel 2D. The intention of building this small game is to illustrate how the GameAnalytics product can be used, from instrumentation through to the planning phase and finally on to programmatic implementation. Download the game! In order to fully understand the contents of this page, I’d recommend that you download and play the game. Here are the links: Download Swivel for iOS Download Swivel for Android Swivel is a pseudo-single player casual game for mobile platforms created by...

The question I ask is – can we go beyond? Every UX, Game, Product designer aspires enhancing prototypes to map the complete user flows, not just bits and bobs. This article is divided into Tactical and Strategy layers. I will cover the former first. As an UX Director, I have to continuously work on both Tactical and Strategy sides of UX with my team and stakeholder groups to enhance the quality, push the limits and strengthen the integrity of our UX pipeline and process. In my last article Here, I detailed the process and benefits of low to mid fidelity prototypes where we built a device ready interactive version for user testing. Example below of our low-fi proto. built during the last post. My last post focused entirely on just prototyping a low-fi stand-alone feature. This time we will build a hi-fi prototype with inter-connected features, hence testing the entire...

The mobile games market is growing at a fast speed (52% during 2016 according to Newzoo), making it a truly a global area of business. However, as is in any other global business, there are differences in consumer needs, desires and behaviors. It is crucial for any mobile games company to learn about these differences as this information is the key to unlocking success – and profits – worldwide. In the mobile games marketplace, these differences are reflected on the types of games that become successful in different markets. It’s clear that these three markets are different, but how about the dozens of the other markets? This was the question we wanted to answer – and to back it up with facts. To make the results easy to understand, we wanted visualize the answers, and to create the “true world...

Chances are you’ve thought about running your own Kickstarter. Money coming directly from your community and passionate players, wouldn’t that be great? Crowdfunding is more than an option to budget your projects. First, it doesn’t have to be the only one. It combines well with subsidies, it doesn’t prevent you from collaborating with a publisher, or running on another stream of income. It offers a great way to test the market and your communication before you release your game to the world. But success is not a given. Less than half the campaigns reach their goal. It is not easy money either. Take this route if you want to involve your community and unlock some extra funds as you’re building the game. It takes a lot of preparation, and a good understanding of what your visitors will love, more so...

It’s no secret that creating a stellar game from scratch is no easy feat – it’s comparable to climbing Mt. Everest, in fact. Remember the movie Grandma’s Boy where the main character, Alex, was basically producing his own game with triple-AAA level graphics and gameplay for the Xbox console? And when J.P. was shown a preview of the game, commenting “I like what you did with the bump-mapping”? It doesn’t work that way! Though the movie itself was hilarious, the idea of creating a jaw-dropping 3D game, for a console no less, entirely by yourself in your spare time, is a pipe dream. Sorry for bursting anyone’s bubble, that’s really not my intention – I just want any would-be game developer to fully comprehend the hurdles of game development, especially if you’re going it alone. So for this article, I’ve...

Behavioural Economics is a fascinating offshoot of economics, which explores psychology of decision making process of customers. Over the years I have been testing and reviewing numerous mobile games and apps in different genres. While I enjoy deconstructing and analysing different aspects of the digital products, on-boarding, core loop, social, meta, PvP etc. Monetisation patterns employed are of special interest to me due to my background in economics. [bctt tweet=”5 incredibly effective monetization strategies in game design (and the behavioural economics behind them)” username=”GameAnalytics”] Here are five unconventional monetisation patterns that differ from the crowd but work incredibly well, each based on a sound behavioural economics principle. But before we dive into what these patterns are, let’s understand the underlying Behavioural Economics Principles and how they apply to these unconventional patterns. What is ‘Behavioural Economics’? The study of psychology relating...

With more than 500 games submitted to the App Store every day, it’s hard to imagine a more competitive environment to get noticed. That’s why every little improvement to your listing is particularly important. With an average conversion rate of 4.47% (for games on the iOS App Store), even the smallest of changes can be hugely influential to your success or failure. Of course, a quality app or game is what matters the most. A well-optimized listing won’t fix this. Yet, what steps should you take once your game is polished? When your UI is on point, gameplay is fine-tuned, well balanced, and all bugs and glitches are detected and fixed. Once you’ve dealt with all of the above, you’ll want to pay closer attention to App Store page. In fact, optimization of each product page element can take your conversion...

Overview As of 2017 you can find almost 5.3 million iOS and Android mobile apps in App Stores which makes mobile app marketing a huge challenge for new mobile app developers and mobile app marketers. The mobile apps market is highly developed and an increasing challenge for developers with Google Play adding almost 50 000 new mobile apps monthly. Mobile user acquisition cost (UAC) is also growing year by year which does not make it any easier with the average iOS app costing $3.04 in the United States according to Chartboost data. Mobile app developers have many more ways to reach their customers, than those in “classic” commodities and services marketing, although this can be a bigger challenge as well. What most characterizes mobile app marketing is its aim on return on investment (ROI). This factor provides data about the...

A note from Ryan: If you’re reading this chances are you’re a part of a larger iOS or design community I’ve been quietly learning from for quite some time. I owe you a great deal and I think it’s my turn to start giving back and sharing more. Here is the first of a few drafts I’ve been holding onto far too long. I added sharing mechanics to Blackbox as an afterthought—but I’ve been designing for sharing since day one. To this day, these design decisions and mechanics keep Blackbox growing and reduce the need for marketing. Below is a breakdown of how sharing in Blackbox works from a mechanical level, as well as some of the design considerations I made along the way. Many of these observations may appear to apply only to games, but I firmly believe they hold merit...

Editor’s note: We wanted to give you the heads up that our Ads Dashboard is now live! Make the most of your in-game ads by seeing your data in our new dashboard. Improve your ads performance by answering the big questions. Advertising is part of nearly every mobile experience, and whether or not you personally approve of it, it’s becoming standard for most mobile games. After all, it’s a billion-dollar industry. And if you’re going to do it, you should do it well. Ads should be well-placed, high quality, and in just the right amounts in order to make sure your users and your finances are both pleased. Let’s start by going through some general categories of games along with the types of ads commonly used in mobile games, and then we’ll cover the guidelines or thought process that should...

Editor’s note – this is an interview from 2017. Since then, we’ve had a couple more interviews and talks with Voodoo. You can find them here:  How To Create “Hyper-Snackable” Casual Games – Tips from Voodoo How GameAnalytics helps Voodoo identify and release hit mobile games each month Hyper-casual in a Hypercompetitive Market (VIDEO & PRESENTATION) Thanks for taking the time to talk to me Hugo, could you kick things off by describing a little about Voodoo, yourself, and what drew you into the gaming industry? Sure. My name’s Hugo and I’m currently a Publishing Manager at Voodoo. I met the co-founders, Alex and Laurent, 4 years ago when the company was still a small startup. I was actually completing a 6-month internship for them at the time. We immediately got on very well and after finishing the internship I...