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.
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.
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.
Our developers are figuring it’s not the user’s responsibility to tell you what they want, though. 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. 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. Free analytics is really good, especially for teams starting out. It’s done so much for us.
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. 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.
