Editor’s note: This article was written by Nandi Gurprasad, head of Strategic Partnerships at Ogury. As GDPR and Privacy is usually a tricky topic, we’ve asked them to dive into one of their recommended solutions: Ogury Choice Manager.  GDPR and data-privacy isn’t exactly new. Unless you’re starting up a new business or company, you’ve most likely heard these terms and have a rough idea of what it’s about. But what a lot of people may not know is that GDPR isn’t a one time thing. The advice from Data Privacy Authorities (DPAs) is evolving, constantly. And a lot of smaller companies tend to set up their policy once and don’t think about it ever again. When in reality, compliance is an ever-evolving process that needs your attention. To give you an example, advice from the Data Protection Authorities is updating...

As we released A/B testing last month, we thought we’d share a few tips, tricks and ideas on how to make the most of your experiments. So put on your lab coat, fire up the flux capacitor and let’s get to sciencing. If you’re new to A/B testing, it’s a pretty simple concept. Send three variations of your game out into the wild: A, B and a control group. One group of your users sees A, another sees B and the last sees no change at all (your control group). You pit them against each other and see which performs better. It’s survival of the fittest in action. But when should you start your A/B tests? And what exactly should you be testing? Your soft launch is the Goldilocks zone Before you can start testing, you need players. And the...

Editors note: This article was written by Vivian Dong, Senior Publishing Manager at JoyPac. This is based on their most recent webinar, which you can watch here. Testing is the most important part in the whole process of hyper-casual game development. When you have an exciting new game idea, you need to quickly answer the most fundamental questions: Will your idea be appealing enough to draw in players? When they download and play it, will they keep playing it? Will it make money? To answer these questions, you’ll need to start testing as early as possible. We recently hosted a webinar on early testing, along with Gabriel Stürmer, CEO at Clap Clap Games, and Kristina Truvaleva of Business Development & Global Partnerships at ZeptoLab. Here are ten lessons we took away from the webinar. Lesson 1: Test your idea’s marketability...

Editors note: This blog was written by hyper-casual specialists, JoyPac. JoyPac specializes in publishing hit hyper-casual games across the globe, and today they have agreed to share their insights into testing and developing hyper-casual games.  On Wednesday, May 13th, we’ll be hosting a JoyPac webinar all about making successful hyper-casual games using rapid testing and development. This blog is your preview for the topics we’ll be discussing and some of the advice we’ll be giving. The hyper-casual mobile genre is evolving Hyper-casual mobile games use very simple gameplay and a business model based on in-game advertising. The genre emerged as a sort of backlash or nostalgic revival a couple of years ago. But even though it’s a fairly new genre, it’s already starting to shift. This evolution seems to be branching off into two sub-genres: Ultra-casual games—pushing the simplicity of...

As millions of people work from home or are on furlough, they’ve needed something to pass the time: streaming TV shows, learning instruments and, of course, playing games. At least, that’s the assumption. We dug into our data to find that playtime has soared and people are spending more, but each genre is affected differently. We’ve analyzed our data in two ways 1. Global network analysis Our first approach was to look at the overall data across our network. Over 75,000 developers use GameAnalytics to analyze how gamers are playing. That’s about 40,000 active mobile games, all in all, including 40 of the top 100 most downloaded games on the app stores. By combining all this data, we can see how more than a third of the world’s mobile players are behaving. Specifically, we analyzed playtime and how much people...

A couple of months ago, we had the pleasure of attending Google’s GameCamp, which was filled to the brim with gamedev content delivered from the best and brightest in mobile gaming. While there, Elif Büyükcan, the Business Intelligence Director at Rovio Entertainment, shared with us how they’ve been using rewarded ads in their games. We’re here to report on their story, and what you can learn from them. Elif’s main message was this:  “Getting your monetization model right is incredibly important. It takes a lot of time, thought and testing. You need to be constantly measuring, learning and adapting. This makes machine learning (ML) and artificial intelligence (AI) your best friends.” And today, we’ll go through everything we learned from their talk (specifically about machine learning), including: The process Rovio use to hone their monetization models, a case study of...

