There’s a new mediation platform on the block. But this time, it’s been built specifically for mobile games. It’s called HyperBid. And it’s in Open Beta. We’re offering free access to multiple GameAnalytics products, as well as a starter bonus from HyperBid, to all early sign ups for the Beta.

Our crew here at GameAnalytics have lent a helping hand with building this new tool. But to get the full rundown of this new tool, we’ve chatted to Ahmet Genc, HyperBid’s Business Director, to learn more.

What is HyperBid?

Before we start, we wanted to let you know that HyperBid is now in open-beta, and they’re taking on early sign ups. And like we said, there are a bunch of goodies up for grab for those early adopters.

“It’s your new mobile-games mediation platform. We’ve worked with the GameAnalytics team, and used their years of experience and industry knowledge to build a new tool with a developer-first mindset. And we’re thrilled with the outcome,” said Ahmet.

“There are around 2.8 million global mobile gamers,” he added. “And there are hundreds of thousands of brands looking to advertise to these players through mobile games. I personally have always admired the mission at GameAnalytics – to help every single developer get access to the tools and products they need to fuel their growth. So it only made sense to our team to create something developers could use to tap into this huge audience, too.”

Ahmet continued to say that with HyperBid, you’ll be able to:

• “Get the highest bid, every time.” You can use in-app header bidding and traditional waterfalls to get the highest bids and never let an ad placement go empty. So you’ll always get the highest bid, and make the most money each time.
• “Unlock higher eCPMs.” We learned that HyperBid is integrated with over 30 leading ad networks from across the globe. So you can connect to the global markets and get higher eCPMs from Eastern to Western markets, all from one single point.
• “A/B test easily, without a fuss.” HyperBid controls are easy to use to perfect your campaigns. You can test every aspect of your ad monetization strategy, from your waterfall flows to frequency capping (how many times you show an ad) to land the best strategy.
• “Segment your players.” You can divvy up your players into different groups and tailor your mediation strategy to what they prefer. You can also pick and choose how you manage ad experiences for those segments to strike the perfect balance between ads and user experience.
• “Get set up quickly and simply” Other mediation tools aren’t optimized for mobile game advertising, and their technical support is typically reserved for the bigger games. But HyperBid is equipped with a team of industry experts who’ll help you set up and create an ongoing strategy that’ll maximize your game revenue. Without any hassle.

How is HyperBid different?

The biggest difference we’ve chatted about is that HyperBid’s platform has been tailored to the mobile gaming industry. But this means a lot of different things. Here’s what we learned from Ahmet.

HyperBid is built with product analytics in mind

“As this platform was crafted by the experts behind GameAnalytics, it’s been built with analytics at its core. With GameAnalytics help, we’ve laid the groundwork for this platform, future-proofing its development – where we hope to truly bring together your product and monetization data. Our team has more than a decade of experience, so the crew know exactly what types of features and functions a game developer needs in their mediation strategy.

“With HyperBid, we want to make sure you can now build the best business from your game, and truly realize your monetization potential.”

HyperBid is neutral

“HyperBid isn’t affiliated with a particular network or studio. Like GameAnalytics, we believe in being neutral, agnostic, and fair. We don’t associate with any one network, so we’re always looking out for your interests. It’s you, the creative minds making games, who we care about. So you’ll work with the best partners, and get the highest bids.”

HyperBid puts developers first

“We share GameAnalytics’ mission. Their core analytics tool is free to use. And they’ve built new products with open tiers or affordable pricing plans which scale with you.

“This mission has been carried over to HyperBid, too. We’re committed to helping small developers grow, and giving them the best chance to thrive in an already competitive market. You’ll always have the HyperBid team at your beck and call (whether you’re a small-time indie or an award-winning publisher).

“With the industry changing and growing, it’s obvious that we need to evolve with it. There was a huge influx of games in 2020 and the industry expects to triple ad revenue by 2025, so we’re entering the market at a very crucial time. We’re excited to make sure that we help studios be a part of this growth.”

Sign up today to unlock your starter bonus

That’s it from Ahmet. We’re absolutely thrilled about this next step in your journey. It’s been an absolute pleasure to work with such talented and inspiring creators. And we hope, alongside HyperBid, that we can continue to build new tools and features to help you make your games successful.

