GIAF USA Fall 2015 - Lean analytics

Lean Analytics

Will PeroneCTO & Cofounder

August 2015

Who Am I?

• Designing and Programming games since age 11• Making mobile games since 2005• Making social games since 2007• Worked for Glu, Funzio, Kixeye• Started 3 companies - Andrograde, RubyCoins, Wicked Fun

State of Wicked Fun

• Venture backed• 16 employees• Cross-platform real time multiplayer game• Pre-revenue• Iterating the product fast• Iterating UA/Marketing fast

A Conundrum

Be as lean as possible

Iterate as fast as possible

Execute the highest quality bar possible

Different Needs for Analytics

Business Intelligence– Industry standard events easy– Hard to dig into the ‘why’

Design– Want complex game balancing metrics– Want in-game economy related analytics

Engineering– Want performance/bug/crash monitors

Wicked Fun’s Solution

• No dedicated PM/Analyst• Focus on a few core metrics per department• Don’t waste time building analytics in-house• Empower each team to do their own analytics• Balance quantitative and qualitative analysis, don’t let

analytics run your life – Analytics can mislead you on what to focus on

Design

• Use hierarchical events for balancing• Not all off the shelf analytics platforms support hierarchical events, may have

to manually do it

• Total in-game currency, Net currency over time• What are people buying in game• Certain things still require engineering to get involved (db

queries, adding events to code)

Engineering

• Use analytics as crash report statistics and performance/net monitoring tools– Ping, packet size, function times & counts…– Set up special API keys so you can turn it off if event traffic too high

• Set up a different analytics API key per platform (mobile, web, PC…)– The platform itself will color user behavior even if the game is exactly

the same

BI

• Retention (D1, D7)– Connected to # people who convert to paying– How long does it take for people to buy?

• Total funnel is hard to set up but worth it– View ->Install ->Register ->Tutorial ->Screen flow– Higher dropoff in your marketing or in your game?

• What is the first thing people usually buy?• Organics vs Paid Installs -> Virality– Key to cheap UA

Industry Challenges

There is still no good solution for cross-platform marketing, attribution and analytics

Supporting infrastructure for real time multiplayer cross-platform games is still in its infancy

Developers want real time analytics data feed to personalize UX to customers

Questions?

will@wickedfun.com@willperone

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