Category
Tool & Product
#Tool & Product
How GameAnalytics is Getting Ready for the iOS 14.5 Release
With the upcoming iOS 14.5 release, Apple will enforce its App Tracking Transparency (ATT) framework related to IDFA changes. This means publishers and developers will now need to display a prompt (‘enable ad tracking’) to their mobile users asking for their permission to collect their device identifier, IDFA (Identifier for Advertisers). Until now, this was an ‘opt-out’ model for users – meaning unless the player actively disabled sharing their IDFA in their device settings, then developers could still track this. You need to update your SDK Last year we updated our SDKs, so make sure yours are up to date too. You can do that here. You’ll find more information about this below. But for now, keep reading to learn how we’re preparing for these upcoming changes and any other next steps you need to take. Let’s get to it!...
#Tool & Product
Trending Games and Global Hits has arrived to Benchmarks+
Product update: Benchmarks+ is now a part of GameIntel (25th May 2021) We’ve launched GameIntel, a new and improved mobile intelligence offering which from today will be the new home for Benchmarks+. There’s a ton of new features, functions, and capabilities you can dig into here. You can find all of the details about it here. And in case you missed it, we now have more hyper-casual sub genres in our tool, too. ************************************************** Update from 10th march 2021: Our data chefs have been hot in the Kitchen, and the next order is up. This week, we’ve launched two new main courses; our Trending Games and Global Hits dashboards. These new features will help you see which games have been climbing and falling in the charts, and which ranking position the top hit games have across each key country. Let’s...
#Tool & Product
Data Export is going away
Update: DataSuite features are now available in a single, affordable, bundle. Find out how to save on your data processing costs for games here. While we work hard to add more and more features to GameAnalytics, we occasionally have to say goodbye to a feature. Today we’re announcing the well-deserved retirement of our Data Export. If you currently use our Data Export, then please read on. There are some key changes you need to be aware of, and some next steps you may need to take. Here are the details. We’re retiring our Data Export We’re suspending access to the Data Export on May 31st, 2021, a little under three months from now. We’re replacing it with a series of new services we’ve been developing in collaboration with studios and publishers in our community. The Player Warehouse is an instant...
#Tool & Product
Game Explorer has landed in Benchmarks+
Product update: Benchmarks+ is now a part of GameIntel (25th May 2021) We’ve launched GameIntel, a new and improved mobile intelligence offering which from today will be the new home for Benchmarks+. There’s a ton of new features, functions, and capabilities you can dig into here. You can find all of the details about it here. ************************************************** Update from 23rd Feb 2021: Strap on your hiking boots and equip your telescope, we’re here with yet another big update to Benchmarks+. Say hello to Game Explorer, where you can now search for specific games across a range of criteria. Including 100k+ sub-genres to make your market research more precise and relevant. You can now easily discover games in specific genres or sub-genres that reached a certain position in the charts, or even specific titles released by a particular publisher. Want to...
#Tool & Product
How our Free and Premium Services are Evolving in 2021
2020 has been our most productive year yet. If you’ve been with us for a while, then you’ve probably noticed the amount of updates and releases we’ve done over the last 12 months. With so many products and services now under our belt (and more to come), we wanted to take a moment and share in more detail our vision for the future with you, specifically our products and pricing models. So that you can have a clear picture of exactly where we’re heading as a company. Hopefully, this should help you build tools and services around our technology stack with the peace of mind that they will be in place and perform well for years to come. We’ll go over the priorities not only from a product perspective, but also for our team and business. If you’re interested in...
#Tool & Product
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...
#Tool & Product
Top Charts Data Now Available in Benchmarks+
Product update: Benchmarks+ is now a part of GameIntel (25th May 2021) We’ve launched GameIntel, a new and improved mobile intelligence offering which from today will be the new home for Benchmarks+. There’s a ton of new features, functions, and capabilities you can dig into here. You can find all of the details about it here. ************************************************** Update from 27th Jan 2021: We’ve got some pretty nifty updates to help boost your market research in 2021. Our first Benchmarks+ bundle for this year (one of many) is the new beta version of our Top Charts dashboard, where you can now access detailed rankings for the top 500 free and paid games on iOS. We’ve had a ton of requests from indie developers and large studios wanting more detailed insights about the broader market, including specific titles in the charts. And...