To celebrate HyperBid’s launch, we’re offering free subscriptions to a range of GameAnalytics products. HyperBid is also offering a sign-up bonus to new partners, which you can use on your monetization campaigns (rather than dipping into your own capital). Simply head to the HyperBid website and sign up today.

We’re all about the analytics (there’s a clue in our name), and using them to help you grow your games. And we’re always looking for ways to make data work even harder for you. So we’ve added a new service to our already-impressive roster – Raw Export.

Here’s how it can help you turn your data into action.

Dive even deeper

With Raw Export you can automatically export all your games’ raw event data in JSON format, without any manual intervention. So every day it’ll ingest, preprocess, and deliver player data from your GameAnalytics account straight into your AWS S3 account. It even packages it up into a neat and tidy compressed file containing unchanged raw events, all still with their properties and timestamps. No fuss, no faff.

What can I use Raw Export for?

To get really up close and personal with your data using batch or streaming processes. You can carry out custom analysis of non-aggregated data, export it into your own tools, combine it with data from other sources, implement your own data pipeline… pretty much any data-related activity you can think of (within reason, of course).

It doesn’t stop there either. You can also use custom event fields – a set of key-value pairs you can add to all your events. You can only get this through Raw Export (it isn’t available in the GameAnalytics tool). Find out more.

How is it different from other GameAnalytics products?

Have a look at this table to see how it compares to our other Data Services.

Not sure if Raw Export is for you?

Check out this case study about how tech startup TapNation are using Raw Export to make faster decisions on game updates. You might also want to have a read of our FAQs.
We’re really proud of Raw Export – and all our other products – and we love talking about them (we’re super fun at dinner parties). So if you’d like to chat to us, just fill in this form and we’ll get right back to you.

Right, I’m sold. How do I get Raw Export?

Raw Export is one of our premium services. And that means you do have to pay for it. Because our mission is to help indie developers get their first hit by giving them access-all-areas analytics, our core tool will always be free. But adding paid-for services like this one means we can grow as a business. Which gives us more cash to make our free analytics product even more kickass.

The good news is that it’s really easy to order Raw Export through your GameAnalytics account. Just log in and click on ‘Data Services’ in the left menu to get started.

Roll out the carpets and call the paparazzi. We have a big announcement we can’t wait to share with you.

We’ve teamed up with Tenjin and launched Growth Fullstack – a new ETL tool that’ll help bring your marketing and product data together. So you can now get more granular insights about your players, and improve your advertising and performance campaigns.

Growth Fullstack will help you overcome new challenges in the mobile marketing world. How? By turning your data into insights. Here’s everything you need to know.

What exactly is Growth Fullstack?

A lot of developers use analytics (so GameAnalytics, in this instance). And a lot of those same customers use attribution (let’s say Tenjin). But at the moment, there’s a wall between these services. With data working in parallel, but not together.

That’s where Growth Fullstack comes in. It’s an ETL tool that, as it stands for, will let you extract, transform, and load your player datasets from different sources (like Applovin and Tenjin) into a few different Storage and Data Warehouse platforms (like Google BigQuery, or Amazon S3). Which you can then use to merge and cut up the data (using tools like Google Data Studio or Tableau).

Our new ETL bridges the gap here. It makes it possible to bring all of this data together.

Growth Fullstack tackles Apple’s latest update

When Apple released iOS 14.6, IDFAs quickly became almost useless. And it was suddenly a lot harder to scale your apps and games using good old-fashioned techniques that we all know and love. It especially affected indie developers and SMBs (small and midsize businesses).

It caused a big gap in everyone’s campaigns and strategies. Developers and studios were stuck on how they could use their data, and how they could get actionable insights they needed for their campaigns.

The industry demanded something new. So we listened.

It gives developers flexibility with their data 

There isn’t a one-size-fits-all solution out there for managing data. It’s not that straightforward. So what’s great about FullStack is that it gives developers the building blocks (stacks) they can use to create what they need. It’s completely flexible. How you then use your data is up to you. But the possibilities are endless.

We’re excited to see what you guys use it for. In the past, you would need to have a data scientist or engineer to even think about doing this. But now you don’t.

Here’s an example, to help paint a better picture of what you can do.

Let’s look at how SKAdNetwork adjusted to iOS 15

iOS 15 marks the start of a new Apple-centric attribution model on iOS devices. Developers now have all of their SKAdNetworks data (e.g. the source app ID, which hasn’t traditionally been shared by ad networks, until now). But also, these developers (advertisers, in this instance), will be able to compare the ad networks reported data with what Apple reports to them.

