Making Money From Games You Give Away: Understanding and Serving Your Players through Analytics

Jun 20, 2013

📄 Contents

␡

The Eternal Beta
Don't Listen to What People Say, Look at What They Do
Collecting Data
AB Testing
Statistics: The Analyst's Toolbox
The Art of Interpretation
Gather Data, Test, Analyze

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Free-to-Play: Making Money From Games You Give Away

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The Art of Interpretation

Many foes of F2P bluster that analytics replaces design and leads to heartless and dull games. Those with this mind-set misunderstand the goal of analytics: It is not, and cannot be, a replacement for design. You do not open your analytics package and click File > Export Game.

The purpose of analytics is to give you an understanding of how your players behave; the rest is up to you. You must interpret data and then build the best solutions. Every problem you uncover will have multiple possible answers.

If, for example, retention in your game drops every time you introduce items, you may think that your players dislike new items and stop making them. You could be incorrect. The real cause could be that new items clutter your game’s shop, making it harder for your users to find what they want and therefore annoying and frustrating them. Instead, the best solution would be to change the navigation of the shop, making it a better experience and increasing revenues. But by viewing only the number, you will miss the real reason for the drop in retention.

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