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.

Since the launch of GameAnalytics V3, we have appreciated everyone engaging with us to provide feedback and discuss ideas. With this solid foundation in place, we are now able to build faster and deliver more depth and speed in our features. While there is still work to be done, we remain committed to enhancing existing features and introducing new functionality in the upcoming months.

In this post, we will highlight some of the key releases since the update and give you a glimpse of what’s on the horizon. Let’s dive in!

Recent improvements

Since the launch back in Feb, we made many updates, from small bug fixes to much larger enhancements of core functionality. Some of the biggest quality of life changes include:

• A new Overview page for your games
• Filtering improvements for Dashboards, Funnels and Real-time Feed
• Improved event selection
• DAU displayed in game selection
• ‘Sum of daily playtime’ added to Cohorts
• Metrics and filtering additions (New vs. Returning, Win Percentage, Conversion rate)

Game Overview page

The new Game Overview page is a dedicated and user-friendly hub for each game in your portfolio, and it is now the default landing page when navigating between games. This space provides quick access to key metrics to monitor your game performance, as well as important SDK integration information to ensure you’re getting the most out of the tool. The Game Overview page also streamlines access to game settings and controls, making it a breeze to manage your setup. ​​

Refined data sorting options

Another significant improvement we’ve made is the introduction of more effective data ordering for your Explore tool queries. Ordering is now processed on the backend and we added a new option (by number) to order on numerical values within a string. For instance, “level1, level2, level3, level10″ is now displayed in the correct order.

This sorting improvement is particularly valuable when selecting “Top X” with dimensions that contain thousands of values. By ensuring correct ordering and returning those values in logical sort, we now provide more easily readable results for you.

Filtering improvements for Funnels and Real-time Feed

We have introduced significant improvements for filtering Funnels and the Real-time feed, giving you greater control and flexibility in analysing and monitoring your game data. In particular, we have incorporated filters into saved funnels, ensuring that they’re retained when accessing the saved funnel at a later time. The Real-time Feed now offers the ability to filter events not only by ‘user_id’ but also by build and event type. This enhancement proves particularly valuable when testing new builds, so you can ensure that events are accurately captured and displayed.

Additional filter options

We have also expanded the filter options available to you. Our global filters now support:

• New or returning user
• First build
• Days since install
• Engine version
• SDK version

The ‘First build’ filter is especially useful as it represents the initial build observed for a user and remains constant. Combining this filter with the ‘Build’ filter allows you to observe data only from users who have experienced a specific build without subsequent updates (meaning they never updated). This can be achieved by setting ‘First build’ and ‘Build’ to the same build value in your filters.

Improved event selection

We have made it easier to select event values (e.g. levels or items) in the tool with multiple UI improvements, giving you greater control and flexibility to find the values you need. The tool now allows for multi-value event selection by using Shift+Click, enabling you to select multiple values at once, such as a range of level from level1 to level50. You also now have the option to “load more” to retrieve up to 5,000 event values, compared to the previous limit of 1,000. Additionally, the new UI makes it easier to manage selections by providing the option to show only selected values, simplifying the process of deselecting individual values or clearing the selection altogether.

We also introduced a toggle to control event hierarchy filtering. Read more about what this is here. Enabling this option will display only values that would be possible considering all currently added filters in other hierarchy dimensions. For example, let’s consider the Business Event (IAP) having the dimensions ItemType and ItemId. If you select an ItemType= “Weapon” and then continue to list values for ItemId, you’ll now only see ItemId’s listed that were sent on events having ItemType=”Weapon”.

Additional options will be introduced in the future to control sorting, search behaviour and the period that possible dimensions values are discovered. Stay tuned!

DAU displayed in game selection

We’ve introduced an improved navigation feature that allows you to sort games based on DAU. This enhancement makes it easy to get to the largest and smallest games in your portfolio, in addition to the other sorting options already available.

“Sum of daily playtime” added to Cohorts

We’ve enhanced our Cohorts feature with the inclusion of “sum of daily playtime”. This addition allows you to track and analyse the total time cohorts of players are spending in your game. This is essential for identifying the most valuable cohorts in terms of playtime, which is especially beneficial for ad-driven studios seeking to understand potential ad exposure. With this new metric, you can observe how playtime evolves over time since the days from install. It provides insightful data into player engagement and helps you optimise your monetization strategies.

Bringing parity to V3

With our recent updates, we’ve made several additions that bring it on par with our older version. First, we’ve introduced new metrics to enhance your data analysis:

• New vs. Returning, which allows you to distinguish between new and returning players, providing insights into your user acquisition and retention efforts
• Win Percentage, helping you measure the success rate of players in winning games or completing levels
• Conversion Rate, providing the percentage of users who make an in-app purchase to help you understand your game’s monetization

We’ve also added widget zoom in dashboards and implemented the ability to apply filters to Dashboards in V3, giving you greater control over the displayed data. This functionality allows you to refine and customise the data according to your specific requirements, enabling more precise analysis.

Coming improvements

We have an exciting lineup of improvements on the horizon that will enhance your experience within the tool and provide deeper insights into your game’s data. We aim to create a smoother and uninterrupted analytics experience with several UI enhancements, like a revised Explore Tool, making query definition and metric shortcut selections more intuitive. Very soon, you’ll also see more advanced functionality related to Scheduled Reporting, Errors, Retention, and your Organization overview. We’ll share more details about these changes in a coming update.

Improved data insights are also planned with the addition of the DAU/MAU metric, which help gauge stickiness in your game. A high DAU/MAU ratio indicates strong use engagement, where a significant portion of monthly users are actively playing on a daily basis. This usually means that your retention levels are healthy! ARPDAU (Average Revenue per Daily Active User), which helps you understand the average revenue generated per user each day, will also be released shortly.

Additional filters and filter persistence will be introduced (to ensure selected filters remain in place during navigation). We will include support for filtering on AB Testing, Remote Configs, install cohorts and acquisition sources, allowing for more precise and granular data analysis. And finally, the introduction of a date comparison feature will enable you to compare selected date ranges with previous periods, facilitating trend analysis, pattern identification and the impact of changes over time.

We will be introducing updated demo data for all event types as well, providing you with example data that showcases the insights available in the tool. This feature can serve as inspiration for you to consider adding additional event types to your own tracking, further enhancing your data analysis and decision-making capabilities.

Stay tuned!

There’s a lot more to come over the following months, and we’re confident that the GameAnalytics experience will improve exponentially. We’ll keep you posted about every new update that helps your quality of life.