#Tool & Product
Ad Metrics in A/B Testing & Metrics API and Custom Control Group
Despite the challenges that 2020 brought, the gaming industry has thrived. And if you’ve been following our many updates throughout the year, you’ll know that we’ve been keeping ourselves pretty busy. We released a ton of new features, like A/B Testing and Ads Dashboard. We launched our new product line, DataSuite. And we made a bunch of updates to Benchmarks+, our mobile intelligence platform (the biggest update is there are now 50+ sub-genres, ICYMI). All to give you the best tools to analyze and grow your games. And there’s so much more to come. In 2021, we’re continuing to develop our tools and services, and we couldn’t be more excited. So, keep your eyes peeled for our next blog post, where we’ll discuss what we’ve planned for you this year. But for now, let’s go ahead and look at the latest improvements...
#Tool & Product
More Hyper-Casual Sub-Genres Have Landed to Benchmarks+
Product update: Benchmarks+ is now a part of GameIntel (25th May 2021) We’ve launched GameIntel, a new and improved mobile intelligence offering which from today will be the new home for Benchmarks+. There’s a ton of new features, functions, and capabilities you can dig into here. You can find all of the details about it here. And if you missed it, we now have trending games in our tool. ************************************************** Update from 9th Dec 2020: Clear the runway, as we’ve just rolled out an exciting new bundle of sub-genres to Benchmarks+. In our last update, we added new filtering options and more shooter genres. But for this one, the hyper-casual (HC) genre takes the stage with seven new mechanic-focused options now available. Read on to find out just what they are. Hyper-casual games are simple and often rely on just...
#Tool & Product
New Shooter Genres & S/E Asia Filter in Benchmarks+
If you’ve been keeping up with the latest Benchmarks+ buzz, then you’ll know that we recently added a huge batch of sub-genres into our tool just a few weeks ago. Now, following popular demand, we’re pleased to announce that we’ve included more shooter genres to this growing roster: ‘snipers’ and ‘tactical shooters’ (and we’re not stopping there). More details on this below 👇 A few of our users also asked for insights on Southeast Asia, which we’ve slipped in with this release, too. (The data is available from the beginning of the month, for the App Store genres only.) Again more details below. But if you’re a paying user, you can dive straight in and check the data here: This is just the start of many changes to come (with a big update coming soon). But for now, here are...
#Case study
How the devs behind Crossy Road and Shooty Skies became mobile masters
Never spend too long creating a game “For Crossy Road, we made it in 12 weeks, but we actually set out to make it in six,” says Sum. “That all meant that, if it didn’t go well, we hadn’t wasted all that much time. You just don’t know what’s going to happen on mobile. If you take six months to make a game, everything might have changed by the time it comes out.” Finding a team that gels “Every member of the team has their own skills that complement each other,” Sum is keen to note. “Matt Ditton handles a lot of the business side, but he’s a technical programmer too. Whereas Ben is really technically awesome and led the development of Shooty Skies.” Even though they now have a bigger team, Sum said his goal was to create “something...
#Tool & Product
Over 35 Sub-Genres Now in Benchmarks+
You asked, we listened. We’ve introduced sub-genres to our mobile market intelligence platform, Benchmarks+. These sub-genres offer more granular filtering options, for more specific gaming insights. So far, this has been one of the most requested features for Benchmarks+ so we’re thrilled it’s now live. We hope this helps to supercharge your game research and analysis. Why did we introduce sub-genres? The standard gaming categories on the App Store are broad and often misleading, especially when you consider the growing diversity of the mobile gaming market. Over the past couple of years, we’ve had hundreds of game developers reaching out to us, asking for more detailed insights about their particular genre niche. Simply said, the standard App Store genres are just too vague to be helpful for providing this level of detail. That’s why we’ve released our own taxonomy. So...
#Data & Analytics
2020 in Metrics: Understanding Casual and Hypercasual Gaming Markets
2020’s been a year like no other. Casual and hypercasual gaming has fared better than most industries – overall playtime has been consistently up by around 15% on previous years. But when all of our usual social norms have been upended by global lockdowns, how do we make sense of the player metrics we rely on? I recently hosted a webinar on this topic. Using Benchmarks+ from GameAnalytics, I pulled some of the most telling player data from the first eight months of 2020. I dived into the key metrics like retention, session lengths, and playtime. And I did a deep dive specifically on hypercasual – comparing the different app stores and regions. Here’s a summary of the trends I found that will be most useful for developers to understand. The differences between iOS and Android It’s important not to...