While more and more people are spending more and more hours on games, the gaming industry became a crucial part of the global entertainment world. The game development companies are the champions of interactive entertainment just because they are the best when it comes to stimulating social, creative, and sharing behavior. According to the statistics, the global gaming market will generate over $152 billion in 2019. Surprisingly, console is going to be the fastest-growing field (+13.4% year on year to $47.9 billion in 2019). Mobile segment won’t show a significant growth this year. Mostly because of the changes in regulatory policy in China and absence of new world-popular hits.
At the same time, mobile remains the largest segment in 2019, growing +10.2% year on year to $68.5 billion — 45% of the global gaming market.
PC gaming is the smallest and slowest-growing segment so far, increasing only +4.0% year on year to $35.7 billion. However, nobody doubts PC’s status as the bedrock of innovation – the roots of the most popular genres like “Battle Royale” or MOBA, lead to PC gaming.
In the recent years a lot of companies changed their business model adopting the SaaS (Software as a Service) approach to GaaS (Games as a Service).
Taking into account such trends as Free-to-Play (F2P), producing an exciting game isn’t enough. Handling your players data is also very important.
So how does Melior Games or any other game dev studio implement Analytics in their game development processes?
Launch in game development companies
Let’s figure out what key performance indicators (KPI) you need to track when launching a game?
- Number of installs (how many users installed your game by the date specified);
- Number of sessions (how many times did your players actually play the game since installation);
- Session length (how many hours did the players spend in the game);
- Player retention (did they enter the game over multiple sessions);
- Revenue (what are the profit and monetization, and how much money did the game bring).
In some cases additional KPIs are needed. No worries, just edit this list to according to your data.
Game Development Companies Analytics: Core Metrics
- Game monetization
It is probably the first thing most of the game development companies think before launching. Well, this is a vital factor strictly related to the revenue growth. Moreover, creating a game that will engage millions of players demands a lot of time and financial investments. In a nutshell, there are 3 main models of videogames subscription:
- pay-to-play
- free-to-play
- freemium.
And here big data analytics tools are the ones that help you be certain your games are profitable.
- Game design
featuring realistic graphics, amazing physics, augmented reality/virtual reality, and application of AI are revolutionizing the gaming industry right now. What technology should be used in a certain game and what should be passed to the game development outsourcing is another thing to consider when processing the data received from the Analytics tools.
- Marketing
shouldn’t be undervalued anyway if you don’t want to waste money on inappropriate, annoying and, what is more important, ineffective ads and promotion. To collect data that helps to appeal to the audience better should be the point where both the marketers and designers at the game development company are met in order to deliver accurate and powerful marketing meddages to the right audience.
- Social and customer data analysis
is the metric that becomes more valuable with the social media expansion growth. Making decisions according to the customers insights, communicating with the audience, increasing brand recognition and loyalty lead to predicting customer purchases. Besides, customer data may include feedback to find the right niche and tailor the product in the best way.
What analytics tools are used by the game development companies?
- Unity Analytics
- Firebase
- Adobe Analytics
- Smartlook
- Appsee
Conclusion
What is the most interesting about data science in the industry is the fact that it can be applied by the companies right in the game development process. Its role is not only in building models, but also in identifying different points to optimize the process and predict the revenue due to the decisions made at the different milestones. Nowadays insights from the analytics tools are able to strengthen AI and ML algorithms, define the trends in order to enhance gaming processes and create new models based on actual data.
