Insights and tips about the games industry

Update: DataSuite features are now available in a single, affordable, bundle. Find out how to save on your data processing costs for games here. We’re all about the analytics (there’s a clue in our name), and using them to help you grow your games. And we’re always looking for ways to make data work even harder for you. So we’ve added a new service to our already-impressive roster – Raw Export. Here’s how it can help you turn your data into action. Dive even deeper With Raw Export you can automatically export all your games’ raw event data in JSON format, without any manual intervention. So every day it’ll ingest, preprocess, and deliver player data from your GameAnalytics account straight into your AWS S3 account. It even packages it into a neat and tidy compressed file containing unchanged raw events...

Editor’s note: This article was originally written by the brilliant minds at Voodoo. They’ve agreed to share the story with us here, but head over to their blog if you want to see the original.  Run of Life is the brand new hit game developed by Tarek Mongy, a solo-dev based in Cairo. Transforming the popular stacking trend into a super relatable concept, the team hit over 20 million views on TikTok, generating a huge number of organic installs even before the game was officially launched. We sat down with Tarek and Jill, Publishing Manager at Voodoo, to take a closer look at the game as well as their tips on how to come up with viral and mass-market ideas for your next prototype. Ideation Fundamentals Your ideation process is key to creating hot prototypes. The more you prototype, the more...

A few weeks ago, we went over what backends are, what you can do with them, and what kinds of monetization strategies are possible when using a backend-as-a-service. This time, we want to take this topic a step further. Now, we’ll chat about everything else your backend can do, and how to get your monetization right. Let’s dive back in. Quick recap from our last blog You can check it out if you missed our last article (or just want to brush up on your reading). But here’s the TL;DR breakdown: Your backend can handle all kinds of monetization types, including: Hard and soft currencies. Cosmetics. Loot boxes. Upgrades. Season passes and battle passes. Subscriptions. Opt-in events. DLC. And your backend matters here. They provide the ecosystem that lets your monetization both function and thrive. We’ve gone into a lot...

Editor’s note: This article was written by our friends at Homa Games. We recently ran a game jam with them. And we’re thrilled to announce the winners and results below. Another game jam edition comes to an end as we announce the winners of our Arcade Idle HomaJam, and we have many! With the best quality submissions we have seen so far, this jam’s games reached outstanding metrics and presented the most promising ideas under the theme of Arcade Idle. Arcade Idle is a new subgenre that combines idle and adventure arcade’s main attributes with a chilled Hypercasual look and feel. Removing all complexity from resource mining games, but preserving its core ability to engage, this clever mix translates into hybrid games with medium/low CPI, but much stronger playtime metrics that can reach 30+ minutes. With games like Harvest It, Craft Island, and Farm Land,...

This is a slightly longer product update than you’re probably used to. The main thing is you need to update your Android SDKs, in anticipation for Google’s upcoming policy update around their identifiers. But we have a lot more to get through, too. So let’s waste no time on intro’s, and tuck straight into our updates. Anything you want to read about in particular, feel free to jump ahead: Google is changing how you use identifiers for Android (update your SDKs) The above change has affected our Attribution Integrations We have a new SDK for Flutter We’ve added TopOn to our ad network providers We’ve also added new ad revenue metrics into our platform We’re giving our Explore tool a facelift Let’s get to it. First up, Google is changing how you use identifiers for Android Privacy in tech is...

Earlier this year, Apple released iOS 14.5. It was the dreaded update among all app developers, studios, and publishers. If you wanted to access a user’s mobile identifier (IDFA), you had to ask for their consent specifically. If you’re unsure why this is important, the IDFA is used for advertising purposes. When Apple released the update, almost every user needed to opt-in (rather than out), hugely impacting advertising and ad revenue. (More about this here.) But we’ve seen some interesting findings about mobile game opt-in rate. Which is what we’re going to cover in this blog. We have data on Opt-in Rates We’ve read tons of articles and blogs within the industry over the past few months. All speculating what they think the Consent Opt-in Rate would be – especially for games. And for us, we don’t need to guess...