If you have any thoughts or suggestions for further improvements, don’t hesitate to share your valuable insights with us on the GameAnalytics feedback portal.

Lately we’ve talked a lot about some exciting updates coming to GameAnalytics, and over the past few months you’ve been able to get a small taste of these changes with our V3 Open Beta. Thank you to everyone who took part and shared valuable feedback. We’ve been listening to your comments and they’ve helped us polish the V3 experience a whole lot more.

What’s happening?

In this post, we’ll cover all of the nitty-gritty details about this release. But, if you’re short on time, here’s a very quick summary of what’s happening…

TL;DR — V3 is going to be officially released as the default tool

• The legacy solution will be available for the next 6-8 months (or more).
• Users will be selected in groups to enter the new solution (all users will be transitioned over 5-10 days).
• V3 delivers a major update to key features – improvements will continue to be rolled out
• New features are already in development and will be introduced in 4-6 months.
• Certain options (e.g. metrics) lack feature parity with previous solutions. These will be added during the coming months! Let us know your feedback.

Click here to jump straight to release details where you can learn even more about the new functionality introduced!

What is V3 and what do I get out of it?

V3 is just one of many improvements we have been working on to make GameAnalytics the best and most cost effective platform for devs of all types – from indies to publishers, on everything from mobile, to Roblox and PC. Firstly, this new solution delivers a more powerful analytics tool. It’s more user friendly, way faster and packed with many new features and options.

• Funnels have been rebuilt to respond in seconds instead of minutes.
• Explore Tool has been supercharged with many more options for filtering, grouping, splitting the data and aggregating per user or session on all metrics.
• Dashboards now support all query options available allowing the creation of customized views of the specific insights you need to review daily.
• Additional industry insights are now available in a free version of our market benchmarking tool now included within the core GameAnalytics experience.

Secondly, one of our key priorities was to deliver new, flexible and secure systems that operate at high efficiency. Accordingly, GameAnalytics is now SOC II and ISO 27001 compliant, and our systems are effortlessly able to deliver billions of events into a range of low-cost game data processing tools (DataSuite). This is all part of our larger vision to enable devs to turn their data into insights, no matter how custom their requirements, whilst staying on top of changing privacy compliance regulations.

Finally, these technical changes also give us at GameAnalytics a flexible foundation to enable continued platform improvements and agile releases, now and into the future.

Why change GameAnalytics?

While many of you have enjoyed using the legacy analytics solution, from an engineering perspective it was becoming more difficult to deliver those much-requested new features and functionality mentioned above, due to aging and inflexible technology.

For context, in 2018 GameAnalytics overhauled a legacy backend system and replaced it with a modern query solution. The existing V2 analytics tool was altered to support this new backend resulting in GameAnalytics V2.5. This change introduced powerful new options that users have enjoyed since, including the ability to perform powerful and granular multi-dimensional filtering.

However this meant that we were developing two systems that were not originally meant to work together and it resulted in several edge-case issues and limitations. V3 is built to natively support our modern query solution and all of its advanced options. This updated foundation will allow features to be built much faster and feedback addressed quickly. Stay tuned for more features to be introduced during 2023 and beyond!

How do I access it?

The updated version is officially released and will gradually (over 5-10 days) redirect users into V3 instead of the previous solution. You might already be entering the new solution by default.

How do I switch back to the previous version?

Change is often difficult and therefore we will continue to keep the legacy tool available for at least 6-8 months. From the home screen you can access the legacy tool via the menu in the top navigation.

If you keep going back or want to share feedback then please get in touch! You can get in touch with our friendly support team, or use the feedback button on the top navigation bar.

What’s new?

Over the coming months we will release more in-depth articles on each feature and how to use it optimally. In the meantime you can read on to learn more about the key updates introduced. Note that major updates have been made to Funnels, Explore Tool and Dashboards. Read on to learn more details on each feature.

Brand new UI

The first thing you will notice is the updated design and navigation. On the top-bar you can select features, access the game selector or change the active organization.

Home Page

After login you will enter the Home Page. It has been altered to show a mix of Organization details and now lists the most recent games you have accessed to easily continue from a previous session. This is also the place to access and accept invitations to other resources.

• View a list of your recently accessed games
• Overview of Organization key metrics and recently created games
• List of product updates and blog posts from GameAnalytics

ⓘ Metrics for each game are not included like seen on the legacy solution. We are working actively on a new feature called ‘Organization Overview’ providing the same functionality + more.

Benchmarks+

We are pleased to have introduced the free version of our popular benchmarking tool from GameIntel. This tool gives insights into global performance benchmarks for all key metrics, from aggregated data across more than 150,000 games on the GameAnalytics network.

In the near future we’ll add paid benchmarks tiers, along with more  market intelligence features.

Funnels

The Funnels feature has been rebuilt using a new backend solution.

• Results delivered almost instantly
• Progression funnel-type introduced focusing on levels to deliver more insights related to completion ratios for each step.
• Bulk step creation made easy. Simply select more than one value for a step event value and choose to split into several steps (e.g. 10 level names)
• Funnels can be saved and reused

ⓘ Funnels created and saved in the previous version will not carry over to the new version of Funnels.

Read our Funnels documentation.

Explore Tool

Restructured how queries are created to better align with the underlying data dimensions and event-types resulting in a much more flexible and intuitive experience.

• Added a GroupBy option called “All” causing aggregation to a single number (e.g. total Revenue last 10 days).
• Global aggregation options unlocked. Use “count”, “unique users” or “unique sessions” for all queries.
• Mean aggregation supported per unique user or per unique session.  Weighted mean aggregation supported when using Group By set to All.
• Intuitive GroupBy and SplitBy interface allowing control on query limits (max values returned)
• Global Filters supporting a nested AND/OR definition and EXCLUDE. Added filters for “First Build”, “New or Returning”, “Engine Version”, “SDK Version”

ⓘ At release the Explore Tool will be missing certain unique metrics (e.g. Win/Loss Ratio, New vs. Returning Users) and certain functionality like comparing 2 different metrics and sorting. All these areas are in development and will be delivered soon. Queries created in the previous version will not carry over.

Read our Explore Tool documentation.

Dashboards

• Custom dashboards now support the full extended query options from Explore Tool allowing many permutations of metrics to be added
• New widget called Metric showing a single number (e.g. Total Revenue) using the query option GroupBy set to All
• Initially supporting Line-chart, Bar-chart and Metric visualization
• Predefined dashboards available for easy access

ⓘ At release the Dashboards feature will lack certain feature parity. These are actively being worked on. We aim to soon release filtering of dashboards, widget zoom, additional visualization options and sharing the dashboards. Dashboards created in the previous version will not carry over.

