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 advantage? Store Intelligence allows you to apply granular filters, such as store type, game category, date, and rank change, or focus on paid versus free games. That means you can view similar titles to yours and follow their development.

Consider this guide your first step in optimizing your games to increase their visibility in the stores:

Identify high-potential keywords

One of the keys to discoverability is understanding the keywords or search terms that lead players to top-ranked games. You might have heard about Search Engine Optimization (SEO) – a marketing strategy to rank a website on the top of search engines such as Google, attracting organic (not paid) traffic.

With Store Intelligence, you can pinpoint which keywords effectively drive this traffic. You can then optimize your game title, description, and metadata to increase visibility and attract more players.

Competitive analysis

Top-ranked games didn’t get there by chance. With Store Intelligence, you can analyze the ranking positions of successful games in your category and genre to uncover valuable insights. You can then use their gameplay mechanics, art styles, and user reviews to identify common elements across successful titles that resonate with players. This information can guide your game development decisions.

Pricing and monetization

Successful monetization strategies often align with higher rankings. With Store Intelligence, you can analyze store ranking fluctuations and their connection to in-game monetization to optimize pricing models and in-app purchases, driving more revenue. This approach can help you optimize your monetization strategies.

Promotion strategies

Studying the promotional strategies employed by top-ranked games can offer valuable lessons. Investigate their advertising campaigns, social media engagement, influencer partnerships, and other marketing efforts. Understanding what works for others can inform your own promotional initiatives, with Store Intelligence as your guide. Here are some tools to help you out:

• Google Ads Transparency Center: Find active ads published through Google (FREE)
• AdSpy: Searchable database of Facebook and Instagram ads
• Moat by Oracle Data Cloud: Search for specific ads and view their performance metrics.

Timing and seasonality

The game’s popularity can also be influenced by the time of the year. Use Store Intelligence to analyze how this factor impacts rankings and player activity. You can then plan game releases, updates, and events to align with periods of increased player engagement or holidays. Guided by Store Intelligence, strategic timing can give your game a competitive edge.

Store ranking data is a goldmine of insights that can propel your game to the top charts. These 5 strategies are just the tip of the iceberg regarding its power. We encourage you to go ahead and explore our Store Intelligence on your own. Although users of our core analytics can access this tool, they will realize that access to some features might be restricted. For unlimited experience, we suggest you update to GameAnalytics Pro.

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 better.

Before we delve into concrete steps to guide you through interpreting the benchmark data, learn about various benchmark tables, associated metrics, and filtering possibilities:

How game developers benefit from industry benchmarks?

When comparing your game to other studios and developers, holistic data about player retention gives developers insights into how other games retain players. This data is valuable for understanding how players engage with games over time and allows developers to benchmark their game’s performance against industry standards.

You can, for example, analyze retention trends within your game’s genre to understand player behavior patterns unique to that category. Similarly, by examining retention benchmarks over different time periods, you can track player engagement changes and identify potential improvement areas. Such analysis can help identify correlations between different metrics and provide insights into player engagement and retention strategies.

Relying solely on individual benchmarks may provide a limited perspective. Instead, we recommend a holistic approach by comparing and contrasting several benchmarks to unveil deeper insights. Such multifaceted analysis enriches your understanding of player dynamics and allows you to refine your strategies.

For instance, by analyzing how changes in session length correlate with retention rates, developers can pinpoint optimal session durations that keep players coming back for more. Similarly, understanding how playtime affects retention can inform decisions about game pacing, content depth, and progression mechanics to enhance player engagement over time.

Insights into monetization trends

Monetization benchmarks are essential to measure the effectiveness of in-game monetization strategies and assess the overall financial performance of their genre. These benchmarks provide insights into key revenue metrics such as conversion rates, average revenue per daily active user (ARPDAU), and average revenue per paying user (ARPPU).

Once again, comparing with other benchmarks will only deepen your understanding of the market. For example, comparing monetization benchmarks to engagement metrics involves analyzing how revenue metrics like ARPDAU correlate with key engagement indicators such as session length, session count, and retention rates. If higher ARPDAU coincides with longer session lengths or higher retention rates, it suggests that players who engage more deeply are more likely to spend. Conversely, if monetization metrics are low despite strong engagement, it may indicate opportunities to optimize monetization mechanics or offer more compelling in-game purchases. By identifying these correlations, you can refine your monetization strategies and maximize revenue potential while maintaining a positive player experience.

