Insights and tips about the games industry

Wouldn’t it be awesome if your players spent money within your game all of the time? While building a community that spends actual currency in your game’s environment is certainly difficult, it’s not impossible. In-app purchases are a huge form of income for the mobile gaming world, and is only getting more and more popular. This chart from Statista shows just how comfortable users are becoming with making purchases on their mobile devices. The million dollar question every game developer is asking is ‘how can I take advantage of this?’ It all comes back to the game, and your data. By analyzing your users behavior you can better optimize your gameplay so not only will your users have a better experience, you’ll also be able to get them to perform your desired actions. Before you can do this however, you...

Being lean is more just than a tech industry buzzword, it’s a way of life – or at least a smart way of doing business. That applies to many different categories, but especially analytics, and definitely so when you need to figure out your minimum viable analytics. With most analytics programs (including ours) you get a ton of information, but as it’s commonly said – if you can’t measure it then you can’t improve upon it. We’ll build on that further by saying that if you and your team can’t easily track, consume, and find actionable data in your analytics reports, then what’s the point of tracking everything? You’ll likely end up wasting a lot of time and effort on something unnecessary when you have better things to do – like improving your game or working on new ones. That’s...

Editor’s Note: this post was originally published by Om Tandon, Director of User Experience at Digit. With over 14 years experience, Om specializes in UX design, UI design and User Interaction, and has previously worked at Gameloft and June Software.  Is it just me or are UX playbooks, UX pattern libraries, UX style guides not talked about enough? Or incorporated as often as UI style guides or brand style guides? Are these just buzzwords or do they really not matter? Or is there some kernel of truth and real benefit of creating them, be it in games or enterprise softwares and apps? Before we start talking about the HOW, it is inherently important to ask WHY. Why do you even need a UX playbook, pattern library or style guide in first place? The origins Style guides have been around for a long long...

China is the biggest mobile gaming market on the planet. It’s also one of the most challenging markets. But it doesn't have to be.

A new opportunity When they were invited by Facebook to become one of only 15 launch partners on Instant Games, SOFTGAMES immediately understood the massive opportunity. Since then it became the mission of the world’s largest HTML5 games provider to enhance the overall Messenger games experience… and in this pursuit, they’ve now released a string of hit titles, including Cookie Crush, Solitaire Story, and Bubble Shooter HD. One cornerstone of their ongoing success is the focus on high-quality games that they tailor precisely to the features available on certain platforms, such as leaderboards or progress syncing on FB Messenger. For this successful studio, measuring, understanding, and balancing progression flows with a considered focus of these platform-specific features is the key to driving and accelerating growth. They supplement this by listening to their community and quickly actioning the feedback, constantly optimizing...

So first, what’s the story behind Claws of Furry? I created Terahard Studios about 5 to 6 years ago, and about a year ago we started making a prototype for a platformer. We were playing around with a few different concepts, but the idea of cats being ninjas stuck straight away and was one of the first concepts we tried and we loved it. We changed the shape of it a few times to make it more interesting – and the version we’ve shown here is the version that stuck with us – and the more we played the game and the more we were making it, while still playing it every day, we tried to make it more extreme. We had a lot of little different fun mechanics added in that almost compliment each other; you can fight quickly,...

If you’re a game developer, chances are that you’re running some native ads. Or if not, you’re probably at least thinking about it, because properly done native ads can be incredibly successful and lucrative. However, there are a lot of reasons they are the next big thing in mobile advertising, so let’s dig into how you can best execute native advertising in your game(s). Let’s start by defining what a native ad actually is. Generally, a native ad is considered any type of digital ad that echoes or follows the form and function of the platform on which it appears. And in most cases, the value of a native is the fact that properly deployed, they don’t feel like ads at all. Which is why they can be so successful if they are carefully executed, tracked, and measured – and...

Editor’s note: If you’re reading this, then we highly recommend that you also check out our latest updates to the tool here. It has tons of information about the new features, as well as the most recent changes to the GameAnalytics platform. New features, you say? Currently we are quite busy with introducing a modern data processing backend, free-to-use for all of you fine GameAnalytics users. Even so, we found the time to add some powerful new toys for you to play with. We are introducing a new features called Command Center. Essentially, it will allow you to control your game from within GameAnalytics. All of this in real-time, without having to update a single line of code on the App stores! How it works + documentation The command center provides a specific way of triggering these changes: Command Center (Configs)....

If you’ve read our helpful guide to launching mobile games in China, you’ll know that there are a number of stylistic and cultural differences between the kinds of games that Chinese and Western gamers choose to play. But how about the differences in when and how they play the games themselves? With that in mind, we’ve picked out five insights that we think will help Western game developers better understand and appeal to audiences in the East. 1. Fewer Chinese gamers spend money… Just as in the West, Chinese mobile gamers mostly play titles that are free to download, but which monetize through IAP or advertising. When we compared the proportion of free-to-play gamers that converted to paying players, Chinese players were around 20% less likely to convert than players in the rest of the world. However, the big swings...

Editor’s note: The yearly Rezzed event run by Eurogamer.net is a great way for indie developers to showcase their games. One title we got to look at was Kenshi, an open-world RPG with a map that reaches over 870km² and a new danger seemingly lurking around every corner. After initally getting absolutely wiped out within minutes of starting, we discovered that this isn’t like most titles around. Kenshi requires strategy, wits, and leadership skills. How did you become a game developer and end up working on Kenshi? I started about ten years ago, self taught, and just decided to start making it from scratch. The first version of the game was made completely single-handedly. It looked a lot rougher due to this – it was a lot smaller and less complete. I got it alpha-funded. So, before Steam Greenlight I started releasing and selling it...

Back in 2012 when we released the first Fun Run game, we had little idea that the series would pass 100m downloads over the next few years. We came to realise that it’s possible to reach the masses by word-of-mouth, with players sharing Fun Run with other people they thought would also enjoy it. This led to us founding Megacool, to help other games to grow organically through improved content sharing. From that moment on, we’ve immersed ourselves in the world of GIFs and developed some best practices that we hope will help you make GIFs an essential part of your marketing strategy. Let’s start by taking a quick look at why you should choose GIFs over video or images. GIFs + Games = Greatness First, let’s be clear that a GIF is a great format to show what your...

By now, many of you will be aware of the fact that GameAnalytics is about to undergo a major technical overhaul. For the past 18 months, myself and a small team of engineers have been rebuilding (and also migrating), our existing infrastructure to an innovative new solution. That solution is called Druid, and it’s essentially a high performance data store. In this post, my aim is to give more of a technical overview of the new systems and solutions that we’re putting in place. I hope this helps to give all users of our service more context about the change, why it was necessary, and the benefits it will bring. For more information about the upcoming changes, you can check out this Beta announcement post. What is Druid? Druid is an open source data store designed for real-time exploratory analytics...