Read our Dashboards documentation.

Settings and User Management

All settings have been restructured to be more centralized around an Organization.

• Full list of users having some access to resources on the Organization
• Bulk Invite users to Games, Studios and Organizations
• Look at other user-profiles on the Organization (if you have access)
• Handle archived games or studios more easily
• + more

Game Selection UI

An updated UI for selecting games.

• Select games across organizations (all games available for a user)
• Quickly open recently accessed games
• Much faster performance for larger studios having 1000’s of games
• Pinned games list (personal pinned list)

ⓘ After release a new column showing DAU with sorting enable will be added informing users of game size when selecting.

What’s next?

We know that some of the features you’re used to might not be available yet, but don’t worry! We’re working hard to bring everything over from the old solution as quickly as we can.

We’d love to hear your feedback and suggestions! You can reach out to us through the support channels or the feedback button in the tool. We’re always looking for ways to make things better, and your input is invaluable.

What’s going on?

If  you missed it before, we recommend that you check out this post we shared a few days ago for more context: GameAnalytics is changing…

As promised, we will now deliver more detail on the Open Beta. We’ve included a video introduction and also a list of all major features describing what functionality is delivered initially and what additions to expect over the following months.

See it in action

In this video, Kasia from our product team gives a detailed overview of all the new functionality available in our Open Beta. It covers all key features — please give it a watch to get the most out of this update!

What is the Open Beta?

The Open Beta is a period of time when a new and separate version of GameAnalytics is available whilst features are being finalised for a full release (called V3). All of your current games will be available in the Open Beta version and any changes will propagate across both versions (for example any admin or settings changes like renaming a game title).

When will the Open Beta end?

We’re committed to ensuring that GameAnalytics V3 is running smoothly before we release it, so there’s no end-date set in stone. We will make this decision based on user-feedback, but we expect the Open Beta to last 2-4 months, so into Q1 2023 at the latest. Once the Open Beta period ends then the updated V3 will become the default.

We know how difficult it can be when reliable tools suddenly change so, rest assured, we are making the existing (legacy V2.5) experience available well into 2023. We’ll keep you posted.

How to access V3?

The Open Beta switcher can be accessed via the Home screen and will open in a new browser tab.

How can you help?

We need your feedback to build better features!  Within the Open Beta,  you have the opportunity to give feedback via this callout. You can also see and upvote suggestions made from other users.

Please do get involved! Your input matters a lot and helps us shape GameAnalytics for the better.

What to expect?

You will see a lot of improvements, but also certain features still lacking parity with our existing offering. Don’t worry, though, this is just the first phase. We have many improvements scheduled over the coming months and we will keep listening and improving for years to come.

We have even more planned features being developed for release during 2023, but that is for another time. For now, we very much hope you like the new direction of GameAnalytics.

What’s included, and what’s coming up

Take a look below to learn about all of the newly added functionality, along with some areas that you should still consider WIP, especially at the early stages of the Open Beta

Funnels

Added functionality available in Open Beta

• Rebuilt Funnels feature to deliver results in seconds compared to 20-25mins.
• Progression funnel-type introduced delivering more insights related to completion ratios.
• Bulk step creation. When selecting more than 1 value for a funnel step (e.g. 10 level names) it can be easily converted into separate steps.

Pending functionality WIP during Open Beta

• Saving Funnels and listing all saved Funnels.
• Easier bulk-selection of values (e.g. levels) to create steps.

Note: funnels created and saved in the previous version will not carry over to the new version of Funnels.

Explore Tool

Added functionality available in Open Beta

• Restructured how queries are created to better align with underlying data and events, delivering a more intuitive experience with more metrics and filtering options.
• Many aggregation types possible across event types. For example mean-per-session or mean-per-user for almost all metrics.
• GroupBy and SplitBy connected in a more intuitive experience.
• Filters allowing a nested AND/OR definition and supporting filter excludes.
• Additional new filters like ‘First Build’ and ‘SDK Version’.

Pending functionality WIP during Open Beta

• Data table.
• Export data.
• Annotations.
• Comparison of 2 metrics and 2 date periods.
• Advanced metrics like Retention, ARPDAU, Win/Loss Ratio.

Note: queries created in the previous version will not carry over to the new version of Explore Tool.

Dashboards

Added functionality available in Open Beta

• Dashboards fully rebuilt to allow all Explore Tool extended query options.
• Create, Edit, Save and List dashboards.
• Widget creation supporting Line-chart and Bar-chart.

Pending functionality WIP during Open Beta

• Save and Load dashboards from backend (not local storage).
• Predefined dashboards for easy access.
• Filtering of all widgets when viewing a dashboard.
• More widget types (single digit, pie chart + more).

Note: Dashboards created in the previous version will not carry over to the new version of Dashboards.

Benchmarks+

Added functionality available in Open Beta

• Introducing features from GameIntel to better research market Benchmarks and trends.
• Market data for Retention, Engagement, Monetization, Advertising.
• The following will be disabled in Open Beta:
  • Top 2-15% quantiles.
  • No (recent) data reported for 2022.

Homescreen

Added functionality available in Open Beta

• Faster access to previous games:
  • Recently accessed list of game
  • Recently created games on Organization
• Overview of Organization key metrics.
• Product updates and content from Gameanalytics.

Real-time

Added functionality available in Open Beta

• Filter the live feed of events by user_id (device id) making it much easier to debug an integration and only view events from the relevant test device.
• Error reporting is now displaying ‘users affected’ per error in addition to count.

Cohorts

Added functionality available in Open Beta

• Weighted mean to totals.
• User count display alongside ratio numbers to understand sample size.

Game Selection

Added functionality available in Open Beta

• New game selection modal added, allowing quick access to all games available for a user.
• A way to quickly open recently accessed games.
• Pagination added to avoid loading all games at once, resulting in significant performance improvement for users working in larger studios.
• Responsive design improvements to automatically adjust screen height to view as many games as possible.
• Filter by studio and search by title.
• Pinned games list.
• Sorting by columns (e.g. title, created date).

Pending functionality WIP during Open Beta

• Advanced filtering (e.g. by platform).
• Data column showing DAU per game.