Focus on your target player and keep testing

Segment analysis is a powerful strategy for deriving actionable insights from GameAnalytics’ Benchmarks. Filtering the data based on various parameters, such as time period, genre, region, or platform, will allow you to customize game features, content, and monetization strategies to suit specific player groups better.

To achieve the best improvements possible, you can conduct A/B tests to experiment with different game features, mechanics, and monetization strategies. GameAnalytics Pro allows you to roll out a discovery you made through A/B testing, target users in a specific country, build or operation system version, and set a config to switch ON/OFF at a specific time directly in the tool.

GameAnalytics’ Benchmarks are simply a treasure trove of data-driven insights for game developers. By leveraging its comprehensive dataset, you can refine the entire portfolio of your games, optimize engagement and monetization strategies, and ultimately scale the games for success.

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 behavior by tracking those who perform specific actions during a given period and return on subsequent days. The charts and cohort give you an overview of which players return after performing specific in-game actions, such as buying items or completing challenging levels.

For example, you want to see the retention rate of players who purchased a sniper rifle:

• In the condition field, select ‘user sent.’ This means you are looking for an event that was triggered.
• Choose a ‘Business’ event to indicate your interest in purchase-related events.
• Next you specify the event by selecting ‘Item type’ and ‘Item ID’, here it is ‘Weapons’ and ‘SniperRifle.’
• Now, the retention chart and cohort are generated.

You can additionally select a specific period you want to analyze.

Custom triggers for deeper insights

With customizable starting and returning triggers, you can focus on analyzing specific player segments. Whether it’s players who completed a level, made a purchase, or triggered a specific event, you are the one to define the conditions that matter most to you.
To better understand your players, you can explore the retention rate of users who purchased the said sniper rifle and completed Level One in World One:

• In the ‘Start’ trigger line, you implement the same conditions chosen for event-based tracking earlier.
• The returning event you seek is a state of ‘Progression.’
• Now, in the event filter, you set the status to ‘completed’ and select worlds and levels as you desire.
• The related retention chart and cohort are generated.

Accessible, in-depth analytics for game developers

While the Engagement feature is a part of all product tiers, event-based retention, and custom triggers are only available for Pro users. GameAnalytics Pro is designed to reduce friction points and empower developers and game studios to make educated decisions, enhancing the game experience and improving retention rates.

Aside from the Engagement feature, GameAnalytics Pro includes many efficient and relevant tools to help you optimize your games and apps, such as Scheduled reporting, Portfolio overview, Health monitoring, industry Benchmarks or Metrics API access. You can learn about the Pro tier here.

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 navigate the landscape of their game portfolio, displaying metrics for their top-performing games. We have heard your feedback that a comprehensive game overview is important and plan to expand this feature. A similar game overview should soon be featured on the initial home page, too.

Documentation

Engagement analysis

Exploring player retention and returning user engagement is now even more seamless with the enhanced Engagement feature. Apply filters and custom event conditions to decipher critical touchpoints affecting player return rates.

Documentation

Health reporting

This brand-new health feature allows quick discovery of potential technical glitches and errors within your latest builds. Currently, you can monitor real-time errors in the Realtime dashboard, but moving into 2024, we aim to add realtime in the Health feature and introduce FPS, Memory, and AppBoot insights.

Documentation

Industry benchmarks

Benchmarks is a feature that has been around for a while now. However, we have extended its functionality for users of GameAnalytics Pro. While the free version allows you to only see industry data from before 2021, this limitation is removed from the premium version, and you can access the latest statistics.

GameAnalytics Pro also gives you access to top-performing quantiles, allowing you to see the top 5% of studios and their retention rates.

Documentation

Advanced filter value controls (coming soon)

We understood the need to select the right filter values for many levels and items. We will soon introduce improvements to control how event values are loaded and searched, allowing easy discovery of the values you need.

Advanced controls will be added to alter search behavior, the period values that are loaded from the data, and the ordering of values. The result is a much more flexible way to locate, order, and select values needed.

As you are reading this, the functionality might be already out.

Remote Configs Character Limit Increase

Enjoy more freedom in customization with an increased character limit for Remote Configs. You can now tailor your remote configurations precisely to your game’s needs with a limitation increased to 2000 characters.