Which is great. But you can probably expect to see some discrepancies in this data. Using our Growth FullStack, we stack this data together to form the insights you need.

How to get started

What’s especially great about this is that you don’t need any dedicated resources or data teams. We have training guides and the tools you need to get up and running.

To get started, you’ll need to:

1. Give us some information about your current stack
2. Pair up your favorite Data Source with the Data Destination of your choice (feel free to check out our recommendations).
3. Then when you have your data, you can connect it to any data analysis tool of your choice. You’ll also get free training for this, so no stress there.

How much does it cost?

You only pay for the ETL service. Connecting the tools, and all of the training is on us.

A match made in heaven

It made sense to buddy up with Tenjin. Developers need to make the most of their marketing and product data, without any barriers. It was a no-brainer to come together and solve this industry-wide problem. 

A lot of developers in the industry use both of our free platforms. And we both share a mission to help every developer in the industry. So we’re excited to come together to help apps grow in the new privacy-first world. 

If you fancy signing up, or just want to learn more, then get in touch with us. We’d love to find out how we can help you.

Raise the curtain and turn on the spotlight, because we’ve got an exciting new tool for you. It’s called GameIntel. And it’s here to bring accurate game-industry insights to developers of all shapes and sizes, whether you’re a small indie outfit, or a serial top-ranking publisher.

With GameIntel, you’ll be able to follow market trends in real-time, see which games have the best performance indicators, and supercharge your game research and ideation. What’s more, you’ll also have access to the popular Benchmarks+ service included within your GameIntel account.

You can try it out for free here or read on to learn more (including how to claim a special discount — up to 40% off 12 months access to GameIntel). Details below.

Why did we build GameIntel?

Most mobile intelligence tools cost a small fortune. With GameIntel, you now have an affordable and transparently priced alternative to get the insights you need to make hit games.

We built GameIntel to help improve your game research and find out everything you want to know about the mobile games industry in a single tool. Access powerful market insights dashboards, including interactive views of the top charts, global top-performing games, and publishers, recently released titles, trending games, and upcoming titles.

GameIntel also includes deep categorization of hundreds of thousands of games, with many millions of contextual data points allowing you to search across the entire app store for games. Explore the gaming market with more ease and accuracy than ever before with game-specific, contextual search functionality.

What can you do with GameIntel? 

• See the top charts for all major nations, updated hourly
• See the global hits and top-performing publishers
• Search a game database of more than a quarter of a million titles
• Discover performance and usage estimates for top games
• Learn which games are trending over the last day, week or month
• See recently released games, and titles that are upcoming
• Explore hundreds of datapoints, including themes, art style, mechanics
• Search across hundreds of thousands of games tagged with contextual metadata
• View aggregated benchmarking data for all key metrics.

New pricing for INDIES

We’re keen to make sure GameIntel is accessible for all, so we’ve added a low-cost INDIE tier, too. This unlocks most of the core functionality with just a few limitations on the data.

What if I already use Benchmarks+?

Don’t worry. Your account won’t change and you’ll still be able to use all those features within GameIntel. You’ll now just have a load of extra functionality included. Enjoy!

Save up to 40% on our pro plans

For a 20% discount, apply the code INTEL2021.

It works on all plans, including annual — where by paying for the year you can double the discount for a whopping 40% total saving. What are you waiting for? Start your quest now.

We’ve got some big news for you Huawei developers out there. We’ve now partnered with Huawei and joined their mobile services ecosystem as an official Platform Partner. So if you’re making a game on one of their devices, then we’re thrilled to say that you now have access to free analytics.

Huawei is currently the 3rd largest ecosystem worldwide reaching more than 2.3M developers and 530 million AppGallery monthly active users globally. That’s a big chunk of the game dev community. So it only made sense we made Huawei our next official partner.

If you’re one of Huawei game devs, make sure you download our latest SDK that now supports OAID (Open Advertising Identifier for Huawei devices). Read on to get more details.

What’s changed

So, what’s exactly new? Let’s break it down:

• GameAnalytics joins Huawei Developer Ecosystem as an official Platform Partner, bringing free analytics to over 2.3 million developers worldwide.
• Our Android SDK now supports the OAID (a non-permanent device identifier that developers use to display personalized ads for their users while protecting their privacy) for Huawei devices, out of the box.
• Every GameAnalytics feature now works natively for all Huawei AppGallery apps.

