What are the professionals talking about? Based on a round table on analytics of game projects within the framework of White Nights Moscow

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    In October, the devtodev mobile and web analytics service team visited White Nights 2016, the coolest international conference in Russia with the participation of world leaders in the gaming industry. The conference was held in Moscow and brought together more than 3,000 industry professionals, including giants such as Google, Facebook, Unity, Amazon, Rovio and VKontakte.

    I was fortunate enough to take part in a round table on game analytics together with experts from Pixonic, Game Insight, OrcWork, Nevosoft and AppLovin - this event was the culmination of the first day of the conference.

    For those interested, we collected answers to some questions that were addressed to all participants of the round table, and designed them in Q&A format. Special thanks to Ruslan Gerasim and Julia Lebedeva (Nevosoft) for their help in preparing the material.

    Q: How much does it take for a person involved in game analytics to know math, be able to take the integral, solve examples?

    A: An analyst, or at least a person with the role of analyst, should be highlighted in the company. He must have knowledge in the field of statistical mathematics at least. But more importantly, he must have deep analytical skills. Because the study of any analytics is very similar to the work of a detective. Quite often there are situations when it is necessary to evaluate why users act in this way, and not as the game designer expects, according to plentiful but few data.

    That is, we need not mathematics, but the ability to use it. You can also compare the work of the analyst with the work of Dr. House. When you have a bunch of disparate symptoms, and you need to be diagnosed with “what's wrong with your game, what steps you need to take to change this.”

    All people who are at least somehow connected with analytics, who make decisions based on analytics, must understand at least the concept. Those. they may not know how to build a specific mathematical model, how to take the logarithm, for example, but understanding the basics of statistics and analytics is necessary for making a decision.

    Q: What mobile analytics systems do you use? Own or strangers? One or several?

    A: Participants mentioned systems such as devtodev, Amplitude, AppsFlyer. At Pixonic, this happened historically: for six years, analysts have been writing their own system, but Philipp Gladkov recommended using new solutions to new companies. In general, using several analytics systems at the same time is an absolutely correct approach, giving more valid data.

    Q: Is it possible to determine by the behavior of the user his gender, age, without collecting his personal data?

    A: You can use the Insights service from Facebook, see the audience of any game, any interests and find out up to what cars this audience drives.

    You can also see competitors, analyze their groups on social networks, and draw a portrait of a player. And for your game, you can also try to create a portrait of a person who will play what you do. This, by the way, is a good case when you look at the players on the social network who play your game. Sometimes a portrait looms very well. After going through at least fifty portraits, you will form a fairly clear idea of ​​who this player is.

    Q: Are there any other correct and important KPIs for f2p games besides LTV and advertising prices?

    A: LTV and the price of advertising is the tip of the iceberg. They determine whether it is a Titanic, whether it crashes, crashes, travels, travels? If LTV> CPI, then all is well.

    If you continue to lay out metrics, detail the question, then retention, ARPU, ARPPU and so on will appear there.

    The question is - why do we need to know the metrics? If you publish a game, then you need to know LTV, CPI - this is enough. If you evaluate deeper - we take retention, ARPU. If you need to analyze a particular feature specifically, deeper metrics are used there, up to “how many fights are done in one session”.

    Q: Is the behavior of users in different countries very different? Can the experience of one country be transferred to another in terms of large-scale changes in the game?

    A: Differ greatly. For example, users in Japan can look at the game twice and already make an internal purchase, but in Russia this is unlikely. Therefore, using data from two completely different countries and taking some results from them is very dangerous.

    Another interesting case is related to the launch of the Mushroom Wars game in Korea. For us, this game seems difficult, and Korean players are very fond of overpriced complexity. They passed the levels with a bang! Moreover, even those levels with which the developer himself is experiencing difficulties were too easy for Koreans. And I had to manually tweak the complexity of the game for them.

    And, for example, when Game Insight launched the Guns of Boom game in Turkey, they noticed that online sagged very much in early September, when schoolchildren ran out of holidays. There were also noticeable subsidence during prayer.

    During a soft launch it is better to focus on those countries that are similar to those of interest to you: for the United States, this is Canada, for Japan, Korea and so on. But it is impossible to interfere with all countries in one pile.

    Video recording of the round table can be seen here .

    On my own, I note that communication with industry experts facilitates the exchange of knowledge and experience, but conferences are still not so frequent, and participating in them, you still won’t get structured knowledge, so we created an open course ”Marketing and product analytics of games ”and invited experts from Game Insight, Pixonic, AlternativaPlatform (Tanki Online) and Nevosoft. If you are interested in analytics of game projects, and strive to improve your skills, join

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