Creating Organizations, Studios and Games

Added functionality available in Open Beta

• Guided experience with contextual help to understand what is being created.
• Seamless creation flow to set up all resources one needs to get started with analytics (Organization → Studio → Game).

Pending functionality WIP during Open Beta

• Step to invite users when creating an Organization.

Settings

Added functionality available in Open Beta

• Introducing a centralized Organisation settings area for accessing resources (games/studios/users).
• Archived games management.
• Games/Studios list and settings pages.
• Lists to manage all users with Organization access and their permissions.
• View your personal profile and the profile of other users (with the right permissions).

Pending functionality WIP during Open Beta

• Invite users to Games, Studios and Organizations.
• Improvements on additional columns (e.g. DAU for game list) and sorting/filtering.

Editor’s note: since we posted this we’ve been busy bees; we’re delighted to say that the Open Beta is now live! For more details (including a video demo), check out our Open Beta update here.

About this change

We’re truly excited to announce that we’ll soon be launching a major, much anticipated and much revamped version of GameAnalytics. In this update, we’ll share details about what we’re changing, why we decided to make these updates, and what improvements you can expect them to bring.

So… what’s going on?

Over the past few years, we’ve focused on developing a new version of GameAnalytics, bringing huge improvements to load times, studio management, game organisation, funnels, AB testing and event level analysis with our explore tool. This is just the tip of the iceberg; our new version represents a fundamental overhaul to our system design and user interface, bringing hundreds of different usability improvements.

The coming update is internally named GameAnalytics V3 and it represents a major shift in our product technology, where we’ve listened to your feedback and delivered a huge number of your suggestions.

Since we founded GameAnalytics we’ve made the following major releases.

What’s the release plan for v3?

In the coming few weeks, we will go live with an Open Beta where all users can experience GameAnalytics V3. From the existing (V2.5) tool it will be possible to switch to and from the V3 Open Beta. Some functionality is still in development and improvements will be released throughout Q4.

We will launch the updated version as the default when the Open Beta period ends, so you will still be able to transition and use the old V2.5 well into 2023. Exactly what date this permanent switch to V3 will happen is still TBD, but it will at the latest be during Q1 2023.

After the full switch to GameAnalytics V3, we will continue delivering improvements based on your feedback, aiming to better optimise both your productivity and our overall system performance.

Why change GameAnalytics?

Our main goal with V3 is to provide better features and faster updates. During the past years we have heard your valuable feedback and, in many cases, we sadly could not always quickly deliver these improvements.

One of the main reasons for this was due to limitations in the technology that we built almost 9 years ago. It was clear that we needed to pursue a different tech stack. Now, in contrast, our amazing developers and designers have built a new framework which enables fast feature scaffolding for a continually evolving, state-of-the-art analytics tool.

With this modernised technology underpinning GameAnalytics V3 we decided to not only rebuild for feature parity, but also to improve and reimagine our service. We have gathered many years of feedback to rethink and improve much of our core functionality.

Key improvements to expect

We will go into more specific details for each feature in later updates. We’ll also share detailed documentation and helpful video guides. But for now, here’s a quick overview of some of the major improvements you can expect to see available in GameAnalytics very soon.

• Funnel results delivered almost instantly (seconds rather than minutes)
• Overall faster user-experience (especially for studios with 1000s of users/games)
• New ‘home screen’ enabling better studio management (sneak peek below)

• Easier to resume work done at last login via recent games
• Deeper insights possible via updated query builder
• Improved user-management and settings

The initial release will not have everything all at once, but with your feedback, our new tech and great team… we will get there very quickly! Expect us to ship many more feature releases and improvements, at a much greater cadence than ever before in 2023.

We can’t wait for you to try it

For now, this post is mainly to give you a heads up. The V3 Open Beta is right around the corner and we’ll keep you updated with more information including a full video overview very soon.

Stay tuned!

If you read tech news, you’ve probably stumbled on the term Web3. And you might be wondering what it means and how it could affect gaming. So let’s explore Web3 and the surrounding opinions.

What is Web3?

It’s all about ownership. The web has been going through gradual changes, ever since it launched. Web1 was where people uploaded websites with static pages and information. You simply read Web1. The next step was Web2, where users create their own content.

Web3 is a prediction that users will begin to own digital content and have control over how they use it. But it’s also about decentralizing that ownership: making sure it’s not tied to any particular platform. (You don’t just own a movie on one platform, you own the right to watch it anywhere, for example.)

“I was lucky enough to be a part of the generation of Web2, building a company like Reddit, that proved and just showed a model for the world of read and write,” Alexis Ohanian, co-founder of Reddit explained in a talk with Bloomberg. “Now what we’re seeing, this whole Web3 jargon, is really just about a third component, which is the ownership part. And we’re just starting to see that, whether it’s with gaming or NFTs or this infrastructure that now exists that let you benefit from a sense of ownership.”

Theoretically, it doesn’t matter how users gain ownership over their digital content. But most experts agree that the blockchain (and specifically NFTs) are the first signs that it’s coming. (Have a look at how Axie Infinity have been using Blockchain for their game.)

So what do blockchain and NFT mean?

It needs to be secure if we see any level of control or ownership. That’s where blockchains (and the NFTs build on that technology) could come in.

• Blockchains can be seen as public databases. Every blockchain has a ‘ledger,’ and they record every transaction. This ledger is shared on everyone’s machines, so it can’t be faked. There are other technical reasons that make blockchain secure, but we won’t get into them here. (This is how cryptocurrencies work.)
• NFTs are the ‘deeds’ to a digital thing. It stands for ‘non-fungible token.’ Which just means a token that’s completely unique. And it’s technically proof that you own a thing. NFTs run on the blockchain, so you always know who owns which NFT.

How might this work in gaming?

It’s impossible to tell exactly how gaming will change. But, theoretically, the blockchain could give players ownership over many different assets. Players could own the game itself, items within the game, or currencies in the game.

It’s the decentralization that matters here, though. It’s not just about owning a cosmetic skin in a single game, it’s about being able to trade that skin like a real commodity. Or even use that skin in another game. (Though, that would need a level of cooperation between developers that’s highly unlikely.)

But Twitter’s founder and CEO, Jack Dorsey, doesn’t believe that Web3 gives as much control as you might think. “You don’t own ‘web3,’” Dorsey tweeted. “The VCs and their LPs do. It will never escape their incentives. It’s ultimately a centralized entity with a different label.”

