Understanding Player Behaviour - Games

A good game gives you decent downloads & revenue, but as a developer, it is of utmost importance to understand player behaviour which includes how they are performing in the game. This will enable you to tune your game for optimum revenue generation.

In this post, I am going to cover the following points.

• Game KPIs and how these will help us to understand players.
• Custom game events and the most important ones.
• Funnels & their importance.
• Player feedback & support.

Game KPIs & their uses:

Game KPIs give us more information to understand the player behaviour. As a developer, our ultimate goal is to improve KPIs. Below are the most identified key performance indicators and their analysis.

- Player Retention, Sessions & Session length

 These KPIs plays a very important role and every other KPI will more or less depend on these.

Based on retention numbers we can analyse how much players engaging with the game and also we needs to analyse which game mechanics are making players come back every day. Usually, the developer will consider Day - 1, 3, 7, 15, 30 & 90 numbers to analyse game performance. Depending on the game genre, retention numbers will vary.

- DAU & MAU

  Based on daily or monthly active users, we can analyse how players are hooked to the game. We should calculate DAU/MAU to know the player's engagement. It will be <1.

- ARPDAU, ARPU & ARPPU

  Based on the high average revenue per user or per paid user, we can analyse which mechanics are making players purchase items.

- LTV

 Based on the player lifetime value, we can identify whales, dolphins, minnows & non-paying players. With that understand we should analyse how we can convert non-payers to minnows.

Game Custom Events and most important ones:

To know the in-depth behaviour of players, we should have game custom events. There are a lot of analytics tools out there in the market which gives basic KPIs like retention, DAU, MAU & session length etc.. by default, but to track custom events, developer needs to add a piece of code based on the event.

Commonly identified custom events:

- Quit after Intro Video/Game Intro.

- Tutorial complete steps as events.

- Energy or lives usage.

- Events related to gameplay mechanics.

- Level progress events.

- Events related to monetisation mechanics.

- Game premium currency spendings.

- Game soft currency spendings.

- In App Purchases.

- Premium to soft currency conversions.

Funnels & their importance:

Funnels will give us data on how many players are actually going through a sequence of steps to complete a particular task or action. To understand the in-depth behaviour of the players using custom events, we should create funnels.

We should analyse funnels before finalising events list.

Some key funnels:

Initial Launch Funnel:

Using this funnel, we can analyse how many players actually launched our game after installation.

If there is a huge difference in numbers, we can suspect a possible launch or game performance issue which is interrupting game launch.

Tutorial funnel:

The Tutorial is very important in most games, and with this funnel, we should know how many players actually completed all tutorial steps and entered the game.

If the completion percentage is more than 85%, then most players liked the on boarding experience and are going to continue gameplay.

Gameplay funnel:

If you observe a good percentage of users who are completing those actions then we can conclude that players actually liked your game concept and can possibly go on to be paying players.

We should include all the game mechanics which are in the game to know more information.

Based on this funnel, we can identify which game mechanics are liked by the most of the players.

IAP funnel:

Based on this funnel, we will be able to know which gameplay mechanic is leading to IAP so that we can polish it more and make decisions accordingly.

All the above funnels will give us enough information about the players and we can come up with the actions items accordingly. We can also create any number of funnels to analyse more about the player behaviour.

Player Feedback & Support:

Surveys are powerful tools which gives us direct feedback from players. We should select our most active players and invite them to participate in surveys.

Also, player support is vitally important. With in the games or apps, we should provide options to contact the developer which would enable players to get in touch with developers directly.

Direct feedback from players will always help to improve your game. In that way, we can analyse the player behaviour and take right decisions at right time to improve ROI. All the best!

Thank you for reading this blog and subscribe for more interesting topics.