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? Continue reading
It’s been almost two months since I started the blog and began writing about The Player Lifecycle. Next I will write about how to set up your game analytics stack and The Player Lifecycle has a central role, moving from a theoretical context to a practical one. Continue reading
I’m looking forward to moving to more practical stuff. To do that I need to wrap up the 101 posts of The Player Lifecycle. The one missing is Virality.
Virality is the game’s ability to acquire new players through actions of existing players. Facebook shares, tweets, SMS, invite codes, etc. All of these actions count as virality as long as they are trackable. This means that things like word of mouth don’t count. It’s a pity I know! A good game gains traction pretty fast through word of mouth, but we want measurable virality.
And so it begins. Acquisition is that special moment where someone opens our game for the first time. As magic as it is (and it is!) there’s quite a bit going on. Acquisition is important in a couple of different areas: the first, more business oriented, is marketing and user acquisition. The second is early knowledge of the player. Let’s begin.
The About page tells the story of a fictional player. It is a rare story, one shared by less than 1% of the daily players of the average mobile freemium game. There are several steps of the story.