It won’t all be sunshine and rainbows

There’s a big difference between what could happen and what will happen. Sure, the idea is to have one central place with all your digital assets, from music to individual game items. And that you’d be able to use them in any game. From a player’s perspective, that’s very exciting.

But practically, it’ll likely be more fragmented than that. Companies will still need to cooperate to make it work. For example, a game developer could theoretically allow a player access to any ‘meta skin.’ Or perhaps allow you to use in-game currencies from another game. But how many developers will support that?

If it’s going to happen, the industry will need to release a lot of standards to make it easy for developers to incorporate their player’s digital assets into their games. It’s theoretically possible to add a setting to your game where players could play the soundtrack from another game, for example. But would you want to? Would you want them using currency they earnt from a competitor?

We’ve seen this before, and it failed

Back in 2012, there was a cloud-based service called Ultraviolet. The idea was to be a single locker that housed your digital right to watch a movie. Quite a few studios agreed to honor the system so that users could buy a movie once and be able to claim the right to watch it on any device.

But the service died out in 2019. Who knows whether it was a problem in their marketing, resistance from some of the leading movie giants, or just bad luck. Perhaps it was just too early. But, either way, it meant that users lost those rights. And that they never truly own anything.

There are interesting trends in gaming, though

While there have been failures in the past, it seems that the gaming industry is beginning to dabble and dip their toes in web3-Esque concepts:

• Midnight Society. The famous influencer, Dr. Disrespect, has created a new game studio. One aspect is that people who buy a ‘Founders Pass’ will get what appears to be a custom avatar that “can be traded and collected on open marketplaces.”

• Gods Unchained. This title comes from the former game director of Magic: The Gathering Arena. In it, you can earn cards as you play and then sell them on the marketplace for cryptocurrency.
• Steam. Not quite there, but it already has the Community Market. You can sell items from different games there. However, this isn’t quite web3 yet: you can’t withdraw those funds. But it could be a start.
• Lost Lore Studio. Full disclosure, these guys have been using our technology to track in-game events for a while now. But they’re worth mentioning. Their game, Bearverse, shows what could happen as it lets players earn NFTs and trade them for cryptocurrency.

The game still needs to be good

While these examples seem to show the beginnings of Web3-like games and show us what the future could look like, there are words of warning worth bearing in mind.

“Too many times, our ecosystem has tried to build out NFT-enable games, but forgotten the first step, which is to build a great game,” Sam Bankman Fried, CEO of FTX, tweeted. “And just as importantly, web3 should make a game better, not neutral or worse. If integrating crypto hurts a game, we don’t want to do it.”

We can still help you track events

If you’re interested in trying out Web3 concepts for your game, you can still use our analytics to track how it’s going. We exist to help you make better games and monetize them efficiently. Blockchain shows some promise in monetizing your game, so if you need to track the progress, we’ll be here to help.

Virtual reality has been a hot topic for a few years now. And although there are a few kinks to iron out, VR is starting to take its seat in the gaming industry – it now boasts around 171 million VR users worldwide. We actually support VR games. Our SDKs work out of the box for Oculus Quest games. You just need to download our SDKs as usual, but with one extra step. (But more on that below.)

It still comes second place to most other types of gaming in the industry. (Mobile gaming is easily one of the top dogs, having generated $93.2 billion in 2021 alone.) But VR is a space to keep your eye on (or even dip your toes into).

But how do you even get started developing VR games? What tools and skills will you need? And how can you take your existing mobile titles and apply them to VR? Let’s take a look.

The good, the bad, and the VR

First of all, what are the pros and cons of developing VR games?

Pro: New space means less competition

Despite a large amount of money VR is making, it’s a small sliver of what the whole industry is making. It’s ripe to be tapped and you’ll be entering a new space with less competition.

With such promising predictions and growth, it makes sense to get a head start now.

Con: VR is trickier

It’s no secret that VR is more complicated. Engines are still building software and support for this new technology. And there’s so much more to develop, build, and test when working in a 3D environment.

But as Dr Kelso in Scrubs said: “Nothing in this world worth having comes easy.”

Pro: VR can bring life to an existing game

Adapting your best mobile game to VR can bring in a new source of revenue and audiences to your franchise. It can be less risky than starting with an entirely new and unproven project. And it can help keep your current players engaged and loyal.

Image source: Fruit Ninja VR 2 (we actually interviewed Halfbrick, have a read through here)

Con: There’s a higher risk with VR

Crafting a great VR game will need a lot more time, resources, and budget. So if your project doesn’t hit off, then that’s a lot of investment lost down the drain.

A good way to get around this is to create it as a mobile game first. Test the gameplay, try out different mechanics, and see how it performs to a select group. If it kicks off, then you know it’s worth investing. And it could also help build your following, so you already have loyal customers when your launch your VR version

Pro: VR opens up opportunities to work with brands

The metaverse is happening. We may not see it properly happen for a few years. But brands and businesses are already turning their attention and brainstorming ideas on how to enter the space.

Image source: Roblox blog

Take Gucci and Roblox. In May 2021, Gucci debuted a two-week art installation called the Gucci Garden, hoping to target young customers inside Roblox. The same could easily happen when the metaverse kicks off. And they’ll need developers and studios to work with.

Taking your mobile game to VR

It’s safe to say that most games don’t convert directly into VR. Studios have to recreate their games with new visuals and models in a brand new environment for VR.

Sure, it’s not impossible to use what you already have. But the reality is you’ll need to build your game from scratch to transform it from mobile to VR.

So here are a few steps to get you off the ground:

• First things first, you’ll need to make it 3D. A lot of mobile games start out with a 2D style. So unless you originally designed your game in 3D, you’ll need to map this out.
• Research the right engine. There are a ton of engines and platforms out there for mobile games, but only a few support VR / AR. So research which engine will be best to hold up your vision.
• Adapt your mechanics. Angry Birds is a prime example of this. On mobile, it’s a ‘tap, hold, and aim’ movement. Whereas in VR, they replicated the motions of using a slingshot. Otherwise, it wouldn’t be fun.
• Keep it short, simple, and fun. Virtual reality demands so much more from the player in terms of senses and spatial awareness. It can be pretty alarming and overwhelming for new users. So it’s crucial to keep gameplay simple and easy to understand.
• Sort out your analytics. We’re kind of experts in this. But take it from us, mapping your event tracking and analytics in a VR game versus your mobile game is trickier. Our platform supports VR and you just need to install our SDKs to get started: Unity, Unreal, or Android.
• Think about what you want to track. Moving to VR means that you’ll need to think about how you should track spacial metrics. How do players look around? How are they moving around the space? Do your players prefer to stand still or duck and weave?