Documentation

Live Event Filtering Improvements

The real-time event feed has been updated to control the events shown via filters. We now support build and event-type filters in addition to user_id. It is now way easier to validate an SDK integration as you can focus more granularly and sit back and watch the events arrive. The event list also increased to show 50 at one time.

Documentation

Other notable improvement

There is also a list of smaller yet impactful improvements, including

• global filters supporting Acquisition dimensions;
• Explore tool will no longer reset filters while you explore various metrics;
• simplified Organization management; and
• a seamless transition from Dashboard metrics to the Explore Tool.

Each tweak is geared towards enhancing your analytics journey.

In reflecting on the tool updates made in the second half of 2023, we are inspired by your invaluable feedback. From the comprehensive Portfolio Overview to the streamlined Engagement feature, your insights have played a pivotal role in shaping these improvements. As we journey towards analytics excellence, we’re excited to share that many more improvements are already in the works and are set to be introduced in 2024. Your continued feedback is essential in steering our course, so don’t hesitate to keep sharing your thoughts and experiences directly in our tool.

We’re excited to share news about a new initiative we’re rolling out – GameAnalytics Pro. This step towards a paid offering comes from a place of necessity and aspiration. Our aim has always been to provide reliable, insightful tools to help your studio thrive. And to continue improving and expanding our offerings, we are introducing this new premium tier.

With GameAnalytics Pro, we intend to augment our service via new tools tailored to meet the evolving needs of your studio. The new premium offer is completely optional. We remain fully committed to our free offering, ensuring every studio, big or small, continues to have access to solid analytics tools at no cost. GameAnalytics Pro is an extra option for those wanting to dive deeper into their data.

Why are we launching Pro?

The introduction of Pro is a significant move to ensure that we keep delivering more advanced and valuable tools to support your studio’s growth. We’ve always valued the relationship we share with each one of you. Your feedback, engagement, and loyalty over the years have been the cornerstone of our growth. As a token of our appreciation, we offer an exclusive 67% discount off the planned price for early birds who upgrade by January 31st. This discount will be locked in for a minimum period of 2 years.

By upgrading to Pro, you’re not only receiving an immediate analytics boost, but you’re also locking in the lowest price for even richer insights as we continue to enhance our offerings. It’s also about being first in line for many more features we have planned down the line.

The Pro tier will receive additional functionality in 2024 at no extra cost. Several of these features and improvements are already being developed and slated for early 2024 delivery. Stay tuned!

Quick Glance at Pro Perks

• Engagement Tracing: Dive deeper into player retention and returning user engagement. Apply filters and custom event conditions to understand critical touch points affecting player return rate.
• Scheduled Reporting: Have key metrics delivered on-the-go as soon as the data is ready. Reports will always compare metrics to a previous period.
• Portfolio Overview: Gain insight into company metrics across all games and discover the Top 20 performing games based on metrics such as DAU or IAP Revenue.
• Metrics API Access: Programmatically query KPI’s for all your games to deliver internal dashboards or other custom reporting needs. Read more here.
• Benchmarks +: Benchmark trends for all major KPIs (Retention, Engagement, Monetization), with filtering options for key regions and player actions like made IAP.
• Health Monitoring (Coming Soon): Proactively address technical glitches with enhanced health monitoring to ensure smooth gameplay.

About the Early Bird

This early bird offer isn’t just about the advanced tools you get access to right away. It’s also about being first in line for many more features we have planned down the line. By upgrading to Pro, you’re not only receiving an immediate analytics boost, but you’re also locking in the lowest price for even richer insights as we continue to enhance our offerings. Your support directly contributes to our R&D efforts, ensuring a continuous cycle of improvement and expansion of GameAnalytics.

Pricing overview

The standard base price for GameAnalytics Pro is $299 per month, but with our early bird offer, it drops to just $99 per month—a neat 67% off.

Alongside the base price, there’s a usage charge based on Monthly Active Users (MAU). The initial 2 million MAUs each month come free of charge. After exceeding this limit, the usual rate stands at $1.50 per thousand MAUs. With our early bird offer, this rate is slashed to just $0.50 per thousand MAUs, translating to a 67% discount.

It’s important to note that our current pricing structure accommodates up to 5M MAUs. If your studio exceeds this number, we encourage you to get in touch with us for a customized offer.

GameAnalytics is for everyone

GameAnalytics has always been about laying a robust foundation for your analytics needs. Pro features aim to address specific challenges you face with deeper insights, streamlined reporting, detailed metrics, and benchmark insights. Going Pro will ensure you have the advanced data and analytics tools necessary to maintain that competitive edge as you grow.

