If you follow this blog you probably know what a whale is in the context of freemium games. If you follow this blog you might have (or not) noticed that I have not used the term whale. Or freeloader… or minnow… or dolphin!
I have very strong feelings regarding this. Here’s why. Continue reading
Sometime ago I wrote a blog post on why questions are better than data. Zach Riegler from Upsight commented:
Very insightful post. Now for the most important questions – what is the best way to come up with the most important business questions to ask…?
This post is about that: the important questions. What they are and how to get them. It’s about the thought process and a sneak peak on how analysts, scientists and statisticians translate business questions to quantitative questions that can be answered with data.
Let’s go! Continue reading
If I counted correctly (and a case can be made that I’m not that good with numbers), there were 30 talks in the Game Dev Camp 2015 not counting the opening keynote. This is my top 3 of those talks plus a couple of honourable mentions. Obviously my list is biased towards production, business and analytics. I’m sure there are some fine art and development talks there but I can’t really give a intellectually honest opinion in areas where I don’t feel I have something to add. There is a surprising number of design ones on my top 3, reason being… they are quite analytical behind the curtain. Not that it is obvious during the talk itself, but from my own experience, that is the kind of stuff analysts help quite a lot.
Without further ado… my top 3! Continue reading
As I wrote sometime ago, Microsoft organised Game Dev Camp 2015, an event for the Portuguese game development community. This post and next week’s post are about that but to write them I wanted to see all the 30 talks.
This post is simply my talk there. Kinda egocentric I know but next week I’ll post my favourite talks from that event and will exclude myself from it.
In this talk I tell the full story of implementing analytics in Miniclip, from the early stages to the current state but the take away points were the mistakes we did and I hope everyone can learn from. So without further ado and since WordPress is giving me a hard time with videos, here’s the link to the video of the talk.
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? Continue reading
Deciding to build or buy the components of our game analytics platform is one of the biggest decisions we have to make. I’ve seen many questions on Quora on this issue. Often people ask which is the best analytics platform. From my experience, the only person that can answer that is the person that asked it. Every other opinion is biased either by positive or negative experiences or commercial interest.
The problem is the question. Instead of asking which is the best solution, the question should be which solution best fits my needs. This post is about that. Defining needs that may exist and which should be addressed. Continue reading
On Games n' Data 