Tom Kinniburgh

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...

It’s an exciting time when a platform or feature creates new opportunities with which you can make games. As a developer, being first to market can prove lucrative as there is much lower competition. However, this doesn’t come without risks; if the platform fails then your game and the investment you’ve made is wasted. The iMessage platform is simple to develop on and uses Xcode as the main tool to create projects. When compared to new technologies such as VR or AR (which both require much larger investments in learning and development), iMessage provides a less risky opportunity for new games. At Pocket Gamer Connects 2017 in London, I presented some of the data that we’ve been observing from the latest iMessage apps. I took the time to read up on the protocols and the implementation as well as downloading...

Benchmarks allow you to determine how well your game is performing compared to similar titles on the app store, without requiring any changes to your code. This knowledge can help you make decisions and focus your development on improving game metrics and making a better game. Your core KPIs are the central metrics that we benchmark. KPIs are particularly important as they are usually simplified numbers which quickly inform you about the health of your game. Retention, for instance, is a measure of addictiveness or stickiness, as people come back and play your game again the next day. ARPU is a measure of monetization and pricing.  High ARPUs require good game design in presentation and purchase so that a user understands the benefit and value of their purchase. Let’s take a deeper look at how you can use the Benchmarking feature from GameAnalytics in your game today. Understanding Benchmark...