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15 min read
#Guides

Marketing Your Indie Game On A Zero-Dollar Budget

Why Marketing Your Game is Essential Most indie games are not profitable. There are plenty of great games that come out all the time, and as you know, making great games is not enough to sell them. It’s true for all kinds of creations and products. You can rarely rely on what you make to grab attention. In the crowded game market, your first problem is to reach out to people. To prove them that your work is worth their time and attention. That is why you must communicate in smart and innovative ways. I insist: it is necessary. See, I’m a creator, just like you. I already built an indie game studio with a talented engineer, and we didn’t make it. And a fair part of that was due to my lack of interest for communication. Since then, I...
Match-3 Video Ad Retention
5 min read
#Ads & Monetization

Rewarded Video: Retention Impact in Match-3 Games

Editor’s note: the following article is a guest post from Yaniv Nizan, co-founder and CEO of Monetization Measurement Platform, Soomla. The original report is available to download here: video ads retention study in mobile games (PDF). The Purpose of this Study Rewarded video ads can have a positive or negative impact on retention – depending who you ask. This is an unbiased 3rd party study to answer this question for Match-3 games. Test Setup – Data Collection and User Selection to Groups This study aggregates data from 6 Match-3 mobile games. All the data in this test was collected by the SOOMLA TRACEBACK platform coming mainly from: Client side SDK installed in the tested games Ad-network reporting APIs – mainly used as a source of data validation The selection of users to groups was done differently in each test: Test 1 – refers...
Frontend Developer
13 min read
#GameAnalytics Updates

How We Built GameAnalytics (An Interview)

Editor’s note: A few weeks ago, GameAnalytics turned 5 years old. What better way to commemorate this landmark than by interviewing our senior frontend developer and SDK team lead, Nikolaj Pedersen. Nikolaj has been with us from the beginning and his work has been essential in the development of the tool that you know and use today. ? Q. Nikolaj, you’re GA’s longest standing employee. How did it all begin? The idea behind GameAnalytics originally came from a Danish game company (now called Cape Copenhagen). Back in 2010, they created an internal analytics tool and met with our founder, Morten Wulff. Morten had previously founded a tracking company called TraceWorks and together they discussed the idea of building an analytics tool available for all game developers. However, Cape Copenhagen decided not to pursue analytics and instead chose to focus 100%...
iMessage App Store Games
10 min read
#Game Design

iMessage Games: New Opportunities for 2017

It’s an exciting time when a platform or feature creates new opportunities with which you can make games. As a developer, being first to market can prove lucrative as there is much lower competition. However, this doesn’t come without risks; if the platform fails then your game and the investment you’ve made is wasted. The iMessage platform is simple to develop on and uses Xcode as the main tool to create projects. When compared to new technologies such as VR or AR (which both require much larger investments in learning and development), iMessage provides a less risky opportunity for new games. At Pocket Gamer Connects 2017 in London, I presented some of the data that we’ve been observing from the latest iMessage apps. I took the time to read up on the protocols and the implementation as well as downloading...
7 min read
#Game Deconstructions

Our Top 10 Mobile Games That You (Probably) Haven’t Already Played

Now that 2016 has officially (and mercifully) been declared over, we thought we’d kick off the New Year with something more uplifting: a look back at some of the best, but less conspicuous games from last year. [bctt tweet=”? The Top 10 Mobile Games That You (Probably) Haven’t Already Played #IndieGame #MobileGame” username=”GameAnalytics”] Many of these games released in the latter half of 2016. They’re true hidden gems and if you haven’t already played them, we’d highly recommend you check them out. Without further ado, let’s begin the countdown of our top 10 mobile games. 10.  Touchdown Hero Developed by Cherrypick Games ?  Download for iOS ?  Download for Android Score big, become a Touchdown Hero and recreate the Madden’s of yesteryear on your phone in this birds-eye infinite running retrogame. The movement is fluid (simply drag from left to...
11 min read
#Game Design

How To Make An iMessage Game (And Why)

What’s the deal with iMessage games? With iOS 10, developers are now creating games that are directly integrated with iMessage. This seamless, inherently social play style is viral by nature with built-in engagement and retention mechanics. If you’re not already building for the iMessage App Store, it’s a channel to watch. In this post we’re going to start by outlining the technical setup for such a game. We’ll then explore how you can make the most of this relative new kid on the block, with comments from some thought-leaders to help answer the question: what makes a great game for iMessage? Click here to skip the technical part. [bctt tweet=”iMessage Apps ✉? Create, Design & Release a Successful iMessage Game! #imessage #app #gamedev” username=”GameAnalytics”] How to create an iMessage game iMessage Apps allow users to engage with your content without having...
Funnels Reporting Illustration
9 min read
#Data & Analytics

