Resources > All

Insights and tips about the games industry

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

Microphone
11 min read
#Game Design

Being Successful in Free to Play Games: Atelier 801 Interview

We got in touch Melanie Christin, the co-founder of Atelier 801, an independent game studio that produced the massively multiplayer Free to Play title Transformice. Its community has been extremely active since 2011, the year of its initial release. We asked her for tips and feedback on the company’s experience. Melanie, can you tell me who you are and what you do at Atelier 801? Hi, I am Melanie Christin, the cofounder of Atelier 801. We built this game company with my partner, Jean-Baptiste Le Marchand, thanks to the success of our first game, a multiplayer title called Transformice. And we created the game one year before the studio. Your flagship game is Transformice. How does it play? Transformice is a massively online multiplayer browser-based game. The player is a small mouse that jumps from platform to platform to catch a...
15 min read
#Live Ops

Live Ops Strategies For Free To Play Games

Launching a new game is an undeniably exciting moment. After putting in the hard work, imagination, and effort that goes into a new title, you get to send it out into the world. But really, the work has barely begun, especially if you’re launching a free to play or F2P game that’s monetized based on ad revenue and/or in-game purchases. Once a game is launched, you should be optimizing, adjusting, updating, and reporting your progress throughout your game’s lifespan or existence, working to improve player retention as well as increasing downloads, getting lapsed players to return, and increasing the number and length of player sessions. All these activities and events meant to increase player retention and maximize the value of a game’s user base can be referred to as live ops. [bctt tweet=”What are live game operations and why may...
ASO for Google Play
7 min read
#ASO

ASO For Games On Google Play: Get 53% More Installs

Outline One of the most popular questions we get is how to lure more traffic for the Google Play app. We decided to showcase a simple text optimisation for an indie game app with a small amount of installs. Disclaimer: Unfortunately, we can’t disclose the name of the game but all the data in this article is real. Introduction So, what we initially dealt with? App: Game in Google Play Category: Card Strategy Country: USA Preliminary data: Total visits per day: 329 Total installs per day: 92 Average conversion rate from visit to install: 28% The information is taken from the Google Play Developer Console, country is USA, measure by “Country (Play Store organic)”. Step 1. ASO-audit Based on current app metrics we estimated which keywords and keyphrases made users in the US find and install the app as well...
User Analytics Persona
15 min read
#Marketing & Publishing

How To Create User Personas As Unique As Your Audience

Do you sometimes wish that you could get to know every one of your players and the members of your target audience personally? Know their playing habits, what they like and don’t like about your game and online gaming in general, any similar interests and related activities, demographics and location, and whatever other tidbits that might have you improve your game’s user experience for them. While fulfilling that exact wish is pretty unlikely – especially with a larger audience – you can put a type of face to those data points by creating user personas that essentially characterize each group or segment of your audience. In fact, you can even name them, assign images to them for better visualization, or further flesh out their backgrounds to make them more “real” in your mind. Why You Should Develop User Personas… Personas...
FRVR Interview
23 min read
#Game Deconstructions

From 0 to 2 Million DAU: An Interview with FRVR

Editor’s note: This innovative studio has released 7 games so far, with another 15 in production for Q2 2017. In less than 2 years, FRVR has gained more than 2 million daily active users and 70 million all-time players. We chat with the founder of FRVR, Chris Benjaminsen, to draw light on this success. Thanks for taking the time to talk to me, Chris. To kick things off, could you give a little background about yourself and what motivated you to start FRVR? Of course. Back in 2013 I had worked as the director of gaming for Yahoo! for two years, and it was very clear to me that I needed to do something else. I wanted to go travel the world while still generating income, and taking on as little responsibility as possible. Essentially, my initial motivation was to...
Microphone
12 min read
#Strategies

Getting into Free to Play Games: Lone Stone Studios Interview

There’s nothing like learning from the experience of other developers. That’s why we went ahead and interviewed a young mobile game studio who’s working on their first Free to Play title, City Invaders. We got in touch with Pierrick, the company’s co-founder. He shares his experience getting a mobile game studio started. Following on our recent 2-part article Launching a Mobile Game Business he shared some tips and several decisions the team took to hopefully make both the company and the game a success. Hi there! Could you tell us who you are and what you do at Lone Stone? Hi, I’m Pierrick Bignet, co-founder of Lone Stone studios, a game company that also provides web services. We are a small independent studio, so I’m both the game designer and one of the developers in the team. We all work on several different...
12 min read
#Ads & Monetization

