Hundreds of articles for game developers

Securing a coveted spot in the top charts can be a game-changer for developers. It opens doors to increased downloads, revenue, player engagement, and long-term success in the competitive mobile gaming world. To help you navigate the complexities of app stores, we developed the Store Intelligence platform. Store rankings are not just empty metrics; they provide valuable insights into player preferences, market trends, and the factors that drive a game’s success. Access to such metrics is especially important for developers and studios aspiring to get to the top, who do not have the resources for expensive data solutions and data scientists to help them translate acquired data into actionable insights. Together with our Benchmarks, Store Intelligence presents a tangible opportunity to understand your competitors’ strategies and how they turn them into engaging gameplay mechanics, monetization strategies, and more. The biggest...

Achieving success when creating a game requires more than creativity and innovation. Knowing and correctly interpreting your KPIs is undoubtedly the foundation of making educated decisions during game development. And to support you on your data journey, we compiled a list of the 22 most essential metrics to keep an eye on. But while paying attention to your game performance cannot be overstated, it is equally important to deeply understand player preferences and industry standards. From performance comparison to trend identification, game industry benchmarks offer a grand scale to set realistic goals and expectations. Providing data and insights from over 140,000 game studios and developers, our Benchmarks are a powerful ally for game developers. The tool offers a wealth of information on key metrics such as retention, monetization, engagement, and advertising, enabling developers to understand player behavior and market trends...

When it comes to game and mobile app analytics, there are hundreds of metrics numbers to track. There are metrics like downloads, sessions, or DAUs on one end of the spectrum. These numbers are relatively straightforward and measure concrete actions. More complicated metrics include user churn or Average Revenue Per Paying User (ARPPU). These are less intuitive to interpret and might raise more questions than answers. While there’s no one-size-fits-all policy for game analytics, some useful metrics can help shed light on how you can improve your mobile game. To better understand how these metrics relate to each other and provide comprehensive insights into your game’s performance, we divide them into three main categories: engagement metrics, monetization metrics, and advertising metrics. Each category focuses on different aspects of player behavior, revenue generation, and marketing effectiveness, allowing you to optimize various...

When building a multiplayer game, your players are going to need a way to find each other. That's where a matchmaker comes in. But what is a matchmaker? How do they work? And is there any difference when it comes to mobile?

What exactly should you be focusing on this year? What are the trends that will really impact your development? We’ve dug through the most popular trends and brought together the topics you should keep an eye on in 2024. 1. Learn about AI and Machine Learning With the release of Google’s Gemini, we’re seeing AI continue to explode. It won’t be long before it’s a common tool that we all use day to day. Getting to grips with how it works is going to be essential, particularly in gaming. At the same time, we’re seeing hyper-casual games shift to richer and deeper experiences – becoming hybrid-casual. In fact, the number of hyper-casual games dropped by 18%, while hybrid-casual grew by 13%, according to Sensor Tower. By their nature, hybrid-casual games have a longer development cycle than hyper-casual games. Using AI...

As we enter the new year, the anticipation is high for the unfolding trends that are about to redefine how we create and play games—from AI seamlessly crafting entire game worlds to the ongoing rise of mobile gaming popularity, where developers refine strategies to extend engagement and enhance monetization, alongside their focus on diversity and sustainability. AI keeps revolutionizing development dynamics Traditionally, creating expansive open-world games with stunning graphics required large teams and significant time investments. But lately, AI is becoming a leader in a new era where even smaller studios and indie developers gain access to tools enabling the next generation of artwork. That includes the creation of entire worlds through procedural techniques, dynamic dialogue generation, or even players’ live avatar integration within the game. These AI technologies are currently in their early stages, but the trajectory is clear...

Addressing developers’ demands for more nuanced retention analysis, we created a solution beyond conventional retention metrics, empowering developers and studios to gain a deeper understanding of player behavior and refine their strategies for long-term success. Our engagement feature enables developers to filter retention based on various event types, offering a granular view of player behavior beyond standard global filters such as country or platform. By creating custom cohorts for retention, developers can tailor their analyses to specific in-game actions, answering critical questions such as whether users return after completing a particular level, making specific purchases, or investing resources in the game. Here is everything you need to know about this feature: Tracking event-based player retention While traditional retention metrics usually focus on install-based data, GameAnalytics’s Engagement feature allows you to filter retention based on player events. You can explore player...

Protecting yourself isn’t necessarily hard. Not if you’re aware of the techniques hackers use. So, with data breaches becoming increasingly common in the news, we thought we’d give a little advice about how to protect yourself.

While you can’t (yet) plug in a prompt and have it develop a fully functional mobile game, you can use AI to help you come up with ideas and speed up your process. So here are a few ways you can use AI when developing your prototypes.

Adapting your game to mobile is no walk in the park. Yoru controls are different, you have a much smaller screen size, and you're much more limited with the hardware. And yet, Psyonix nailed this perfectly. Here’s what we can learn from them.

In the dynamic world of GameAnalytics development, evolution is the constant. While our recent endeavors have been focused on launching GameAnalytics Pro, our commitment to refining and enhancing our standard offerings for everyone never wavered. We are convinced that empowering game development starts by cultivating a sophisticated, cost-efficient, and powerful analytics ecosystem for developers and studios of all shapes, sizes, and budgets. Apart from the launch of GameAnalytics Pro, we’ve delved deep into refining key features, ensuring our platform meets and exceeds your expectations. From comprehensive portfolio overviews to advanced filtering controls and character limit expansions, each improvement has been meticulously designed to empower your decision-making and analysis, offering you a richer, more streamlined analytics toolkit to fuel your game development success. Let us walk you through these impactful releases available for everyone: Portfolio overview This new feature helps developers...

Out of all the many mobile industry benchmarks, it’s important to keep player retention rates top of mind. Retention allows marketers to understand when, and perhaps why, a user leaves their game — which gives you the ability to slow the rate down and keep your users around. In this article, we’ll cover the basics of mobile game retention rates and some of the secrets game marketing pros deploy to reduce churn, as well as look at how you can learn from your retention metrics. What’s The Point of Retention Rate? Retention rates are a key indicator of game growth and its health. Not only does a game with better retention likely mean players enjoy using it, but good retention also means it can generate revenue quickly. In the meantime, low retention means rapid user churn, lower user reviews, and...