Why did we partner with Huawei?

Our mission is (and will always be) to help developers make awesome games. By partnering with Huawei, we’re able to introduce a new growth channel that can support developers with their global success and expansion.

Huawei is one of the world’s largest mobile providers, with a leading market share in some of the fastest-growing markets around the globe. Especially in the APAC region. We believe that developers can greatly benefit from an increased presence in the Huawei ecosystem, and take their first step in entering these new markets across the pond. All while having access to best-in-class analytics to support their journey.

Also, we wanted to make GameAnalytics available and accessible to even more developers. Adding support for OAID helps us reach Huawei AppGallery creators and give them the tools they need to analyze their games.

How to get started

If you’re a Huawei game developer, or want to become one and use GameAnalytics, here’s what you need to do:

1. Download and integrate our Android SDK. Head to our documentation to learn how.
2. Integrate Huawei Ads SDK by following these steps.
3. And you’re done! The Android SDK can now automatically detect if the OAID is available to be used.

Please note, if both GAID and OAID are available on a player’s device, then GAID will be used as a primary device ID, though both will be collected and available in features like the Player Warehouse, Event Export, or Raw Export. If you have any questions, just get in touch with our friendly support team.

What’s there for GameAnalytics users

If you’re already a GameAnalytics user but your games are not on AppGallery (Huawei’s app distribution platform), then you may want to give them a go. Here’s why:

• You’ll get early access to a new and competitive platform where your games can stand out and gain more market share.
• You’ll reach a new, global ecosystem of players that can drive growth for your games.
• You can experiment with new game features and organic marketing tools.

In a nutshell, entering AppGallery can be a new source of players and revenue for you and your studio. Integrate our Android SDK here to get started.

What it means for Huawei developers

And, if you’re a Huawei developer but haven’t integrated with GameAnalytics before, you may be interested to know that:

• GameAnalytics is industry-leading analytics for mobile games. We help you collect, store, and analyze performance data about your games.
• Our tools are used by nearly 100,000 developers and over 63,000 studios worldwide, and we support around 100,000 active games, providing necessary data to help developers grow their titles.
• GameAnalytics can be easily integrated in less than 15 minutes, and our core analytics tool is and will always be free. We also provide more advanced and premium solutions, like DataSuite or Benchmarks+ to help you on your journey from an indie studio to a regular chart-topper.

Ready to get started? Just sign in to our free analytics tool and download our newest SDK.

You asked, we listened. We’ve introduced sub-genres to our mobile market intelligence platform, Benchmarks+. These sub-genres offer more granular filtering options, for more specific gaming insights.

So far, this has been one of the most requested features for Benchmarks+ so we’re thrilled it’s now live. We hope this helps to supercharge your game research and analysis.

Why did we introduce sub-genres?

The standard gaming categories on the App Store are broad and often misleading, especially when you consider the growing diversity of the mobile gaming market. Over the past couple of years, we’ve had hundreds of game developers reaching out to us, asking for more detailed insights about their particular genre niche. Simply said, the standard App Store genres are just too vague to be helpful for providing this level of detail.

That’s why we’ve released our own taxonomy. So far, we’ve already categorized tens of thousands of games on our network with this improved classification model – one that’s flexible and can easily evolve with the industry. So stay tuned, because we’re just getting started.

What’s included?

More than 35 sub-genres in total, everything from ‘hyper-casual’ to ‘MMORPG’. There’s more to come, but here’s a detailed breakdown of what you can find right now:

How it works

They work as filters, inside a dedicated sub-genre selector tab – a convenient home for loads of sub-genres, right next to the standard App Store categories. If you switch between these groupings, you’ll see the data change – that’s because the sample of gaming titles is altered and the aggregated data is recalculated with more specific definitions.

So, with all the announcements and background out of the way, let us show you how to start filtering Benchmarks+ insights data by these new sub-genres.

1. Log in to your Benchmarks+ account (or sign up for free).

2. Click on any game metric on the left menu. For example, ARPPU (Average Revenue Per Paying User) in Monetization.

3. Then look on the right-hand side, next to the App Store section. This is where you’ll find the sub-genres selector. Go ahead and click on it.