Monetizing your games in the most suitable way possible can bring a game studio many gains. It lets you grow your business, build out IP into a series, elevate your team’s potential, and keep you making more games. Today’s studios are somewhat spoiled for choice when it comes to how they make money. Whether you’re using in-app purchases, subscriptions, DLC or something else entirely, there are many options. Picking the right one for your game and audience is key here. What you might not expect, however, is how important your backend is to your monetization strategy. Here at LootLocker, building backends that empower developers is at the core of our business. That’s given us a wealth of understanding around the relationship between backends and monetization — some lessons we can’t wait to fill you in on. We have a lot...

Our collection of Ad Revenue providers is growing. A couple weeks back, we were shouting about Applovin MAX being added into the mix of things. And this time, we’re thrilled to let you know that we’ve just partnered up with Aequus. Meaning you can now analyze your ad revenue from Aequus in your GameAnalytics account. Again, this is another great addition to our analytics platform. Here’s the docs to get you started. And if you want to learn exactly what this means for you, then read on. Let’s get to it. What’s new in GameAnalytics? We added support for impression-level ad revenue data from Aequus (like we did earlier for MAX, MoPub, Fyber, etc) This means you can now: query and filter data for ad revenue metrics from Aequus in the Explore Tool optimize ad revenue from Aequus using A/B...

They could focus their efforts When testing out concepts, it’s difficult to know which ideas will be successful and which will be a waste of effort. In the past, Wargaming’s data didn’t give them quite what they needed and wasn’t particularly scalable. It also didn’t feel fair to their studios. With GameIntel, specifically metric data from Benchmarks+, they could create realistic targets for studios to reach and base their decisions off the data. They now know what KPIs are considered good, great, and downright poor in the industry for each key sub-genre, rather than just guessing. “Success isn’t always about releasing a game. It’s sometimes about shutting a game down soon enough so that you don’t waste time and money,” said Alex Nenadavets, their manager of competitive intelligence. “We’ve definitely saved time by not wasting it on ideas that wouldn’t...

Editor’s note: This story was so great, we pinched it from Voodoo. You can find the original on their site, here. (Don’t worry, they gave the go-ahead to share it.) Slice it All! is the brand new hit game by the Serbia-based studio Tummy Games. The game hit number 1 in the iOS games charts in 35 different countries across the world, including the United States, just weeks after its release. Tummy Games teamed up with Voodoo over two years ago, and this is our second hit game together! One of our top innovation techniques is ‘change the toy, keep the rules’, and they managed to bring this to life by combining a niche hyper-casual mechanic from two years ago with a contemporary social media trend. Let’s take a look at how Slice it All! went from prototype to worldwide hit,...

We’ve been getting our research on, and looking into the metrics behind successful hyper-casual games. You can read our full findings here. But just in case you’re too busy for that, we’ve put together this post to give you the need-to-knows. What’s the research about? Using data from our network of games, we’ve broken down the top KPIs (key performance indicators – basically measurements of performance) that developers of hyper-casual games should be aiming for, by sub-genre. You can use these to benchmark your own games against some of the best games, and learn just whereabouts you sit within the industry. But before we do, here’s an idea of how much data we’re handling in GameIntel. Our network stats for Benchmarks+ All-time integrated games: 140k+ Games tagged with sub-genres: 150K+ Cross-title monthly players: 2b+ Average monthly sessions: 20b+ Network stats...

For everyone creating Hypercasual games, prototyping and testing is a crucial part of the process. It allows developers to save time, to avoid over-investing, and to be able to iterate accordingly. In addition to testing the gameplay and mechanics, an important part of the process is to evaluate a game’s marketability. And that’s where creatives come in handy. Creatives are the ads used in a user acquisition strategy to drive installs and, as the first touchpoint with most of the players, they can have a huge impact on the success of a game. In short, the goal of a creative is to give a good idea of a game and to make players want to play it. Testing with creatives is the best way to rapidly assess the potential of a new product no matter the type of game. But...