Your feedback is invaluable to us. We’ve designed the Pro tier based on your insights and will continue to shape its offerings accordingly. We encourage you to reach out and share your opinions, needs, and suggestions for changes or additions. You can do so easily through the GameAnalytics feedback portal. Your voice helps us adjust and provide the best experience possible.

Sign up by January 31st to save 67% on our early bird offer. It’s our way of showing gratitude for your continued support and loyalty to GameAnalytics.

Upgrade now!

Thank you for being an integral part of our journey. Here’s to launching and optimizing many more games together.

VRMonkey, formerly known as Naked Monkey Games, embarked on a journey into VR a decade ago. Although their activities initially evolved around developing smartphone games, in 2015, after encountering Oculus Rift DK1, they decided to pivot fully into VR and AR development. Today, this indie studio comprises 40 dedicated team members who work on their own IPs and collaborate with renowned VR studios worldwide, including The Munky – creators of Drunkn Bar Fight.

Among VRMonkey’s portfolio, their co-development of Drunkn Bar Fight stands out as one of their most successful ventures. This game is among the top 20 selling VR Games of all time, and it maintains a steady audience, with more than 100,000 MAU. During peak seasons and featured store placements, this number rises to 200,000 MAU.

Harnessing the Power of Analytics

VRMonkey recognized that they must fuel their decisions with data to scale their games. After considering other analytic tools such as Flurry or Google Analytics, the team ended up choosing GameAnalytics primarily for its ability to provide a visual and comprehensive way to derive actionable insights and it focus on games:

We wanted to have a tool that would enable us not only to track specific events but give information about these events in a way that we could visualize and draw conclusions from these data.

To develop Drunkn Bar Fight, the two studios have been using the Unity3D engine. Following GameAnalytics’ integration documentation, VRMonkey was able to connect the analytics tool quickly and efficiently. The real task was determining what events the designers wanted to track and improve.

One compelling use case of analytics was the ability to assess popularity and player engagement with specific weapons. Custom events enabled developers and designers to understand how players interacted with the game and where they faced challenges.

We have several dashboards that enable us to analyze our custom events. But having custom dashboards for specific events is a king for us.

Acting on their analytics findings, VRMonkey initiated changes to encourage players to explore more levels and interact with different weapons. By optimizing level transitions and weapon placement, they were able to boost players’ engagement and overall gaming experience. These adjustments led to a 30% surge in players exploring levels beyond the initial one, highlighting the tangible impact of analytics on gameplay and user engagement.

Following these changes, the studios quickly observed improvements in user satisfaction metrics. The game’s average rating experienced a positive shift, climbing from 4.1 to 4.5.

Words of Wisdom for Aspiring VR Developers

We asked the team for valuable advice for developers transitioning from mobile to VR game development. They emphasized:

Forget everything you think you know. VR is not like mobile. Interactions are unclear, monetization isn’t the game, and the clients aren’t the same.
But always remember, the goal is to make the players have fun.

The studio encourages developers to embrace data analytics and beta testing. Testing, analyzing, iterating, and improving are critical steps to understanding the nuances of player behavior in the VR realm.

Roamer Games is the new kid on the game development block. They are all about creating a mid-core strategy game that would give you the thrill of Civilization in just a five-minute gaming session. Early in the production, their team figured that to create a hit title, they needed to understand players’ behavior on a granular level. That’s where GameAnalytics’ data tools came into the picture. This case study breaks down how Roamer Games used GameAnalytics combined with AI technology to level up their game development.

Understanding Roamer Games’ Needs and Challenges

The game Roamer Games had in mind was a cross-platform but mobile-first marvel. Think iOS, Android, and WebGL. It’s a blend of Civilization and Clash Royale – a strategy with a dash of action.

The studio needed the lowdown on how gamers played their game right from the early stages of development. They wanted to know everything: retention, how long gamers played, how often, where they dropped out, and even what they thought of the first-time user experience. And later, they became set on understanding how players who used Real-time PVP feature compared to those who skipped it.

Roamer Games uses the Unity engine for developing their game. And before integrating GameAnalytics, they also used Unity’s analytics. While it was initially sufficient, they quickly realized they needed more. After reviewing and comparing different analytic tools, they decided to run with GameAnalytics. David Smit, CPO of the studio, comments:

WebGL was a major driver for our choice of analytics provider. That and the ease of setup early in the product development process made it a clear choice to go for GameAnalytics. Their data warehouse offered us a platform to go deep and granular with the data, while the dashboard gave us quick insight into the most important daily metrics.

