Let’s take a moment to appreciate the largest title of a post of this blog to date. Building Performance Metrics Dashboards for Mobile Freemium Games is a mouthful and is exactly what we’ll discuss today.
Let’s dive right in. Continue reading
Monetisation
Why I never liked the term ‘whales’
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
So I bought a new (virtual) car… or why Real Racing 3 is so awesome.
Today’s post was going to be different. Initially it was going to be about rednecks. Then (and because I’m severely delayed with blog posts) I decide to write about Witcher 3, which I will by the way.
But then something awesome happened. And that something was an awesome Shelby ’66 Cobra 427. The one in the photo. So I bought a new (virtual) car… what’s the fuss about it? Continue reading
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. Continue reading
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? Continue reading
Mastering The Player Lifecycle
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
The Holy Trinity of Monetisation
The term The Holy Trinity of Monetisation struck me when I was writing Monetisation 101. I had never read it and I’ll admit I even googled it just in case someone had coined it before. All performance dashboards that I maintain have a line graph with the three parts of this trinity:
- ARPU aka Average Revenue per User
- ARPPU aka Average Revenue per Paying User
- Conversion Rate
These are the three most important KPIs of monetisation of freemium games because… they are free.
Monetisation 101
My grandmother told me that great men have their faces on bills. Observing the picture above I believe it’s fair to say she raised me well! Or that I asked Pedro to put my face in it. You’ll be the judge of that.
On to more relevant matters…
Monetisation is the end result of our analytical journey, The Player Lifecycle. I’m a firm defender that retention is king and engagement the successor to the crown. After all without players that stay and love our games there won’t be anyone to monetise. But not admitting that the end goal in freemium games as a product or service is monetisation is to be naive.
The Player Lifecycle
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.