During this year, our tech teams have been working hard on updating our tool to bring some significant improvements to GameAnalytics, such as A/B Testing and Benchmarks+. As our platform increases in popularity and usage (we now have over 70,000 developers using our tool), a key focus of ours continues to be improving the performance for all of our users. To do this, we’ll be making some changes to our data retention policy, querying capabilities, and event ingestion rules (for legacy SDKs), in mid-April 2020. Here’s an overview of what we’re changing and how this affects you. Data retention policy One of the most important changes we’ve made is our data retention policy. As always, you can query Historical Data for the last 13 months across all of our features (except for exporting your data, you can do this for...

Editor’s Note: This article was originally published by Vitor Margato, Senior Data Science Manager at Wildlife Studios. You can read the original version here. Data science has been a hot topic for the past few years, but it’s often hard to understand what data scientists actually do in real companies. They seem to be behind whatever is going on when your favorite streaming app recommends you new songs, or when a ride-hailing app assigns you a driver, but what exactly is their role? In this post, I don’t try to describe how data scientists can help companies in general — I’ll focus on mobile gaming companies, because that’s where I have firsthand experience. Hopefully, some concrete examples will help you form a clearer picture of data science. But first, let me just take a step back to explain why I think those companies absolutely deserve...

The purpose of this post is to share what I would say to myself if I was able to travel back in time to my first day as a product manager starting out in the industry. It reflects what I think is one of the most under-appreciated parts of the work: running effective soft launches. Too many games are ‘dying’ in soft launch. Too many teams don’t fully appreciate how markedly different a soft launch is from ‘regular’ live operations. This is something I personally wish I understood much better at the start of my career. It’s also something I find myself talking about a lot in my current role at Zeptolab Publishing, where I regularly meet with studios around the world.  So if I had a few minutes to prepare my ‘past’ self for the challenge of this industry?...

Analysis from Benchmarks+ takes into account several different performance quantiles, including the “superstars” (top 5%, 10%, 15%), and the “standard” quantiles (top 25%, median, bottom 25%). We’ve segmented the analysis in this way to give a broad signal of typical performance bands seen across the industry. Tracking these quantiles also sheds light on historical trends per “band” to give a better sense of how the industry has evolved. Using Benchmarks+, we have analyzed how the main gaming categories and genres have performed for daily ARPPU (Average Revenue Per Paying User), looking at the full year of 2019, and all the way back to 2016. For this analysis, our key focus is the top 5% performance for this metric, which is a good indication of how much “whales” spend in popular titles on any given day. All revenue is IAP based...

3,100 apps appeared on the main page of the App Store in 2019. And 1,465 of them (which is almost 50%) were gaming apps. To help mobile game developers get a better understanding of which gaming apps Apple’s editors gave preference to in 2019, the team at AppFollow has put together an analysis – with the help of their App Store Featured Tool. Let’s get to it. We have analyzed all 1,465 gaming apps which appeared on the App Store main page across the globe between January and December 2019. We have gone over the main App Store tabs, including: App of the Day, Game of the Day, Stories, and Collections.  Stats at a glance: 47% of all apps featured in the Today’s tab are games. Games’ share in the Today’s Collections is 39%, and 48% in Stories.  Action, Adventure,...

Here at GameAnalytics, we receive, store and process game events from 1.2 billion monthly players in nearly 90,000 games. These events all pass through a system we call the data collection API, which forwards the events to other internal systems so that we eventually end up with statistics and graphs on a dashboard, displaying user activity, game revenue, and more. The data collection API is fairly simple in principle: games send events to us as JSON objects through HTTP POST requests, and we send a short response and take the event from there. Clients either use one of our SDKs or invoke our REST API directly. We get approximately five billion requests per day, each typically containing two or three events for a total of a few kilobytes. The response is a simple HTTP 200 “OK” response with a small...