Author profile
Nicolas Estrem
Product Marketing at GameAnalytics
5 min read
#Data & Analytics
How TapNation makes hit games with DataSuite
TapNation helps nurture over 80 studios to develop hit games. Data is crucial when working on any genre. But particularly when you’re making a hypercasual game. TapNation helps studios all over the world to develop and improve their games. But to do that, they need accurate data. Fast. That’s where DataSuite comes in: it’s a collection of our services to help you bring all your data together and easily plug it into your other systems. We spoke with TapNation’s VP of engineering, Kamel Haddad, to see how that works. And what they use DataSuite for. Tell us a little about TapNation and yourself Sure thing. We are TapNation. We’re a publisher based in Paris and have taken around 80 different studios worldwide under our wing. Over the last few years, we’ve had around 19 hit titles, counting over 500 million...
9 min read
#Marketing & Publishing
Hybrid-casual: the secret sauce to higher retention and better engagement
Hybrid-casual is a fairly new concept to enter the gaming world. You may have heard the whispers around the industry and a few hybrid-casual games already entering the app stores. But it’s starting to make its mark in the market. Players are starting to spend more time in games (with time spent in apps up 80% from 2019 to 2021). And in response, Developers and studios alike are turning their attention to this new type of game development and reaping the benefits (if done correctly). So what exactly is hybrid-casual? How does this differ from hyper-casual? And what do you need to do to get started? That’s what we aim to cover. Let’s dig in. So, what are hybrid-casual games? It’s when you mix together the simple core gameplay of hyper-casual, with the features and monetization models of mid-core. The...
7 min read
#Game Deconstructions
Five mobile games that nailed shifting to VR
Virtual reality is no new concept. Have you ever heard of Sword of Damocles? It was invented by Ivan Sutherland and Bob Sproull, it was arguably the first VR / AR head-mounted display connected to a computer. That was in 1968. Today mobile games are at the start of shifting to VR But it wasn’t until 1987 that Jaron Lanier used the name ‘virtual reality’ for the first time. He coined the term to help better describe his research. His company was the first ever to sell VR goggles, called the EyePhone, which cost upwards of $250,000 (including the computer to run it). Image source: Flashbak Of course, technology has come a long way since 1968. In 2021, the global VR market size was just under $5 billion, and research shows that we’re now predicting the market to increase to more...
4 min read
#Tool & Product
GameAnalytics A/B testing allows you to go deeper
We’ve improved our A/B testing feature on GameAnalytics so you can optimize further your games and try out new great ideas and concepts. You can now stop user acquisition and exclude offline users from your tests. A/B Testing: Stop acquiring users We notice many game developers want better control over the allocation of users in an experiment. There are situations where developers would prefer a cohort to remain active; however, no more users join this experiment. For this reason, we introduced a functionality where you can choose if and when you’d like your experiment to stop allocating more users. How does it work? While an experiment is running (active), the number of users allocated to the test is displayed on the page. When you want your test to stop assigning more users, click the Stop Acquiring Users option from the...