You might need to team up with a VR studio

It depends on how big of a project you want to take on. VR games are a lot more demanding than traditional mobile titles. So partnering up with experts could get your title to where it needs to be. To give you an idea of what we mean, when the team at Resolution Games built Bait! VR, they had around eight people working on the project.

Looking for some inspiration? Check out these five games that nailed shifting to VR.

Download our SDKs to get started

Our GameAnalytics SDKs support VR games (we have a few up and running already). It’s the same process as installing our normal SDKs, with one extra step. Read our documentation for each to get started: Unity, Unreal, or Android. We also took the time to guide you through integration for Meta Quest 2.

Fancy some more reading about VR? Check out these articles:

• 5 mobile games that nailed shifting to VR.
• How to build successful VR games as a solo developer
• Among Us VR dev talks about how to create immersive worlds

We’re coming to the end of the year, and what a year it has been. We’ll have a roundup blog coming out soon, but there’s still plenty to do and fill you in on before we start chatting about 2022.

Recently, we’ve had a few major updates across all of our product lines. Here are the highlights:

• You can now analyze ad revenue from AdMob in your GameAnalytics account.
• We also added a new DataSuite to our product family, Raw Export.
• Ranking data for over 80 sub-genres is now available in GameIntel.

So without wasting any more time with the intro’s, let’s dig into the main course.

What’s new in GameAnalytics?

We’ve created an integration with AdMob

We partnered with Google’s AdMob to bring you Impression level revenue data (ILRD) from their network directly to your GameAnalytics tool. All to help you analyze all your game’s data in one place, including insights about your ad revenue. Read our integration guides to learn how to get started:

• Overview article on impression events
• Unity SDK
• iOS SDK
• Android SDK

Over 2021, we’ve worked hard to bring onboard new partners for your ad data. So far, we’ve welcomed Aequus, Applovin MAX, Fyber, and ironSource, with many more to come. And if there’s any other ad network you’d like us to integrate with next, let us know here.

We’ve released our new Raw Export

Raw Export is the latest feature added to our DataSuite family. It’ll let you automatically export all of your games’ raw event data in JSON format, and pump this straight into your AWS S3 account. What’s better, there’s barely any manual intervention. And it’ll package all of your data into a compressed file, containing unchanged raw events, with their properties and timestamps.

To give you an idea of how it’s different, here’s a comparison table against other DataSuite products:

We’ve gone into a lot more detail around this new feature here. And we have plenty more updates coming out regarding our DataSuite soon. So keep an eye on this space.

And we’ve added new features to GameIntel

We’ve been pretty quiet on the GameIntel front. But for good reason. We’ve added a bunch of new features, and polished a lot of the edges in our marketing intelligence tool. Alongside a UI refresh, you can now:

• Filter the charts by over 80 sub-genres
• Sort the ranks by specific metrics
• And unlock this (and more) in our new starter tier – only $99 a month.

There’s a lot to explain in this update. But in short, it’s the next step in creating your one-stop market research tool for the mobile games industry. You can get all of the details around the latest release here. Or dive right in and try it out for yourself.

What’s coming next

We have some big plans for 2022. It’s a bit early to go into the details. So make sure you subscribe to our newsletter to stay in the loop. We send monthly updates around our tools and any other game development news. But for now, check out some of our other updates:

• Introducing Raw Export – A New DataSuite from GameAnalytics

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 a pretty hot topic at the moment. It’s constantly evolving. Earlier this year, we saw Apple make changes on their iOS identifier. And now Google will soon be changing how developers use the Advertising ID (AAID).

You can read more about Google’s policy change here. But in short:

• You’ll see less Advertising IDs: If a user opts out of ad personalization, you’ll no longer have access to the Advertising ID (AAID, also called GAID). Instead, you’ll see a string of 0’s.
• Google is introducing App Set ID: This is to help you identify unique users for the purpose of analytics (among other non-advertising purposes). This identifier is still in ‘preview-mode’ at the moment. But it’s intended to potentially help you identify users between apps from the same vendor (so your portfolio of games). But it may be limited, and we don’t know how useful it’ll be yet. Here’s their docs.
• These changes will start soon: They’ll be rolled out in phases starting late 2021.

We’ve been preparing for this for a while. You’re going to need to update any SDK targeting Android devices ASAP, which you can do here. But here’s some more information about the changes, and how we’re getting ready.

How we’re ready for Google’s upcoming release

We’ve been preparing for this ever since Apple’s announcement for iOS 15. But before we go into the nitty-gritty details, we need to give you a quick recap on how we track users (feel free to skip if you’re already up-to-speed).

How we track users on Android

At the moment, we create a unique identifier for each device that sends data to GameAnalytics. We call this the GameAnalytics User ID. We usually get this value from a device identifier. And if that’s not available, then we create a random User ID when that person installs an app, and we then assign it to that device.

For Android, our SDK has used Android’s Advertising ID (AAID) for identifying unique devices (that is, assigning the user_id).

In preparation of Google’s upcoming release, we have made changes in how we identify devices. Before, we used AAID. But now, our SDKs will instead generate a randomized user ID on the first app launch and keep using this user_id for all future activity.

How this affects you

1. For new Android installs in your game using GA SDK v7.+ → Your game metrics shouldn’t be affected. We’ll assign the new user_id based on our new identifier logic.
2. For existing Android installs in your game which update to GA SDK v7.+ → These will continue to use our previous identifier logic (that is, we’ll continue to assign user_id from AAID). This may impact your metrics when Google restricts AAID. This means for the players that do not consent, Google will not return AAID, and it’ll change our user_id to a random one. You’ll see them as new users in GameAnalytics. And for a short time during the transition period, you may see an impact on certain metrics like retention, new users, returning users.
3. For existing Android installs in your game which don’t update → If users are on SDK 6.6.0+, then their devices should start using a randomised identifier. If their SDK is below 6.6.0, then for the users that do not consent, they will all end up with the same identifier (0’s). Unfortunately, these will have a high impact on your metrics.

You need to update your SDK as soon as possible

To avoid scenario three, we highly recommend you update your SDKs. It’ll make your transition a lot smoother when Google releases their update.

Update your SDKs here. Please note, for Unity, you’ll want version 7.+.