Lastly, he appreciated the quick integration:

Setup was surprisingly easy. Install the SDK, create a game on the Dashboard, and link the two. Now you are good to go.

Combining GameAnalytics and Artificial Intelligence

The dashboard was the go-to for Roamer Games. It gave them the initial insights they needed every day. They even saved common queries to track player progress, where players dropped off, and Cohort data to understand how players hung around.

The data export options from GameAnalytics allowed Roamer Games to go even deeper with their data, unlocking player and event-level insights. The data tools that GameAnalytics offer are incredibly powerful. We now have access to an enormous amount of data through BigQuery. It requires some good knowledge of SQL, but it’s the way to go if you want to dig deep into the product and what happens to these users. Once you understand the different databases and workflow, you can get incredibly granular and hone in on any specific point in the game.

Since the studio does not have a dedicated in-house data scientist, the team didn’t shy away from using AI – specifically ChatGPT – to form and optimize complex queries. They simply specified the data sets and tables available and asked ChatGPT to write the queries. The team was aware of occasional hallucinations and inconsistencies, and when they found some, they asked for a revision, and the chat would fix things for them.

Here is an example of a prompt Roamer Games used to build a query:

This is Table X about the player state: *paste the structure of that data set and table*.
This is Table Y about the daily checkpoints: *paste the structure of that data set and table*.
Give me a query that returns the following information, split by build, of the last six months.

This is a query generated by ChatGPT:

However, BigQuery returned an error as it tried to grab a field ‘Build‘ that does not exist in the design_event table (highlighted in red). On top of that, the warehouse attempted to split by build while already filtering by a specific build, leading to a meaningless split.

The team simply prompted ChatGPT with the error: “error: Unrecognized name: build at [5:7]”, and AI provided an improved query. Now, Roamer Games received a meaningful query:

Optimizing the Game with Key Findings

Here is what Roamer Games learned about its game after integrating with GameAnalytics. The studio discovered that players who dived into PVP had a 50% better Day 1 retention. This allowed Roamer Games to understand the value of the feature in their product very early.

Plus, they figured that most players picked to play as Vikings. This led the studio to prioritize not only the starter pack but early unit creation in general. The team made sure that they focused on creating a whole set of crowd-pleasing units from the Viking era first.

Last but not least, they also noticed gamers were spending more time playing the game:

We measured progression between levels a lot. The number of core games someone played was the main indicator of their progression. We found that after level 3 or 5, players dropped out in large numbers. Thanks to this insight, we could easily pinpoint the issue and quickly improve the balancing of these levels.

Discover, improve, optimize

Roamer Games leveraged GameAnalytics to delve into player behavior and optimize game features. Despite not appointing a dedicated data scientist, the studio was able to translate data from Raw Export to meaningful queries using artificial intelligence and further gain valuable insights via the BigQuery warehouse. As a result, the studio improved the game’s starter pack and other units by prioritizing Viking characters, enhanced level progression, and created data-driven, player-centric gaming experiences.

GameAnalytics can help you squash bugs and make data-driven decisions about your own titles rather than guessing in the dark. Check out our SDKs and start using our free tool today.

An analytics tool that works across all platforms

As HyperVR sought to create a fun, accessible VR experience for all players, they needed an analytics tool that could work across all platforms. With GameAnalytics, they can quickly and easily track metrics across all their different games, builds, and platforms.

According to Ģirts Ķesteris, Studio Lead at HyperVR, the metrics he tracks the most include session count, item usage, locomotion usage, actions, and events. These help him quickly identify issues and make improvements on the fly.

“GameAnalytics is the glue for our games. We’re able to see all of our data across our different games, builds, and platforms quickly. Something we just didn’t find with other tools out there.”

Making the game immersive

To create an immersive VR game, it is important to identify any glitches that might break the player’s immersion. VR’s biggest strength is its ability to make players lose themselves in the game.

“VR is all about having an immersive experience,” Ģirts explained. “People like to grab stuff and interact with things. And that’s free in VR. While for other games, developers need to come up with special mechanics when picking items up. If you build around that and make it dynamic, then you can make a good game.

