What say the professionals? On the motives of round table of the analysis of the game projects in the framework of the White Nights Moscow

In October a team of service analysts mobile and web applications devtodev visited the White Nights 2016 — cool international conferences in Russia with participation of world leaders of the gaming industry. The conference took place in Moscow and brought together more than 3,000 industry professionals, including such giants as Google, Facebook, Unity, Amazon, Rovio and VKontakte.

I was lucky enough to participate in a round table on Analytics games along 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 have compiled the answers to some questions addressed to all participants of the round table, and arranged them in the format of Q&A. special thanks to Ruslan Gerasim and Yulia Lebedeva (Nevosoft) for help in preparing the material.

Q: How should the person who deals with gaming Analytics to know math to be able to take the integral to solve the examples?

A: the company must be dedicated analyst, or at least a person with a role analyst. He should have knowledge in statistical mathematics at least. But more importantly, he must possess deep analytical skills. Because the study of any intelligence very similar to detective work. Quite often there are situations when you have a rich, but limited data to assess why users come here, not as the designer expects.

That is, we need not mathematics, and the ability to use it. You can also compare the analyst with the job of Dr house. When you have a bunch of disparate symptoms, and you need to diagnose “what's wrong with your game, what steps you need to take in order to change it.”

All the people who has anything to do with Analytics that make decisions based on the Analytics, should understand at least the concept. Ie they may not know how to build a specific mathematical model, how to take the logarithm of, for example, but understanding the basics of statistics, Analytics — is necessary for decision-making.

Q: What mobile Analytics you use? Your or someone else's? One or several?

A: Participants referred to the system as devtodev, Amplitude, AppsFlyer. In Pixonic historically: six years writing my own Analytics system, however, the new companies Philipp Gladkov recommended to use ready-made solutions. In General, the use of multiple analytical systems simultaneously — is absolutely the right approach, giving more valid data.

Q: is it Possible to determine the behavior of the user it belongs to sex, to age without collecting personal data?

A: You can use the Insights from Facebook, view the audience of any game, with any interest and learn to the extent to which machines drives this audience.

You can also view competitors, analyze their social media groups, to create a portrait of the player. And for your game you can also try to create a portrait of a man who is going to play in what you do. This, incidentally, is a good case when you look at players in a social network who play your game. Sometimes a very good portrait emerges. 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 in addition to LTV and rates advertising?

A: LTV and the price of advertising is the tip of the iceberg. They determine whether it's the Titanic, the crash does not crash, will not go go? If LTV > CPI, then all is well.

If you continue to lay out the metrics, detailing the issue, there will be retention, ARPU, ARPPU and so on.

The question here is — why should we know the metrics? If you publish a game, you need to know the LTV, CPI — that's enough. If you evaluate deeper — we take retention, ARPU. If you need to analyze specifically any feature — there are deeper metrics, up to “what is the number of fights per session something done.”
Q: Much different user behavior in different countries? Can the experience of one country to migrate to another plan for major changes to the game?

A: Differ greatly. For example, users in Japan can see two times on the game and have to make an in-app purchase, and Russia is unlikely. So use these two completely different countries and to take from them some results is very dangerous.

Another interesting case is associated with the start of the game Mushroom Wars in Korea. For us, this game seems complicated, and Korean players are very fond of high complexity. They flew by the levels on the “hurrah!” moreover, even those levels that the developer is experiencing difficulties, for the Koreans proved to be too easy. And had to manually tweak the difficulty of the game for them.

And, for example, when Game Insight launched the game Guns of Boom in Turkey, it was noticed that online greatly subsided in early September, when pupils over the holidays. Was also a marked drawdown during prayer.

During the soft launch to better focus on those countries that are similar to you are interested in: for the US, Canada, Japan — Korea and so on. But to disturb all countries in one pile is not possible.

Video of the round table can be seen here.

From myself I will note that communication with industry experts facilitates the exchange of knowledge and experience, but conferences are still not so often, and participating in them, you still do not receive structured knowledge, so we create an open course ”Marketing and product analyst games” and invited experts from Game Insight, Pixonic, AlternativaPlatform (Tanki Online) and Nevosoft. If you are interested in intelligence game projects, and strive to improve their skills, join

Article based on information from habrahabr.ru