A Deep Dive into Funnel Reporting for Games

Funnels are a way of visualizing and measuring how your players move through a sequence of events, or ‘steps’. A well-configured funnel gives insight into which of these steps lose the most players, whether your paths to conversion are optimized, and whether your players are progressing through your game as intended. The aim of this post is to give you all the insights you need to make the most of GameAnalytics funnels. We’re going to start with some background and cover the basic concepts, before ‘diving deep’ into some of the more advanced practices to help supercharge your setup, including how to create and track custom events. Plan your custom events with this free tool… We’ve also created a worksheet for you to use for inspiration when creating your custom event IDs. View it in Google Sheets here (click ‘file’ > ‘make a copy’...
Monetization Mobile Game
13 min read
#Ads & Monetization

10 Monetization Tips for Mobile Games in 2017

Speak to anyone in the mobile gaming industry and the topic of conversation will always turn to one thing: monetization. Who can blame them? Statista predict that mobile games will generate $40.6 billion in revenue by the end of 2017. That’s more than double Facebook’s 2015 revenue. Not a number to sneer at. Perhaps more noteworthy is that – as of January 2016 – this revenue was generated by less than 1.9% of the overall player base, showing a 0.4% increase from the same study in 2014, according to a report by the mobile marketing automation platform, Swrve. Mobile gamers are spending more Their study aggregates data from over 10 million purchasing players – from the minnows, to the dolphins, and the whales. Interestingly, at just 0.19% of the demographic the “whales” account for a whopping 48% of the total revenue....
Common GameAnalytics Questions
5 min read
#Data & Analytics

6 Game Analytics Questions: Answered by Data Scientists

Top 6 GameAnalytics questions: Can I use the same pair of keys for all platforms I am targeting? What common KPIs should I track using design events? I have sent events but I cannot see them in the tool. Where are they? I’ve setup IAP validation but all my monetization data is still invalid. Why? Can I automate the data export feature? Why did my funnel report fail to process? If none of the above concern you – good stuff. Maybe check out our recently updated post: how to increase your game revenue by 510% 😀 1. Can I use the same pair of keys for all of the platforms that I am targeting? Short answer: This is possible but we don’t recommend it. Long answer: We suggest that all users create a unique game entity for every platform that they target....
7 min read
#Data & Analytics

The power of benchmarking in your game

Benchmarks allow you to determine how well your game is performing compared to similar titles on the app store, without requiring any changes to your code. This knowledge can help you make decisions and focus your development on improving game metrics and making a better game. Your core KPIs are the central metrics that we benchmark. KPIs are particularly important as they are usually simplified numbers which quickly inform you about the health of your game. Retention, for instance, is a measure of addictiveness or stickiness, as people come back and play your game again the next day. ARPU is a measure of monetization and pricing.  High ARPUs require good game design in presentation and purchase so that a user understands the benefit and value of their purchase. Let’s take a deeper look at how you can use the Benchmarking feature from GameAnalytics in your game today. Understanding Benchmark...
5 min read
#Data & Analytics

5 most common mistakes of data analysts

This is a guest post by Peter Fodor, the founder of AppAgent, a service for mobile developers who are launching a game or app but need help with marketing and user acquisition. Did you know that there are 1,736,111 Likes on Instagram; 284,722 shared snaps on Snapchat; and 590,278 swipes on Tinder every minute of every day? The growth in the usage of mobile apps and games has created a mountain of data. Millions of users generate significant traces of their behaviour – all of which has value. Crunching the numbers are the legions of data analysts whose skills are increasingly in demand. The need to find meaningful connections from this data is increasingly putting pressure on these analysts, whose insights and conclusions can affect billion-dollar businesses. Eating numbers for breakfast Historically analysts were people with a narrow expertise in...
11 min read
#Data & Analytics

8 ways of spotting and fixing the reasons why players are leaving your game

The following article is based on a previous one we published on the GameAnalytics blog: 16 reasons players are leaving your game, which you can find here, written by Nathan Lovato. This article has been trending on our blog, and it’s a hot topic among developers who are looking to optimize their user experience. Considering this, we’ve thought to complement Nathan’s piece with examples of how you’d use analytics to spot and fix the problems listed. Share the post with this ready-to-go tweet 🙂 To make sense of it all, we’ll follow a similar structure to what Nathan used: listing the reason and the way you can investigate it through the use of analytics. Note our numbering will differ as we won’t be discussing all the reasons. If you didn’t get a chance to read the 16 reasons…, do so now –...
9 min read
#Data & Analytics

Chinese Gamers: in-game behaviour of players from China

During the last few years, the Chinese market has become a massive opportunity for game developers. There are 550 million active smartphones and tablets in the country, and every one of them has an average of 5 games installed. The key questions to answer, therefore, are about the players: How do Chinese players compare to players from the rest of the world? What do they prefer to play? How committed are they to a game? How many games do they usually play? We set about answering these questions and more from a data-driven standpoint, and analysed the data in the GameAnalytics network by comparing Chinese players’ in-game behaviour to that of players from the rest of the world. So what are the results? Here’s a teaser. What we found is that Chinese players in our network are: Less likely to...