“It’s easy for something to go wrong. With VR, you need to be aware of your limitations. The top two are how much physical space your players might have, as well as any potential motion sickness. You need to do everything in your power to cater to these.”

Tracking all these metrics is key to offering players a personalized experience. HyperVR uses data to identify what works and doesn’t work for their players and to fix any pesky bugs in the code.

Keeping a swift and responsive approach to issues

Crashes in games are easy to miss without data. And in VR, these bugs can break the immersion, make your players sick, and ruin your game.

“We monitor errors and crashes all the time,” Ģirts said. “We need to make sure the experience is smooth and seamless for all our players. Otherwise, you’ll ruin their experience, and even make them feel unwell. Keeping an eye on your bug report is paramount.”

Fixing bugs fast to keep reviews positive

“All of our games are premium. So if something breaks, and our rating drops, then there’s a lot of backlash, immediately. Bugs are much more noticeable and personal. You see it in your view, right in front of you. And you’ll have a much more serious reaction. If your game isn’t flawless, then your players are more likely going to leave a bad review and ask for a refund.”

A clients review of Shave&Stuff on the Meta Store.

Keep the gameplay short, simple and satisfying

Wearing a VR headset is pretty intensive. Unlike some PC or console titles gamers play for hours on end, VR sessions are notoriously shorter – similar to that of a casual mobile game.

“You need to create cleverly saturated games. After some quick testing in our games in the past, we noticed that our players enjoyed shorter sessions. Your players can’t sit in VR for hours playing games. After 20 minutes or so, they’ll get tired and want to take a break.

“You want to track what users are doing in your game to perfect your core loop. Analytics is concrete here when adjusting your meta gameplay. Once you have that loop down, you can build on it.”

Understanding the platform is a part of perfecting your game. HyperVR kept a close eye on engagement metrics like Session Length and Playtime to understand their audience and find that sweet spot for their games’ levels.

Market test early on

“We market tested Shave&Stuff early on. It helped us figure out what worked, and what didn’t work with our players before we put in loads of man-hours investing in specific gameplay and features. We didn’t want to end up wasting any time.”

By doing earlier market testing, the team could decide what to focus on. Testing and building a VR game is a lot slower than any other type of game out there. You’re constantly looking for issues and bugs to squash. And every change you make to your game takes up valuable development time. So it’s good to figure out the important parts early on.

“Testing is slower and takes more energy since it involves a device on a face that occludes vision. While interactions are a lot easier to do (than say in a PC or mobile game), they require more fidelity and more budget and time.”

Get started with GameAnalytics today

GameAnalytics works across all VR platforms and can help you squash bugs and make data-driven decisions about your own titles, rather than guessing in the dark. Check out our SDKs and start using our free tool today.

Francesco and the Privacy Team at GameAnalytics play a pivotal role in protecting player information. With a deep understanding of EU law and privacy management, coupled with the CIPP/E certification, they oversee compliance operations for over 100,000 games. This team manages compliance related to standards such as ISO 27001, SOC2 Type II, COPPA, GDPR, ePrivacy Directive, and CCPA. Their dedication ensures game developers using our services are meeting top-tier data privacy and security standards.

The role of privacy professionals in today’s digital age can’t be understated. They’re essential in managing privacy threats and ensuring information assets remain secure. The IAPP has set global standards in education and testing for privacy, with the CIPP certification being a prime example. The CIPP/E focuses on European data protection laws, enforcement models, and best practices for data protection. By acquiring this certification, Francesco aligns with an international network of professionals upholding these standards.

“Privacy is of paramount importance in the digital age, especially in industries that handle vast amounts of user data, like the gaming sector. Earning the CIPP certification not only highlights our commitment to data protection but also underlines the strategic importance of privacy professionals in our organization.” – Allison Bilas, COO at GameAnalytics

What is IAPP?

Established in 2000, the IAPP serves as a leading global information privacy community. As a not-for-profit organization, it sets benchmarks, provides resources, and supports the privacy profession worldwide. For more details, visit IAPP’s official website.

The importance of data in game development is undeniable and crucial for optimizing user experience, player retention, monetization, and more. GameAnalytics helps over 60,000 gaming studios optimize and improve their games, offering a well-supported ecosystem of integrations whatever your dev tools of choice. When considering switching engines, the real challenge lies in preserving historically collected data, which serves as a compass guiding future game enhancements and decision-making.

