Case Studies > Trihex Studios

Trihex Studios: delighting 40M players with analytics

The story behind Trihex Studios and their hit Roblox title, Redcliff City. Learn why they integrated GameAnalytics and how they use this data to evaluate and ship the most engaging new features into their open world game.

Trihex Studios

Challenge

After launching Redcliff City, Trihex Studios discovered early on that mainly listening to the most vocal members of their community didn't necessarily represent what was best for their whole playerbase. If they wanted to get a broader, more objective view, they needed data. Trihex Studios needed a way to listen to their silent majority.

Solution

Data was key. With the ability to track all types of metrics, including custom design events, Trihex could learn what really mattered to their players. Roblox only provides a few metrics, so Trihex decided to integrate GameAnalytics – giving them access to in-depth analytics and aggregated insights to improve their overall player experience.

Interesting facts

About Trihex Studios

Founded by Eric Park and Tae Kim, Trihex Studios developed Redcliff City – a role-playing game that drops players into an immersive city where they decide their own fate and path. A completely open simulator, Redcliff City has garnered over 40 million players just this year, with their daily active users reaching over 700,000. Incredible results for a team of just two people!

GameAnalytics gave a voice to Redcliff’s silent majority

Eric and Tae discovered early on that most developers can end up only listening to a few very vocal players. But those players often aren’t representative of the entire player base. For one, over half of Roblox’s players are under 12 years old. Not exactly the sort to engage with a developer or fill out an online survey. In fact, under most privacy laws — a developer isn’t even legally allowed to collect that information, as it could reveal personal information about a minor.

“It’s not the user’s responsibility to tell you what they want, though,” Eric explained. “It’s our responsibility as developers to figure out what the player wants and needs in the game. But you need to be careful. It’s very easy to set up a Discord server and get stuck in an echo chamber of a vocal minority who end up controlling everything. Nothing speaks for the silent majority better than data.”

Tae and Eric quickly learnt that they needed to incorporate analytics into their game. Otherwise, they could easily start heading off course – and making changes their community didn’t really want.

“Data is the canary in the mine,” Tae said. “Canaries hint at a sign of danger. They’re the first ones to know when things are going wrong. Sure, it might not always show you a problem, but they’re the early warning sign that we desperately need.”

Data can reveal insights

Roblox has only recently released analytics into its platform – a dashboard that simply tells developers their MAU and DAU. While useful, it doesn’t dig deep enough for Trihex. And – at the time – it wasn’t available. By incorporating GameAnalytics’ SDK, they were also able to get the insight and depth that they needed.

“GameAnalytics really helped us bootstrap and has been a key part of our journey,” Tae said. “Free analytics is really good, especially for teams starting out. It’s done so much for us.”

Redcliffe city game art

Now, with our Roblox SDK, Trihex games could get all the metrics they needed, like retention, gameplay, and custom events such as resources and progression. For example, they could design an event called ‘visited_store’ to whether the player spawned a house when they first joined the game. This can reveal whether the changes Trihex made were actually working.

“GameAnalytics provides all this data in real-time,” Tae added. “So they’ve been absolutely amazing, especially for Roblox members. The GameAnalytics SDK for Roblox is a community favorite. Even with Roblox’s changes, it’s still an essential staple.”

Want to learn more about how Trihex reached these huge levels of success? Well, we’ve got you covered. Check out the full interview with Trihex Studios here.

GameAnalytics is kidSAFE

It’s worth remembering that Roblox’s audience is so young. This can make it difficult for most analytic tools to collect any information about their gameplay.

However, GameAnaltyics never collects any identifying information. No names. No ages. No emails. Nothing that could be used to identify a player. All the data is completely anonymous. In fact, we’re certified by kidSAFE and meet their standards.

Give a voice to your silent majority

It’s not just Roblox that we support – we have integrations for Unity, Unreal, Meta Quest 2, Godot, Gamemaker and more. Check out our full list on our integrations page. And if we’ve missed the engine you’re using, just drop us a message. And we’ll look into adding it to our pipeline.