Game Analytics Review

This post is part of a series of posts about analytics platforms that I would use and recommend using for game analytics. None of these posts were asked for or sponsored by any of the companies that own the platforms. My knowledge of the platforms comes from demos they made by my request or hands on experience working with them. My objective is to state what each platform offers and what makes it unique so that it helps game developers in the process of picking a platform if they choose to do so.

Today’s post is about the game analytics platform called Game Analytics. No, I’m not repeating myself, it really is Game Analytics! And rightfully so. Game Analytics is built from scratch with videogames in mind.

To explain why Game Analytics is important and relevant I have to tell a little story… so… bear with me for a minute…

When I added events for the first time in a game, an analytics platform was either basic, a work in progress with little knowledge of how to use analytics or very expensive. Truth be told, this was back when I did flash games almost a decade ago but this was the offer back then. Things have changed in the last 2 or 3 years but the honest truth is that it is possible to find the three cases. This benefits large studios that have the money to hire analytics solutions or manpower to create their own.

What does this have to do with Game Analytics, you ask? Simple… it is free and good. This democratizes access to game analytics to any developer. Want to know why?

Omniata review

This post is part of a series of posts about analytics platforms that I would use and recommend using for game analytics. None of these posts were asked for or sponsored by any of the companies that own the platforms. My knowledge of the platforms comes from demos they made by my request or hands on experience working with them. My objective is to state what each platform offers and what makes it unique so that it helps game developers in the process of picking a platform if they choose to do so.

It is rather easy for me to speak about Omniata. It is part of Miniclip’s game analytics stack as I write this post. We’ve been using it for more than one and a half years now and it has served us well.

When we chose Omniata, we had a specific constraint we wanted to address. That constraint was the inability to create complex datasets for analysis that would answer complex questions. We wanted datasets of higher complexity without losing the ability of creating structured and organised reporting dashboards. That was our use case back then.

Since then we grew in sophistication and complexity and Omniata grew too. Although the fundamental offer didn’t change substantially, their vision of how they integrate in a complex data driven organisation is the most sophisticated I know of. Let me explain you how and why.

deltaDNA review

This post is part of a series of posts about analytics platforms that I would use and recommend using for game analytics. None of these posts were asked for or sponsored by any of the companies that own the platforms. My knowledge of the platforms comes from demos they made by my request or hands on experience working with them. My objective is to state what each platform offers and what makes it unique so that it helps game developers in the process of picking a platform if they choose to do so.

The first documentation I read about game analytics was from deltaDNA. It is therefore almost poetic that theirs is the first analytics platform I review. The product offer was simpler back in the day. A good infrastructure with a nicely featured front end and a number of consulting services, a trait I believe is rather unique to this day. That and segmentation.

If someone asked me to define deltaDNA in two words, those would be it: services and segmentation. Their services, in particular the consulting services, are offered from game developers for game developers. They are not “simply” specialised analysts, they actually know about gamedev. This is something that I hold in high regard since this is also my background.

Segmentation is part of deltaDNA’s DNA (pun totally intended!) way before it was cool. Today everyone speaks about targeted messaging but deltaDNA was spreading the word of actionable segmented player behaviour before any other platform if my memory serves me right. This vision that users are segmented beyond payers and non-payers is to this day wishful thinking to the majority of game developers and deltaDNA has vast experience with it, even their advertising mediation services takes segmentation and player behavior into account. If you’ve ever had a discussion about when and how many ads to show to users, then segmentation and raw data analysis would greatly help.

Want to know what you can do with it? Let’s dive in!