We understand these concerns and make sure that you can confidently switch between engines, knowing that your historical data remains intact and actionable.All you need to do is instrument your SDK of choice, and the data collection continues in our engine-agnostic platform, enabling you to make data-driven decisions and continually refine your games. To make it as easy as possible, GameAnalytics is compatible with a wide range of not only engines but also popular platforms like Roblox, Javascript/web games, development environments, and frameworks.

Integration with leading game development engines

GameAnalytics offers 18 official integrations for all popular game development engines and environments, ensuring accessibility for developers across the board, making it a truly engine-agnostic platform, suitable for any tech stack. Each integration is tailor-made to satisfy the specific requirements of the game engine, providing a hassle-free and efficient experience.

These integrations are powered by streamlined SDKs, each comprising just a single line of code. While installation is a breeze, it’s worth noting that each game engine requires its unique line of code. These codes are readily available, either directly from GameAnalytics, the engine’s marketplaces, or dedicated hosting development platforms such as GitHub. Head over to our ready-to-use SDK documentation to understand their application and start collecting data and insights for your games.

PS: Our SDKs have built-in features to enable A/B testing and Live Ops – free of charge!

If you are considering switching your engine – or simply are looking to start with one –, check out our overview of the most popular ones:

Unity: Unity enables you to work with both 2D and 3D graphics and their Animator system can be used to create an animation state machine. The Unity-specific snippet empowers you to collect data and glean insights into player behavior effortlessly. Dive into detailed instructions via our Unity Integration Guide.

Unreal: Unreal engine is a great option for cross-platform development, high-quality graphics creation, and its ability to scale your game. Whether you want to start with the Unreal engine or already develop games through this platform, explore our Unreal Integration Guide to understand all the benefits that GameAnalytics can provide.

Godot: Renowned for its open-source nature and user-friendly interface, Godot operates on a language model similar to Python, which is one of the easiest coding languages used for game development. With GameAnalytics, you can dissect player progression, in-game events, monetization, and more in real-time. Read along with our Godot Integration Guide to learn more.

Cocos2D: This is the primary engine for writing games for iOS and Mac. While Cocos2D allows the development of regular old applications along with customized graphics, it also provides Objective C code. Our Cocos2D Integration Guide provides in-depth instructions to get you started.

Defold: This is a free-to-use engine that operates in Lua programming language with a high-quality visual editor and hot reload function. Head over to our documentation to explore the full potential of Defold analytics via our Defold Integration Guide.

GameMaker: Thanks to its intuitive interface, GameMaker eliminates the need to create a code base and engine from scratch. That allows game development beginners to easily create 2D mobile games. SDK for this engine is available in our GitHub repository and you can fetch it via the GameMaker Integration Guide.

Cordova: The biggest advantage of the Cordova engine is its ability to build mobile apps without the need to learn new programming languages or frameworks. That means developers can use and leverage their existing HTML, CSS, or JavaScript skills. To learn how to integrate Cordova with GameAnalytics, read the Cordova Integration Guide.

Flutter: This cross-platform development framework allows developers to work fast thanks to its Hot Reload feature and highly customizable UI design. Integrating the open-source framework to GameAnalytics is as easy as flipping the switch and is fully described in the step-by-step Flutter Integration Guide.

GameAnalytics compatibility extends also to many leading platforms and environments along the engines listed above:

• Android
• iOS
• Roblox
• Meta Quest 2
• JavaScript
• Adobe Air
• Construct
• C#
• C++

We know that working with data requires sensitive treatment. It is at our core to incorporate great measures toward legal, privacy, and security compliance. Continue reading to learn about our mission towards navigating the complexities of an ever-changing privacy regulatory landscape for you.

Privacy and Security: GameAnalytics’ Commitment

Integrating GameAnalytics into your game development process offers a wealth of benefits, from improving user experiences to ensuring player privacy. We understand the importance of trust, compliance, and data security in the gaming industry, which is why we go the extra mile to ensure your data is in safe hands. Our commitment to security and privacy is underlined by our impressive certifications:

• SOC2 Type II Compliant
• ISO27001 Certified
• Regular Penetration Testing
• Business Continuity/Disaster Recovery (BC/DR) Plans
• Robust Intrusion Detection and Infrastructure Monitoring

Our analytics tool empowers game developers to optimize and improve their games by collecting and analyzing crucial game data. We respect the privacy of both you and your players and do not provide collected data to any third party. Our products are further engineered with industry-leading security protocols to safeguard your data at all times. From multi-layered encryption to firewall protections, we ensure your data is uncompromised.