4. Now you should see a list of all sub-genres, divided into 11 genres and 3 major classes. If you’re a Premium user, you can click or unclick any sub-genre to filter your data.

5. Let’s try. Click ‘Deselect all’ at the bottom, and then click on a chosen sub-genre.

6. You can now see precise numbers for your sub-genre on your left. Go and get your insights.

What’s coming

Benchmarks+ is growing and there’s more to come. Here are the things we’re working on:

• Adding a region filter for S/E Asia
• Adding even more metrics
• And more sub-genres to come. Stay tuned!

Let your voice be heard. Vote for features you’d like us to work on next.

Get started today

Kudos for getting to this point. You’re now well equipped to get started. And in case you missed the previous announcement, we’ve recently opened Benchmarks+ for all, so you can sign up for a free tier (or log in here). Enjoy playing with the mobile gaming industry’s data. Cheers!

In September we ran the first webinar in our Toolbox series: making casual games in a Covid-19 world. Joined by our friends at Adjust and TopOn, we covered what we’ve spotted, how to grow your casual game and how to advertise during the pandemic. Don’t worry if you missed it. You can catch the recordings and read up on the talks in this blog.

It’s been an odd few months. Over that time, we’ve noticed a dramatic shift in the gaming industry: we’ve never seen so much playtime, traffic is at an all-time high and some countries have really surprised us. So we thought it’d be worth sharing the key metrics and banding together with Adjust and TopOn to give you some advice on how to make sure it’s your game beneath those idle thumbs.

The webinar had three main sessions:

• an update on the state of the gaming industry
• a talk on how to use your data to grow your game
• a lesson about developing your advertising strategy.

Casual gaming in 2020: What’s the data saying?

Our CEO, Ioana Hreninciuc, kicked things off by going over the Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) for casual games, including retention, session length and Cost Per Install (CPI). She also tackled the rise of hypercasuals in 2020, and discussed the key regional differences (for example, how did Asia compare to Europe?).

Ultimately, this should help you figure out how your game is performing compared to others in your genre. And you can expect to learn which genres are winning the war for those thumbs. Here are a few highlights.

Since lockdown, playtime has consistently grown by 15%

It’s now starting to return to normal. But we saw that over the summer, people were playing more and more games. The lockdown period saw people making more time for playtime, as we didn’t see much difference between the weekends and the weekdays.

Android has lower Day-7 retention than iOS

Specifically, hypercasual games had a 50% higher D7 retention on iOS than on Android. We suspect this is partly because there are more errors on Android devices. There are a lot more app stores and devices, especially in Asia, which can make it difficult to test for every eventuality.

But Android has more playtime and session counts

It seems that Android users come back for fewer days, but on those days they return more often and cram in more play.

Ioana recommends that to make the most of your game, you should measure your life-time value directly, test more on Android devices, expand into Asia and be aware of seasonal changes.

You can discover the key facts and see where your game sits in the grand scheme of things by using Benchmarks+. Try out our free tier.

A quarantined world: reaching the at-home mobile gamer

Next on the agenda was Stephanie Pilon, the global director of product and field marketing at Adjust. She looked at how monetization models, mechanics and player’s behaviour have changed. And how you can keep up with the pace.

She shared the successful marketing techniques that hypercasual games have been using, which business models work and three strategies you can use for yourself. Here are a few highlights.

Gaming installs increased 75%

Comparing the first quarter of 2020 to the same time in 2019, there was a massive increase. In fact, March alone saw a 132% increase. And a single week of March, we saw a whopping 1.2 billion mobile games downloaded.

Most of this is driven by hypercasual games

Because hypercasual games are so easy to pick up, small enough to be downloaded on the dodgiest connection and completely free (they use ads), they’re driving around 80% of all installs. But hypercasual games do something else, too. Companies cross-advertise their other titles, keeping gamers on their games. You can finish one hypercasual game from a developer and immediately move onto the next game in their portfolio.

If you make sure that you focus on using your data correctly, push your other games and keep communicating with your players, you can learn a lot from how hypercasual games function.

They have two reports that you can download. Or you can relive the video and get the slides here.

Monetization for different markets

Last – but not least – we had Harry Yang, the chief marketing officer from TopOn. He explained how countries overseas have been advertising their games and what we can learn from them, as well as how you should develop a strategy and how ad mediation might help.

