Insights and tips about the games industry

Editor’s Note: After our previous interview with FRVR back in 2017, we want to catch back up with founder Chris Benjaminsen to see how the company has grown, what changes have applied to the structure of his company, and what his plans were for FRVR in 2018 and beyond.  So, what have you been up to since we last spoke to you? [Laughs] That’s a big question – quite a lot! The company is very different from where it was last time – my memory is not perfect, and I can’t pinpoint where we were then. However, to give you an update, we are nine people now. The 9th person just joined the company, we do around 2 million DAU daily, and about 30 million monthly, which I think is not too far off from where we were last time....

Editor’s Note: This is the second in a series of articles looking at casual and mid-core games. The first, which looks at Angry Birds 2 and features a Q&A from developers Rovio can be found here.  The first part of this analytical series focused on Rovio Entertainment and how they successfully evolved and matured their multi-million dollar Angry Birds franchise. In the second part of this article series, we put a spotlight on top 10 grossing casual games developer Playrix, who are trying hard to innovate and experiment with casual games, challenging the established norms of this genre, and finding profound success! Playrix is known for a string of successful top 10 grossing hits like Homescapes, Gardenscape and Fishdom in the highly competitive Match 3 genre, which is often dominated by the likes of King, Jam City & Peak Games. Source: Think Gaming (20/01/2018) “But unlike its peers, Playrix is not relying solely on eye candy graphics,...

Microtransactions (or MTXs for short) are small purchases players make to unlock further gameplay, gain extra lives, change a character’s appearance, or speed up the gaming process in simulation games like The Tribez. The microtransaction business model has a strong right to exist on mobile; in a world where a Match-3 game costs up to $200,000 to develop and promote, even when they are often distributed for free, game studios are bound to find ways to make money from their hard work somehow. At the moment, over 90% of all mobile games use the freemium model; the apps are free to play (F2P) and incorporate various in-app purchases (IAPs). Although only 1.9% of players actually spend money on in-game content, they bring up to 90% of the total mobile game market revenue, which hit $46.1 billion in 2017. Last year...

Travel back in time and see what KPIs the top genres were hitting, in this 2017 industry overview.

Editor’s note: Please be aware that we have now deprecated this SDK and this engine/environment is no longer supported. If you have any questions about this change, please contact our support team. We’re pleased to announce that GameAnalytics has now been set up to work with NativeScript, making it as easy as possible for you to help create iOS and Android apps with technology you may already know. You can now integrate NativeScript with our free tool, and get data about your player’s behaviour. It only takes a few steps to integrate, and you can download the NativeScript SDK from the download and installation page. About NativeScript NativeScript is a way to build and create cross platform apps for iOS and Android without web views. By using Angular, JavaScript, or TypeScript in your preferred editors, you can get truly native UI and...

At one stage in your career you’ve begun to care about data. You decide that you want to know what your players are doing, so you start tracking gameplay events. You track everything. With a flurry of code your app is sending tracking events for every card combination, move, spell effect and battle stat! Pat yourself on the back, you have created terabytes of garbage. “Data is not information, information is not knowledge, knowledge is not understanding, understanding is not wisdom.” Clifford Stoll, Physicist Data collected without reason is just data. To be able to make informed decisions you need context, and only by understanding your player’s intentions will you start to be informed. There are a lot of similarities between mobile games and therefore there are some very standard metrics you might look at. We’ve created a simple tracking plan that you...

There’s an infamous quote that’s been ascribed to a variety of artists and creative minds over the years, including Pablo Picasso, but Steve Jobs may have been the most famous to use it when, while discussing the Macintosh, he said that “great artists steal”. However, the phrase applies to much more than just the iconic machines; it can also be used when discussing painting, composing, writing, and – naturally – creating amazing games. That’s probably obvious when it comes to the creative side of developing a game, but being able to recognize greatness, and not necessarily stealing – but adapting it for your own purposes – is valuable when it comes to the analytics side. Learning From The Greatest It should hardly be surprising that the best games tend to have great analytics – and smart analytical minds behind them...

This article was co-Authored with Michael Katkoff and originally published by Om Tandon here. Casual Games Casual games is a relatively new genre that was arguably kicked off by PopCap when Bejeweled launched on browsers in 2001. The true growth of the genre was enabled by Facebook and driven by Zynga’s FarmVille and other Ville-style games. The third and largely ongoing growth started in 2012, when King took its popular Facebook game Candy Crush Saga to mobile. Today, when we talk about casual games, we tend to mean games with relatively simple gameplay, substantial active user base and somewhat limited monetization potential compared to more advanced games. In short, casual games are generally targeted at people who may not traditionally consider themselves as gamers. Casual games like Angry Birds, Candy Crush Saga, and Temple Run are typically distinguished by simple rules, reduced demand...

Christmas trees, decorations, presents, food, holidays, time off, drinks, family, friends. Stop. Start again. The holiday season is at the door and all the magic (and stress) captures everyone for 2 weeks. It’s also a time when you can find an opportunity to do things that you do much less the rest of the year; playing games is one! 2017 has been a great year for GameAnalytics, team growth, product improvements, and many new amazing games that have used our tool and reached some record numbers. The list is pretty long, and it wasn’t an easy choice, but here’s a list of our top 10 favourite games that we’ve enjoyed playing over the past year (and even longer for some!). I hope it helps with the Xmas dinner hangover… 10. Idle Miner Tycoon Developed by Fluffy Fairy Games OK. Christmas...

It’s pretty easy to figure out how much a given player has spent on your game during the course of a set period of time. However, it’s much more complicated to figure out that player’s actual value to your community (and your bottom line). After all, you had to spend a certain amount to get that player to your game to begin with – marketing and promotions aren’t free! That’s where calculating player lifetime value or LTV comes in. The most basic definition of LTV is that player lifetime value equals the amount of revenue earned from an individual player throughout their lifetime – or the profit they will generate for you from their first moment playing your game until the last. We’ve talked about calculating player lifetime value before, and the standard simple equation holds true – the return...

The games market is absolutely booming and will top $108 billion this year, growing at a CAGR of 19%. Mobile games remain its most lucrative segment and now account for 42% (or $46.1 billion) of the total revenue generated by app publishers. Want to grab a share of the pie? How to create an indie game: step-by-step guide to success Market research It all starts with an idea – and your idea has to be validated. Here’s what you should do: Study the App Store and Google Play download/top grossing game charts to see what game genres tend to perform better in terms of revenue and user engagement. As of October, 2017, the upper regions of the US top-performing iOS app charts are occupied by popular Match 3 games like Candy Crush, Puzzledom and Homescapes, the omnipresent Minecraft and occasional...

Starting a brand new indie game development studio is not an easy task. The main reason for this is the fact that finding the right people who will work with you can prove to be quite difficult. Not everyone is cut out to work in such an environment and put themselves on the line each day while not having a guaranteed income. An indie game studio is a huge mixture of business and passion and this means that you need to find people who are similar with each other to begin with. Compared to big corporate studios, the people in indie gaming have a lot of individuality and they all look to create unique games that will reach people across the world and leave a huge impact on them. In order to be successful in this world, you need to...