Resources > All

Insights and tips about the games industry

Subscribe for gaming insights, industry reports and product updates delivered straight to your inbox.

8 min read
#Guides

6 Tips for Hiring the Best Game Developer Talent

Starting a brand new indie game development studio is not an easy task. The main reason for this is the fact that finding the right people who will work with you can prove to be quite difficult. Not everyone is cut out to work in such an environment and put themselves on the line each day while not having a guaranteed income. An indie game studio is a huge mixture of business and passion and this means that you need to find people who are similar with each other to begin with. Compared to big corporate studios, the people in indie gaming have a lot of individuality and they all look to create unique games that will reach people across the world and leave a huge impact on them. In order to be successful in this world, you need to...
14 min read
#Data & Analytics

Understanding Your Audience – Bartle Player Taxonomy

Type of players We all know that every player is unique and special, with their own motivations for playing any given game and developing a personalized approach to its ecosystem. However, it’s nearly impossible to assess and cater to each type of personality with every aspect of your game, so it’s necessary to step back, organize, and plan things out a bit. And that starts by understanding what you’re dealing with in regard to your site’s community. Bartler’s Hence the need for a taxonomy and some kind of assessment system. The Bartle Player Taxonomy or Bartle Player Types are based on character theory and player behavior; the classification is meant to establish player personality types based on behavioral patterns and their goals and motivations for playing the game. Note that no player fits into one particular category; rather, most players...
User Analytics Persona
14 min read
#Data & Analytics

Maximizing The Value Of Player Data

There’s one key ingredient that’s the most valuable part of any game for developers, and it might not be the most obvious element or the first thing that you think of. It’s not the source code, database, live ops strategy, or anything other than the players themselves. Or more accurately, the data they generate. What’s more, maximizing the value of that data might be the most valuable thing that you can do as a marketer or game developer. And there are plenty of ways to accomplish that, starting with understanding and organizing the data itself. In fact, there are five groups of activities or sets of actions that you’ll take during your data collection or journey through the realm of gaming telemetry: Understanding Telemetry As It Applies To Your Game Knowing Your Objects And Attributes Defining And Name Your Features...
6 min read
#Marketing & Publishing

Exploring Motivation & Retention for Popular Games

Retention is the most important metric for a free-to-play mobile game’s long-term business outlook. If you want to understand the link between a player’s lifetime value (how much money they ever spend in the game) and how long they continue to play your game, Emily Greer gave a GDC talk in 2013 absolutely packed with web data. This post will expand on that talk by highlighting some game systems in Kongregate’s mobile publishing portfolio that we’ve seen successfully drive long-term player retention. It will also highlight the core motivations created by each game and discuss how that system ties into that motivation. An excellent resource on the subject is Quantic Foundry’s 2017 GDC talk on the anatomy of player motivations. AdVenture Capitalist offers a simple promise that any fan of idle games can appreciate: click more, get more powerful. Quantic Foundry’s talk highlighted idle...
10 min read
#Marketing & Publishing

10 Tactics To Drive Game Downloads On A Low Budget

Editor’s note: a little while ago we discussed how to market your game on a $0 budget. It was a popular post with a lot of useful tips. We thought we’d get more advice from another industry expert. This time it’s from TheTool’s ASO and mobile marketing lead, Katerina Zolotareva. Overview Getting a mobile game discovered by users is a tricky task and many developers have a perception that it will inevitably cost a lot of money. However, this doesn’t have to be true! There are many ways to promote an app on a low budget. App Marketing is all about creative approach! Good communication with potential players and existing ones is essential to achieve visibility and help your game to achieve maximum exposure. Today we will share some tactics that will make your life so much easier when you need...
12 min read
#Game Design

UX Review: Slotomania, the hooks & baits of social casino gaming.

10 out of  50 US top grossing games are social casino giants, an indication of how dominant this genre is with an massively loyal target audience.   Superdata research predicts massive growth in this segement You may wonder, why people are sinking millions of dollars in to these games which can not be played for real money! give no cash returns, unlike the real life casinos! & online gambling counterparts! I remember in 2010 while working at slot machine giant WMS (acquired by scientific gaming for $1.5 billion). When they launched a variant of their popular flagship (online real money) brand ‘Jackpot Party’ as an F2P game on Facebook, everyone was genuinely surprised, it racked up 25K overnight!! Traditional casino gaming manufacturers could not fathom what would drive people to play these no real money counterparts? Have they discovered another virgin goldmine waiting to be explored? Flash forward 2016,...
Black Snowflake Games Interview
7 min read
#Game Deconstructions