Every market is different. And the more you understand different  cultural and global trends, the more effectively you can advertise your game. So by the end of Harry’s talk, you’ll have a much better understanding of how to plan your advertising strategy.

There’s an opportunity to make money

Ad revenue is predicted to hit $45 billion by 2023. Japan is the highest earner here, along with the US, South Korea and China. In fact, the Chinese market is likely to reach $4 to $7 billion in 2020, with estimates at around $10 to £20 million a day.

It definitely seems like Asia is a market worth considering expanding into.

The less entertainment, the more people turn to gaming

This is a trend that’s spreading across the world, including Japan, China and South Korea. As companies find it increasingly difficult to create films and movies, games are easily becoming the new medium that people are using to entertain themselves. So we expect to see downloads and revenue hitting a new peak this year.

Always check international laws before you expand

For example, there’s a huge opportunity to make money advertising in China. But you need to allow more time in your development cycle. Games can’t have political, military, national or religious content in them. If you’re making a simple or mini-game (like a puzzle, sports or music game), you’ll need to allow 20 days for the Chinese government to approve it. If you’re making a larger game, like an adventure game, this process can take over three months. Bear this in mind if you’re thinking of expanding.

If you’d like to learn more about how to monetize your games, you can watch the full recording and download their report here.

Get the full talks

It’s all online. So if you’d like to watch the full recording, along with all the questions we answered, sign up and register.

In Apple’s most recent WWDC privacy was a key topic. One of the big reveals in this area was that come September, when iOS 14 is released, users will be asked if they would like to allow or restrict data sharing per app. After this, the question on many developers’ minds is… What happens to my analytics? Will my reporting still work or will it be restricted? The answer, for GameAnalytics, is yes! Here is why.

All our SDKs are ready for this (and have been for years)

GameAnalytics always determines an identifier for each device that is sending data from a game. We call this the GameAnalytics User ID. This value is normally a device identifier (like IDFA on iOS), but when this is not available a random User ID is generated and used on all future data for the lifetime of the app install.

For years it has been possible for iOS users to not allow access to the IDFA in their privacy settings by enabling “Limit Ad Tracking”. In this case, the device returns a string of zeros instead. When this happens, we assign the device a unique random identifier and the player is still identified & counted accurately across all our reporting. Easy-peasy!

For iOS14 (when users select “Ask App Not to Track”) this is exactly what will happen; the IDFA will be a string of zeros and we will use a generated User IDs instead.

Having this logic in place enables GameAnalytics to work on any platform (including platforms which don’t have an advertiser ID of their own) and also to continue to work reliably for players that restrict access to their IDFAs.

All our features will continue to work

Analyzing player behavior, building reports, or creating A/B tests all depend on the User ID remaining the same for the app’s lifetime. As this is still the case, all our functionality will continue to work as it does now.

Will it affect my current games using GameAnalytics?

When iOS14 is rolled out we expect more users will select “Ask App Not to Track” compared to users having the “Limit Ad Tracking” enabled currently. For existing integrations, players who already have a game installed and update to iOS 14 may be switched to the zeros-only ID by the OS if they opt for “Ask App Not toTrack”. For such cases, we are working on a way to accurately identify these players as returning, using other information associated with the player. We are also doing our best to make any changes backwards compatible with existing SDKs. We’re still investigating, and we will share more details on this, as we progress. Keep an eye on our blog and SDK updates, to ensure you’re always up to date.

What will change in the industry?

IDFAs are useful in order to identify a player across platforms. This is used, for instance, when cross-promoting or retargeting players. IDFAs make it possible to get a list of players who played one of your titles, load this into an advertising platform, and promote the sequel you just released – whether or not the players are still in the game. They also make it easier to attribute an install to a specific campaign, if the two platforms are integrated.

How these use cases will change depends on industry-wide paradigm shifts, and decisions made by individual vendors. In other words, it’s too soon to say, but the industry has weathered many of these changes well in the past.

Need more information?

If you’d like to know more about how GameAnalytics tracking and reporting works, we’re always here to help. Just get in touch with us, and our savvy support team will answer any questions.

A few days ago, we issued a statement mentioning that we are willing to do our part to support the black community, as well as other ethnic minorities. Since then, we’ve been discussing ways to do this, not just now in the short term, but on an ongoing basis.

