· 7 min read
A Look Back at 2020, and What’s Coming to GameAnalytics in 2021
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:
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.