The Viral Potential Of HTML5 Games – Black Snowflake Interview

Hi Filipp, thanks for chatting with me. Could you share a little about yourself and your studio? Sure. Black Snowflake is a specialist developer of HTML5 games. This really became our core focus after 2013. Since then we’ve developed more than 25 mobile-first HTML5 games, working with big brands like Spil Games, DOCOMO and Nickelodeon. Personally, I believe in HTML5’s potential and promote it at events like Pocket Gamer Connects, DevGAMM and White Nights. So then, why HTML5? The first thing to state is that Flash can be considered obsolete right now. Adobe have said they will finally kill Flash in 2020. It’s pretty obvious that if you’re going to succeed in today’s mobile industry you need to stick to actual emerging technologies. Every mobile platform has already discontinued native Flash support. When speaking about mobile HTML5, I can’t not...
8 min read
#Game Design

UX Walkthrough: Anatomy of a Usability Test in Video Games (Part-2)

Co-authored with Steven Gaston This post was originally featured on Gamasutra In part 2 of this post (in case you missed, Part 1 here), as promised we will cover how to set up external usability tests, preparation done at developers’ (client) and research agencies end, see how internal and external UX designers work in sync combining their final observation & analysis to produce unbiased results. In Part 1, we saw how most studios typically conduct usability test in ways that allow biases to creep in which could drastically alter the results. We are happy to know there are studios that have a more sophisticated UX pipeline & UX designers (some of your comments hinted at that) in place who conduct sessions in a clinical setting. Our process will outline the ideal practices that should be a part of the DNA of any usability session. [bctt tweet=”Part 2 of a handy #UX...
8 min read
#Game Design

UX Walkthrough: Anatomy of a Usability Test in Video Games (Part-1)

Co-authored with Steven Gaston User experience design has become the mainstay of creating intuitive and rewarding offline, online digital experiences, be it across web, apps physical products or more recently GAMES. Most top tier gaming companies big or small (be it PC, mobile or console) like Blizzard, Riot, Sony, EA, Zynga, King, Ubisoft, Gameloft understand this scenery change and are now more readily hiring UX talent & integrating UX design in their development pipeline seriously. I remember finding a big void on this subject a year back and have been writing on the subject of UX design in games under the heading of UX Insights since last year. Analysing F2P games and deconstructing prevailing and upcoming games industry macro, micro trends. UX Walkthrough?…….What’s it about. This series takes the subject of UX in games a step further by sharing with you some of the methods and techniques used in...
6 min read
#Data & Analytics

Analytics In Swivel 2D (GameAnalytics Demo Game)

Introduction Like any other software development team, the GameAnalytics SDK team invests time in team-building and in other activities that elevate the team spirit. We participated in a local game jam in late spring where we managed to imagine and implement a simple immersive game mechanic. With a little more work after the event, we managed to build a simple game, which we later named Swivel 2D. The intention of building this small game is to illustrate how the GameAnalytics product can be used, from instrumentation through to the planning phase and finally on to programmatic implementation. Download the game! In order to fully understand the contents of this page, I’d recommend that you download and play the game. Here are the links: Download Swivel for iOS Download Swivel for Android Swivel is a pseudo-single player casual game for mobile platforms created by...
8 min read
#Game Design

Advanced UX Prototyping and Playtesting (Without the Code!)

The question I ask is – can we go beyond? Every UX, Game, Product designer aspires enhancing prototypes to map the complete user flows, not just bits and bobs. This article is divided into Tactical and Strategy layers. I will cover the former first. As an UX Director, I have to continuously work on both Tactical and Strategy sides of UX with my team and stakeholder groups to enhance the quality, push the limits and strengthen the integrity of our UX pipeline and process. In my last article Here, I detailed the process and benefits of low to mid fidelity prototypes where we built a device ready interactive version for user testing. Example below of our low-fi proto. built during the last post. My last post focused entirely on just prototyping a low-fi stand-alone feature. This time we will build a hi-fi prototype with inter-connected features, hence testing the entire...
5 min read
#Data & Analytics

A Map Of Worldwide Mobile Gaming Markets In 2017

The mobile games market is growing at a fast speed (52% during 2016 according to Newzoo), making it a truly a global area of business. However, as is in any other global business, there are differences in consumer needs, desires and behaviors. It is crucial for any mobile games company to learn about these differences as this information is the key to unlocking success – and profits – worldwide. In the mobile games marketplace, these differences are reflected on the types of games that become successful in different markets. It’s clear that these three markets are different, but how about the dozens of the other markets? This was the question we wanted to answer – and to back it up with facts. To make the results easy to understand, we wanted visualize the answers, and to create the “true world...
14 min read
#Marketing & Publishing

How to Run a Successful Kickstarter for your Game

Chances are you’ve thought about running your own Kickstarter. Money coming directly from your community and passionate players, wouldn’t that be great? Crowdfunding is more than an option to budget your projects. First, it doesn’t have to be the only one. It combines well with subsidies, it doesn’t prevent you from collaborating with a publisher, or running on another stream of income. It offers a great way to test the market and your communication before you release your game to the world. But success is not a given. Less than half the campaigns reach their goal. It is not easy money either. Take this route if you want to involve your community and unlock some extra funds as you’re building the game. It takes a lot of preparation, and a good understanding of what your visitors will love, more so...