We are a small company, but something we do have plenty of is data and insights. We also have a wonderful community of talented indie game developers from around the world, who are working very hard to get their first hit. Knowing which mechanics, genre, or publisher to pick can make a massive difference in a prototype’s success, and insights are essential to that decision process.

We put two and two together and we’ve decided to offer up to 12 months free access to our premium insights service, Benchmarks+, for indie studios created or run by black or other ethnic minority leaders. This tool shows aggregated insights across the mobile gaming industry, helping developers and studios benchmark their games and identify key trends. Our hope is that this will help to support them on their journey towards launching their first hit.

Accessing the services is super easy. Just get in touch via our contact form and provide more information about your studio. We’ll answer all requests in up to 5 days.

As millions of people work from home or are on furlough, they’ve needed something to pass the time: streaming TV shows, learning instruments and, of course, playing games. At least, that’s the assumption. We dug into our data to find that playtime has soared and people are spending more, but each genre is affected differently.

We’ve analyzed our data in two ways

1. Global network analysis

Our first approach was to look at the overall data across our network. Over 75,000 developers use GameAnalytics to analyze how gamers are playing. That’s about 40,000 active mobile games, all in all, including 40 of the top 100 most downloaded games on the app stores. By combining all this data, we can see how more than a third of the world’s mobile players are behaving.

Specifically, we analyzed playtime and how much people were spending.

2. Findings from Benchmarks+

The second approach was to use Benchmarks+ to drill down into how specific genres are performing. This is something that you can investigate yourself, to check out the current state of the industry across different metrics, genres, regions, and platforms. With this approach, we looked at which genres have the most playtime, how many players are converting and what the retention looks like.

So let’s get into it.

Playtime has increased by a whopping 62%

Over the last three months, we’ve seen traffic go up by nearly half (46%), from 1.2 billion people playing every month to 1.75 billion. But it’s not just the number of players that’s skyrocketed. Globally, the total amount of playtime hit a peak of over 90 million hours in the last ten days of March, 62% higher than the first ten days of January. That’s enough time to binge the entire Lord of the Rings trilogy 10 million times. Obviously, part of this is because more people are playing. But on average people are playing for longer, too.

As you can see, this growth has had its peaks and troughs. It starts off consistent with what we usually see between week and weekend traffic (interestingly, there are fewer weekend spikes in March). In addition, those earlier spikes coincide with specific announcements and they tend to level out higher than before. For example, in the second half of January, there was a surge from China. In this time, the global playtime soared by 40%, then dipped back 20% – still higher than before China’s lockdown.

Then, on the 21st of February, we saw a second spike when Italy locked down. Later, there’s a third that coincides with the European and North American lockdown. We went ahead and represented the same data in a different way to really highlight the impact of these global events.

Bear in mind, this graph highlights the relative change, not negative values (think of the stock market ticker). So essentially here you’re viewing the percentage change from the previous day, and the average playtime for this period is still up to 62% higher than it was before the outbreak.

It’s not the lockdown, but the announcements

The lockdowns alone don’t explain these spikes. Take Italy. There just aren’t enough players in the region to result in such a seismic shift. No, this is a little more subtle. We think it’s the announcement itself that’s caused this surge. The news about the lockdown had a much stronger impact than the local measures did on how people behaved. How? Perhaps others, in different regions across the world, started preemptively working from home. Or maybe people were just looking for more of a distraction.

In the following days, we notice that this growth very quickly starts to reverse, just as it did after China’s measures. But when stricter measures were enforced across the world, the numbers picked back up, and seem to be growing for a much longer period of time. This sustained growth is more likely directly linked to people being holed up indoors.

People are spending more, too

The amount of people that are spending on in-app purchases has also gone up. This could be because more people are playing, so there’s a bigger chance someone will spend something. But playtime comes into the equation as well: the longer people play, the more likely they’ll spend. So existing players are likely to be spending more, too.

That’s born out in the facts. In-app purchases have followed a very similar pattern to playtime. While there’s a clear increase at the beginning of the year, the real difference didn’t really start until social distancing measures were introduced in Europe and North America. So, for most of March, the growth was between 5% and 30% a day.

Interestingly, this wasn’t on weekends. The peak was during the workweek of March 16th to 20th – when pretty much the whole of Europe went into lockdown.

This is probably down to a combination of factors. Clearly, boredom. But it’s possible that people are also justifying spending a little more freely on in-app purchases when they’re not splashing out on the weekends at department stores, or the local pub.

