Why do I want a user state

A couple of weeks ago I wrote about the user state. Went through what it is and what it has, meaning, what variables are included. This week the focus is on what you can do with it.

Assuming you are sold to the idea of a user state, you now have (or will have!) a large table with all or users. That table has a many variables that touch all areas of The Player Lifecycle.

So… now what? What’s the point.

This is the objective of this post, to tell you what you can do with it.

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Why the freemium model is a good thing

There’s way too much noise about mobile games freemium model. I can understand why. I’ve read stuff on prefrontal cortex and children that make me appreciate the fact that there’s tighter control on in-app purchases, that the button name changed and there are warnings about in-app purchases.

Yes, some people went too far and focus way too much energy in seeing their ARPDAU grow $0.0001 through methods that go way beyond marketing and data analysis.

My personal opinion is that they are pursuing the wrong things. First a great game, then monetisation. I believe monetisation can be built around a great game. I don’t believe that a great game can be built around monetisation. I also believe the freemium model is a good thing for games and players if we build a great game. I have two perspectives on why this is. One passionate, one cerebral… no surprises I guess. 

The User State

The user state is the unsung hero of game analytics. People spend countless hours looking at dashboards from reporting tables, analysing datasets built from purchases and session events but the user state is only remembered when some vital piece of information about the user wasn’t added to it.

Still the users state is central to a well built analytics system, especially if we are building your own in house.

So what is it? And why does it matter?

Why questions are better than data

Fred entered the room. The walls are covered by whiteboards scribbled with words that he reads in his LinkedIn feed and hand made scatterplots and line charts in red and black, green and blue. This is the lair of the data analysts and data engineers. He is very proud that his company has a data science team. He has been reading a lot of nice stuff about data science and big data and he brags about its impact to his friends.

“Hey Gabriel! I want to ask you something.” Gabriel takes his eyes of his monitor and smiles back to Fred: “Hey, what’s up? What do you need?” Fred requests “If you have the time, can you send me an Excel file with… let’s say… the last 6 months of in-app sales?”