How To Make Your Game UI Shine & Increase Conversions

Why game UI matters Maybe you want to help the players find their way through the menus. You may also want to increase your sales. Regardless of your goal, you can achieve it all by using the principles of design the right way and measuring the impact of your changes. We want people to find their way around the game, to even focus on the game. To make this a reality, we should remove friction in the interface. We don’t want the player to waste time in the menus. We want them to get the information they need through the interface. No more, no less. Unlike the gameplay, you pretty much always want to simplify navigation as much as you can. This has nothing to do with the game’s difficulty or “casual” gaming. In mobile titles, the interface does not only allow...
Analytics Storytelling
15 min read
#Data & Analytics

How to Tell a Story with your Analytics Reports

Analytics reports or presentations are generally not the most exciting thing ever – after all, they are usually just a bunch of numbers and maybe a few graphs on a page. However, it’s all a matter of perception – data can be really interesting when it’s presented in a compelling fashion. And dare we say even exciting! What’s more, analytics reports and presentations are some of the most vital documents that you can produce for your business, so you definitely shouldn’t treat them like an afterthought. You just need to learn to make it tell a story – but that’s easier said than done. In fact, for many companies or brands figuring out how to tell that story might be the most complicated part. On the surface, analytics reports aren’t especially captivating. With rows and columns of data most often...
Mobile Game Trailer
14 min read
#Game Design

The 9 Do’s and Don’ts of Game Trailers

Editor’s note: as we discussed in Marketing Your Indie Game on a Zero-Dollar Budget and How To Create Immersive Game Intros,  your game’s trailer is one of your most powerful marketing assets. Whether it’s for your website’s visitors, who want to get a sense of how the game feels, or more importantly for the press, who will use it to decide whether they want to cover your game or not. This article will help you showcase your game in the best possible light.  Game trailer fundamentals Your game trailer shows what the game is, and it has the power to drive emotion and interest before people get a chance to try out your game. It provides you with an arsenal of visual and audio tools to turn viewers into players. The structure of your trailer will likely always be the same. It will: Start...
Businessman in a Game
8 min read
#Marketing & Publishing

Launching a Mobile Game Business (Part 2)

Editor’s note: This is the second of a 2-part series by Anthony Hurtado, a veteran of the mobile publishing and advertising industry. In this series, Anthony gives sage advice for anyone looking to break into the sector and launch their own mobile game business. To view part 1 of this series, click here. Step 4: How To Get Users So, you have selected your genre, you have figured out how lucrative your newfound audience can be, and you are excited. Let’s build that game, right?! WRONG. You need to figure out how you will get users. In the early days of mobile games, it really was a “you build it and they will come”. This was supercharged by the bigger firms who would endlessly cross-promote, (and sometimes cut inner circle cross-promotional deals that just made the big guys, bigger). For those who didn’t just organically grow...
Creating a Game Business
14 min read
#Marketing & Publishing

Launching a Mobile Game Business (Part 1)

Editor’s note: This is the first of a 2-part series by Anthony Hurtado, a veteran of the mobile publishing and advertising industry. In this series, Anthony gives sage advice for anyone looking to break into the sector and launch their own mobile game business. To view part 2 of this series, click here. Why these early consideration matter Since the launch of the App Store in 2008, mobile games have been the dominant force in the app industry. With millions of games in the app stores, and over a thousand more being added each year it would appear as if mobile games are a turn-key business; just design and build a game and then boom: success, fame, and fortune, right? The truth is that over 90% percent of those games become zombie games. They’re technically alive, but effectively dead. They have less than a thousand downloads...
UX Game Design
12 min read
#Strategies

5 Tips to Improve Your Game’s User Experience

What is UX Design? User experience – or UX – is often a domain we don’t know too much about as game developers. It isn’t big in games yet. However, it’s a common role in software development teams, and for a good reason. UX designers are an essential bridge between the engineers and the users. Their role is to make the program clearer, and as intuitive as possible. Games are applications as well. We want the user – the player – to be able to pick up the game by himself. To overcome challenges on his own. In other words, we want his experience – the user’s experience – to feel great and seamless. If the game designer adds features and mechanics to the game, the UX designer subtracts anything clunky, that adds noise, to make the game more enjoyable....
20 min read
#Data & Analytics

50+ KPIs to Measure Your Mobile Game or App

Editors note: we release bi-annual mobile gaming benchmarks report which pretty much includes all of the metrics mentioned below. Compare how your game is performing against up to 100,000 games in the industry here. What Are Mobile KPIs? So you’ve created an awesome mobile app. The design is perfectly intuitive and visually stunning. It works even better than you thought it would. In fact, you are starting to wonder how you ever lived without it. You’re even starting to see some measurable results based on industry standard key performance indicators. Naturally, you hope that your audience likes it as much as you do, or at least enough to generate some revenue! Figuring out your mobile app’s value and assessing your app’s performance starts with knowing which mobile KPIs (key performance indicators) and mobile app metrics are the ones that you should...