Game analytics @ Halfbrick The document discusses how Halfbrick, a game development studio, uses analytics in their business. They track game events like how players interact with and progress through their games, as well as advertising metrics like install sources to evaluate the quality of users acquired from different channels. Key metrics they focus on include money spent, social virality, retention, and engagement. The document emphasizes tailoring analytics to development goals and resources, making metrics fast-updating, reliable and accessible, and involving employees in data analysis.

1. Game analytics @
Halfbrick
PRESENTATION TO UBISOFT ABU DHABI - 2014

2. How we use analytics now
We use analytics in our business for two major things
• Game Events: Tracking how our players interact with our games and how well
we are in engaging them both in terms of gameplay and in terms of IAP/social
conversion
• Advertising: Tracking the install sources for our games as to what types of
users we are getting from each. This is both from within our own network and
from outside sources

3. How we use analytics now: Game
Events
There are a number of things we use games events to track:
• In game economy: How players consume the various in game currencies
and how this impacts game play
• Game discovery/1st time flow: The path of users through the explicit and
implicit tutorials in game and also the discovery of all features in the game
• Conversion: How we convert players from totally free players to players of
value. This can be both actual money as well as social virality (and the
resulting downloads) a player generates
• Retention and engagement: The length of time a players remains playing a
game and the amount of time they play each day & each game play session
• Game play progress: How players progress through the various game
content in terms of velocity and experience.

4. How we use analytics now:
Advertising
We use analytics to track the success of our advertising in these aspects:
• Install sources: We use attribution tracking to see where users have
installed from, both from within our own network and from outside our
network
• Install quality: Because we link each user to an install source within our
game analytics we are then able to evaluate the quality of users that an
install source is providing. We typically look at such factors as:
• Money spent
• Social conversion
• Retention
• Engagement

5. What is important: Key metrics
Your key metrics are whatever defines the success or failure of a game/update.
They’ll be different for each game but generally speaking they are how a player
can return monetary value to you.
This is commonly:
• Actual money spent
• Virality: Social conversion
• Retention
You should focus your analytic investment on first making your key metrics:
• Fast updating
• Reliable data
• Easily accessible and interpretable
• Able to be easily segmented

6. What is important: Why analytics?
Another important point to consider is to ask why your analytics are going into a
game.
A general analytics spec won’t return much value to a game. In fact it most likely
will only get in the way of development.
A well matched (and constantly evolving) analytics spec not only returns huge
value but it also gets complete buy in from the development team and aids in
bringing them closer their players and so much more responsive to what can
delight them.
Your analytics need to match your development goals and capabilities in order to
succeed in returning value to you.

7. Design to your analysis resources
Analytics will only return as much value to you as you are able to extract insights
from them.
Don’t track any more data than you will be able to leverage from the analysis
resources you have.
More analysis resources = less structured data and more granular player
tracking
Less analysis resources = more structured data and less player tracking
Adapt your analytics as your needs/resources change.

8. Let everyone in on the (data) fun
Whilst you definitely need dedicated analytic talent for some tasks everyone in
the company should have the chance to analyse the data.
This vital as garnering insights is much less science and more about asking lots
and lots of interesting and not-so-interesting questions of your data.
The more accessible and easily customisable you can make your data the more
people will play with it the better value you can drive.
This, more than anything else, I think, should be the goal of analytics for a
games developer.
It should really be the goal of any organisation where data can play a large role
in their success or failure.