This has impacted our Attribution Integrations

At the moment, we support postbacks from all of our attribution partners (you can read more about this here). Which means when one of our attribution partners informs us of an app install, we can stamp our events data with attribution dimensions (essentially where that user came from). This lets you filter your data in GameAnalytics by different install campaigns, and other install dimensions you may use.

We’re able to do this by using identifiers that we and our partners track. It lets us match all of the data together accurately. But as the industry is shifting (take Android’s upcoming AAID changes as an example), we’re no longer able to rely 100% on these cross-app identifiers. Which affects how our attribution integrations work.

We’re still evaluating the impact this will have on our attribution data. But we’ve listed out what this means for you just below.

What does this mean for you?

• iOS → The integration will not work optimally for devices that are on iOS14.5+.
• Android → Currently this still works as expected, but we anticipate that this will be impacted when Google releases their new AAID policy later in 2021.

For iOS15, Apple suggests that developers should add a URL to also send the SKAdNetwork conversion postback. This is Apple’s own solution for Attribution. We’re currently planning and working on solutions to provide insights into SKAdNetwork data (conversion values etc.).

Other updates to note

We’ve released a new Flutter SDK

Our family of SDKs is growing. We’ve just created a new one for Flutter, Google’s UI toolkit for crafting beautiful, natively compiled applications for mobile, web, and desktop from a single codebase.

Our SDK currently supports Android, iOS, and Web Flutter builds. It uses native Android and iOS libraries which means it will send native device identifiers with the events.

To get started, you can download and follow our integration guide here.

We’ve added TopOn to our ad network providers

We’ve been adding more and more partners to our list of ad revenue providers recently. At the moment, we’re working with MoPub, Fyber, ironSource, Aequus and Applovin MAX.

And in the next few days, you’ll also see TopOn added to the mix. You can find the docs to get started here: Unity, iOS, Android. And once you’re all suited and booted, you can head straight to the Ads Dashboard in your GameAnalytics account for a predefined view of ad revenue in your game. Or query for the metrics data in detail in the Explore Tool.

We’ve also added new ad revenue metrics

We’ve added two additional ad revenue metrics in the Explore Tool: Ad Revenue (Total) and Impressions (Total). If you’ve enabled impression events from multiple supported providers in your game, then these metrics will give you a combined view of your impression-level data.

We’re giving our tool a facelift

Lastly, we’ve redesigned the Explore Tool in our GameAnalytics platform. We’ll soon release the early versions of this new updated feature inside GA Labs. With the early designs of our Dashboards feature soon to follow in a couple of months.

We want to build the next-gen analytics tool. And this is the next step to rebuilding and redesigning our platform. These are still early-stage designs. So if you have any thoughts on our new look, then we’d love to pick your brain. Let us know what you think.

That’s it for now. As we’ve mentioned, we’d love to hear from you. So share your feedback and ideas here. And when you’re ready, log into your account to get started.

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 anymore. We have the data.

Here’s what we’ve found:

Opt-in Rate

How many % of the players (who were asked) chose to consent.

Opt-in rate = 43%

You read that right. We’ve shared our findings on how we came to this result below. But to understand the full picture, we must look deeper.

iOS identifiers

To know just how impactful this update was, we first need to learn how 3rd party services track iOS users (including GameAnalytics) via device identifiers. If you’re already up-to-speed on this, then skip right on.

IDFA (identifier for advertisers)

The IDFA value is unique across all iOS apps on a device. It plays a crucial role in earning money from your ads (and does much more), as it lets you track data from different apps and services on the same device, and then later correlate all of that data to the same device/user.

This identifier would let you collect data from many different sources (like install attribution) which you could use in a data warehouse. And with this data, you could optimize your gameplay, monetization strategy, and more.

For every device that has iOS 14.5 onwards, you can only collect this data if the user opts in. And with these changes, many services (including Facebook), decided not to use this identifier at all.

IDFV (identifier for vendors)

The IDFV value is unique across all iOS apps from the same vendor on a specific device (an app developer account, for example).

You can’t use this to correlate data from different app vendors (so games from different studios or developers). For example, you can’t use it for install attribution, as you would need to track an identifier from the specific game showing the ad to the advertised game being installed. It’s a bit complicated. But in this case, too many vendors are involved, so the IDFV wouldn’t work here.

But the IDFV lets you collect and correlate data across your own portfolio of games (if they’re published from the same company account). And it works fine for analytics purposes for that specific app, too. You can always get access to the IDFV value without asking for consent.

Here’s some info from Apple’s guidelines:

“The ID for Vendors (IDFV), may be used for analytics across apps from the same content provider. The IDFV may not be combined with other data to track a user across apps and websites owned by other companies unless you have been granted permission to track by the user.”

Random identifiers

Some services use a random string as the user ID created in the app when launched for the first time. You shouldn’t compare this to creating a fingerprint, as Apple won’t let you do this.

It’s simply a randomized string (often in a GUID format). If the app user were to reinstall, then an identifier will be created again and they would be seen as a new user in terms of metrics. It cannot be correlated across apps on the same device.

For GameAnalytics, we’ll use a random string user_id as a backup in certain cases, or on specific platforms where it’s used exclusively.

A lot of services still rely on IDFA

So as you know, with iOS 14.5+, all games need to ask for consent to get the IDFA. A lot of services are still using the IDFA. Adjust, for example, shared their documentation on how to increase the opt-in rate for IDFA, to try and track more users.

So these services still use IDFA data to predict the non-IDFA users’ behavior, specifically to model user behavior. For example, if 40% of users behave in a certain way, then it’s likely that the other 60% have similar patterns.

So the higher the opt-in rate, the bigger the sample size, and the more accurate their models.

We’ve already moved to use the IDFV exclusively for the user ID. Alongside this, we now only attempt to call the IDFA value if the user has given consent. We only use the IDFA when processing or matching attribution callbacks from other services (like Adjust). Or to share the data (for a specific game studio) via our Data Services.

Introducing ATT (App Tracking Transparency)

To know how many of your users opted-in, we need to review how Apple introduced ATT (App Tracking Transparency).

Apple released the ATT framework in iOS 14.0, but they waited until iOS 14.5 before you needed to ask for consent. This is important, as the data between 14.0 and 14.5 can be misleading.

In short, the ATT framework can always report the current AuthorizationStatus. There’s more on this here. But to give you an idea of what this means, a device can report four different AuthorizationStatus values:

Back to the opt-in rate details

That was a lot of info. Well done for getting this far! In the following table, you can read more specific details on how we queried the data to derive the opt-in rate.

