It is a very challenging job to develop a game. Once you develop it, you obviously want an insight into how well your game is doing among the players.
For this purpose, it is important to know about game analytics metrics. Let’s start with KPIs.
Key Performance Indicators
These are game analytics metrics which are used to analyze your game’s performance. They will give the following information:
- Track your progress in conquering your key goals.
- They act as a performance indicator towards the success of your game.
- You can use the relevant information as an important feedback for your success.
Before reading further, you should know the following interesting fact. Based on the data collected from analyzation of about 400 games, following points are deduced:
- It is possible to measure the success of a game before its release.
- Your first few game customers, can either make or break your game (from their feedback).
Popular Analytics
There are lots of analytics. It is an evergreen field with constant innovation. We’ll discuss the most important game analytics metrics:
Daily Active Users (DAU)
You get information about customers who daily play your game. By playing, we mean they at least participate in one game session.
Take this example as a food for thought. Suppose there are 3 games. Game 1 has 10,000 DAUs with monetization value while game 2 has 1,000,000 DAUs with no monetization. Game 3 has 100 DAUs with much better retention time.
If you closely analyze, you will see that DAU is a snapshot of time with important context information.
Session
Every time you open the game, this counts as a session. Obviously, there are metrics which give information about sessions but additionally, there are also metrics which state the average number of sessions per DAU.
Retention
This means the time it takes between participating in two sessions. Retention rate is very important as this determines how much time on average, a person is giving to a particular game.
This also determines the amount of interest of a player inside a game.
Conversion Rate
Everyone loves to make money, yes? This game analyzing metric will focus on the relationship of your users with your game.
Out of total users, conversion rate gives information about the percentage of unique users which have made in-game purchases.
Through the specified metric, you can also measure the conversion rate of ads.
Virtual Currency
Some games allow the use of virtual currency through which a user can purchase additional features inside a game.
Relating to virtual currency in game analytic metrics, three terminologies are important.
Source – This includes the ways through which virtual currency can be generated.
Sink – This includes the ways through which virtual currency is spent.
Flow – If we combine source and sink, we get flow. By flow, we get the information about total numbers of users, which have precisely earned specific amount and have spent a particular amount to buy certain game features.