Today, we have some exciting news to share with you. GameAnalytics and GameIntel will be joining forces to provide an integrated, comprehensive platform that brings together analytics and wider gaming market insights – all in one simple, unified service.

One of the key focuses for us at GameAnalytics is to continually evolve and provide more value to our users. And again, we’re taking a significant step forward in that journey. From next month, GameIntel will become an integral part of GameAnalytics, bringing robust market insights like detailed KPI benchmark trends for all major metrics along with app store charts and rank positions for major gaming regions – right into our core platform.

Why is this exciting?

Having access to both GameAnalytics and GameIntel’s capabilities in a single place allows you to explore the broader connections between your in-game KPIs and your global app store rankings. This unified solution will provide you with a more comprehensive picture of your game’s performance, your competition, and the broader gaming market as a whole.

You’ll soon be able to track and analyze not only your own game’s data, but also the wider market rankings and performance estimates of other games and publishers that you’re interested in. Imagine having the ability to easily see how KPIs like DAU or retention translate to app store rankings – all on one single graph without needing to export and crunch different data sources. This is just one of the many powerful use cases you can look forward to.

What’s changing?

Going forward, GameIntel won’t operate as a standalone service. Instead, it will be integrated as a paid add-on within the GameAnalytics platform. This means you’ll find all the unique features and insights that GameIntel offers directly within the GameAnalytics interface.

Existing GameIntel users, rest assured! You will still have access to the same extensive data and insights that you’re used to. The key difference? You’ll be accessing these features within the newly redesigned GameAnalytics interface.

We’re working hard to ensure this transition is as smooth as possible and brings added convenience to your game and market analysis. From next month, you’ll be able to easily switch and access GameIntel from the main menu as shown below.

Key feature changes

Firstly, all of these updates bring huge performance and stability improvements, meaning that your market insights will load more quickly and reliably across all dashboards, and we’ll be able to continue launching new features with greater ease.

On this note, we’re excited to introduce a brand new feature – the ability to save games or studios that you want to track into ‘Your list’. This means, rather than searching for them each time, you can now have quick and easy access to your favorites directly from your dashboard.

As part of this consolidation process, the Top Publishers, Global Hits, Upcoming Games and Game Explorer dashboards will be deprecated. Our aim is to instead make this information available in the more streamlined market intelligence views shown below.

What about the billing changes?

The best part about this upgrade? All of GameIntel’s pro features will be available under a single plan at $499 per month. But, if you’re an existing user, we’ve got some fantastic news!

If you’re an existing user, you don’t need to do anything to access these new features! Simply continue with your subscription, and you’ll automatically have these features enabled and retain monthly pricing at your existing or discounted rate. Yes, that’s right – more features, greater value!

Please note, you don’t need to do anything to access these new features and pricing benefits. Simply continue with your subscription, and you’ll automatically have these features enabled and pricing changes reflected in your next billing cycle.

Onwards and upwards

We’re genuinely excited about these changes, as we believe they will give you better tools to understand both your games’ performance, the wider market dynamics and the way these two factors impact your ASO efforts. Remember, this is just the first of many improvements we plan to make – all designed to help you gain a deeper understanding of your audience, make smarter decisions, and ultimately succeed in the gaming world.

As always, we’re here if you have any questions or need further clarification about these changes. We’re all about making your journey with GameAnalytics as valuable and smooth as possible. So, please don’t hesitate to get in touch or share your feedback.

This event design guide is an invaluable resource for anyone looking to make the most out of their data within GameAnalytics.

Data tracking is complex, requiring meticulous effort to ensure that downstream data is valuable. This guide introduces you to the concept of a ‘Tracking Plan’, a strategic document that helps bridge the gap between data collection and analysis.

What’s Inside?

1. Brainstorm Your Burning Questions: Identify key game-related questions to guide your data tracking.
2. Create Your Events: Learn to design trackable events for thorough data collection.
3. Define Your Dimensions and Attributes: Understand the role of dimensions and attributes in enriching your data.
4. Plug in Your Game: Integrate your game with the tracking plan to gather meaningful data.
5. Keep Updating Your Plan: Emphasizes the necessity of adapting your plan to remain valuable.

By following this guide, you will develop a comprehensive, adaptable data tracking plan that ensures robust, valuable data for precise analysis and better insights within GameAnalytics.