The results

Worldwide consent status distribution

The opt-in rate was 43% worldwide.

U.S. consent status distribution

Opt-in rate of around 36% in the U.S.

Final thoughts

So there we have it. Our numbers are much higher compared to, say, what Flurry is reporting. And there are a few different reasons why.

• We calculate differently. So how we calculate the results may differ slightly (what users or apps we included) from what Flurry used.
• GameAnalytics is purely focused on games. And a lot of these games are monetizing heavily via ads. They depend on efficient install attribution. And a lot of them use Adjust (who have been actively encouraging app developers to ask for consent).
• We see a higher restricted status in our data.

Consent status in GameAnalytics

You can get your hands on these numbers as well.

In GameAnalytics, tracking and visualizing your player’s consent status is easy. Simply install the latest SDK, and the consent status will be tracked automatically.

Read our previous blog post for more details.

Move aside 2020. The new year is here, and boy do we have some big plans for all you game developers out there. To catch you up to speed with what’s new, we’ve listed all of the key updates we released last year, and what you can expect to see in our tool over the next few months.

But before we dig into the good stuff, we want to say a massive thank you to all of our users and supporters. We had a tremendous amount of growth last year, with nearly 40% more developers signing up to our core analytics tool. That meant we had up to 164 million daily active players (DAU) across 50 thousand+ active games in 2020. It’s safe to say you guys have been pretty busy!

So, thanks for sticking with us. We’ll do our best this year to continue improving our platform and products, so that you can do what you do best: keep making awesome games.

To get this show started, here are the key areas we’re going to cover:

• • Ad revenue data
  • DataSuite
  • GameOps
  • Custom events retention
  • Organization Overview
  • New interface

Boost your monetization with Ad revenue data

What we did last year:

• We introduced Ad revenue data into our tool. Which means you can now see impression-level revenue data from various ad network providers, all in one central place.
• And we released Ad events. Which you can use to track your ad activity. What’s more, you can keep an eye on both, Ad events and Ad revenue data, in our Ads Dashboard.
• We also added Ad metrics to our DataSuite. One of our new product lines (which we’ll talk about later in this article):
• You can now query Ad revenue data across your entire portfolio with our Metrics API.
• And you can connect both ad and impression event data with your own internal tools, using our Player Warehouse (our out-of-the-box data warehouse).

We’ll have even more Ad Network providers this year

When we released Ad revenue data last year, we mainly worked with MoPub. But now, we’re integrated with both Fyber and ironSource (keep in mind that this is a fairly recent update, so you might want to download our latest SDK to start collecting data now.) You’ll soon be able to see an updated Ads Dashboard in the tool with data from these providers (watch out for our next release!).

We’re going to add even more providers this year. You can vote on which ones we should prioritize next here.

Bring your data in-house with our DataSuite

ICYMI, we launched a whole new product line: DataSuite. It’s a new way for you to bring your data in-house to help drive your games’ success. This includes:

• Metrics API: with which you can programmatically fetch all key metrics (aggregated by time and dimension) across all of your games.
• Player Warehouse: which’ll give you access to your data with player level granularity, in a ready to query table format through Google BigQuery.

Both of these will give you more detailed insights about all your players. Read our documentation to get the technical details.

We’re also making it so you can order DataSuite directly from our GameAnalytics platform. So keep your eyes peeled out for this . Or get in touch with us to discuss the best plan for your studio.

Expect to see event-level data this year in Player Warehouse

Our next big idea is to add data at an event level. This can sometimes be a fiddly process, but we hope to have more updates out soon.

Test and optimize your games through GameOps

Our GameOps features (Remote Configs and A/B Testing), were one of the most significant releases of 2020. It was brilliant to see so many of you sign up for early access, taking it for a test run and sharing your thoughts and ideas with us.

With your feedback, we managed to improve our probabilistic modeling, introduced targeted Remote configs, added binary goal metrics, and more.

And we are not done yet.

We recently added goal metrics related to ad activity and impression level revenue data from our ad revenue providers. That’ll help you further optimize your ad monetization strategy to your best advantage. We’re also working on adding support for more goal metrics. You can have a say on what’s important and vote for features.

Premium tiers coming this year

In 2021, you’ll be able to access new premium tiers for GameAnalytics. We’re still figuring out some of the fiddly details, so we’ll let you know what these pricing options are later in the year. Don’t worry, there will always be a free tier for all our users.

We’re changing the retention of Custom events

We’ve been keeping a close eye on our tool’s performance, and evaluating the usage of queries with certain custom events data (which is currently retained for six months). After speaking with a bunch of studios, we found that a lot of this data is not being queried at all. So we’ve made the decision to change the retention for such data to three months, instead of six. This won’t change how you use our tool, but it will significantly improve querying performance across the platform (making things much faster).

In short, here’s what you can expect with this change while querying data in the analytics tool:

Querying for < 3 months:

• No changes in metrics
• No change for filters & split

Querying for > 3 months:

• No change in metrics
• Disabled for:
  • Design event ids
  • Progression event-level names (progression01, progression02, progression03)
  • Resource event item type and item id

We’re working on the new Organization Overview

We’re planning on releasing the new Organization Overview this year, which will give you a unified view of key metrics across your organization/portfolio games.

We’re still working on this update at the moment. But with it, you’ll be able to do things like:

• See how the key metrics of your games looked like in the past week.
• Compare the performance with the last week/month.
• Or even look into those numbers for only iOS games in a particular country.

If you would like to get early access to the feature (and give us your valuable feedback), please email our product team at product@gameanalytics.com

A new interface is coming to GameAnalytics

Alongside releasing all these exciting new functionalities, we’ve also been working on giving our platform a whole new outfit. As we migrate our features to use newer (and better) frontend technology, we cannot wait for you to experience our new and enhanced tool. If you’re an avid user, then you might have caught a glimpse of the new design with our GA Labs features, Remote Configs and A/B Testing.

The next set of UI updates are on the Realtime page and Custom Dashboards. Later this year, the entire platform will be updated with the new interface (with an option to still access the current tool interface if you’d like). Feel free to email us at product@gameanalytics.com if you would like to share your thoughts on these new designs.

Never miss an update

Those are all the updates (for now). If you follow our blog, then you’ll know that we try to send out monthly updates to keep you all in the loop with what’s new. And if you haven’t done so already, feel free to subscribe to our newsletter to never miss one (form below ).

Again, we really want to give a massive shout out to all of our users. You guys have been amazing. So if there’s anything you think we should work on next, let us know here.