How does this play out at the genre level?

Using Benchmarks+, we drilled down and looked at how different genres are performing. We’ve gone ahead and highlighted three particularly notable findings for you, specifically across adventure, puzzle and hyper-casual genres.

1. Adventure games are doing particularly well

When we dig deeper into Benchmarks+, we start to confirm a few of our theories: namely, that players are whiling away the boredom with games. Playtime is typically longer for the adventure genre, due to its more involved experience. And the top 2% in the genre have grown by 25% – with the most avid of players now playing a staggering 4 hours (245 mins) per user on average.

The adventure genre shows a surge in popularity that most closely follows the industry-level trends. It would seem that, with a lot of time on their hands, people are opting to play longer, more in-depth games to keep themselves occupied.

But this could be taking playtime away from other genres.

2. Hyper-casual games are growing, but slower

Arcade-style, hyper-casual games have grown from 8% to around 10% since January, with playtime per user going from 71 minutes at the start of the year, to 81 minutes in March for the top 2%.

We expected to see a bigger increase here, but this small rise could be because content is limited. If players want to stifle the boredom, there just might not be enough content in a hyper-casual game to entertain them for long enough. They might hit the end relatively quickly, especially as the genre is meant to be short and sweet. You don’t need a snackable game when you’re starving.

3. Arcade games are converting well

The genre peaked at around 3% conversion. Perhaps this is because of the increased playtime, and so more users are looking to buy their way into ad-free experiences or to play for longer with more lives and turns.

4. But other games have dropped

Action, adventure, puzzle and casual games all saw a small drop in conversion of about 1%, going from 5.6% earlier in the year to about 4.6% now. (That’s based on the top 2% of games.)

There’s a very similar pattern when you go to mid-core games: their conversion dipped and then started to recover in the last few days.

It’s hard to say if people are sticking to a game

Knowing when people are dropping off your game is important. But this is such a fast-moving crisis that we just don’t yet have the data to know how it’s affected retention.

D7 retention has dropped from 30% to 26% across the industry. We’ll keep an eye on it and see if this is a trend or a blip. This could just be that people are trying lots of games, before they settle onto one. Or maybe they’re ploughing through the content much quicker than usual.

We’re at a time where people are playing more than ever. It’s perfectly possible that our time-frames are getting squeezed: where a player who would spend a month on your game can get through the same content in a week.

Delve into your own genre

The second approach we took was by using the same filters that are available to you in Benchmarks+. We’re just looking at the tip of the iceberg here, so if you’d like to learn more about accessing these insights and how they could help you stay in tune with industry changes, you can find out more and book a demo here.

After taking a break from elf duties last year, we decided to join forces with Devdog again, and co-organize the fourth edition of the largest daily Christmas Giveaway for the Unity game dev community.

This year, there are over 60 sponsors and 1,100 gifts to giveaway, adding up to a prize pool of $60,000+. What’s best, it’s completely free to enter. Simply sign up to Devdog’s newsletter list, and wait and see!

Here are just a couple of the prizes you can win:

• Games industry conference tickets (Nordic Game Jam, for example)
• Unity Store assets (such as Bolt, NG Tools Pro, Corgi Engine, Odin etc)
• And much more…

So far, developers have won over 200+ prizes from partners like Kronnect, Gamemaster Audio, Ludiq, Code Stage, and RPGWHITELOCK, with a lot more coming over the next few weeks. Don’t miss out, sign up for free here.

So, how does the Christmas Giveaway work?

1. You sign up to Devdog’s e-newsletter.
2. And then between December 1st – 25th:
   • Every day, Devdog will randomly draw a set of winners and let them know that they’ve won by e-mail.
   • Each participant will receive a daily update on who won and what they can win the following day.

To top things off – Devdog went to Mars!

Yes, that’s right. In short, The Department of Space Physics in the Czech Republic has accepted Alchemy Studios’ Matteo Bosi’s (one of Devdog’s long-time sponsors) music in sending it to Mars! And in this #UnityChristmas, you have the opportunity to vote and get his music transmitted back to Earth. Read the full story here.

Devdog has also published the #1 most popular tool in the Unity asset store, Odin Inspector, if that isn’t impressive enough. After speaking with this year’s organizers, we can confirm that there will definitely be prizes from this platform.

Good luck to everyone who is participating, and a huge thank you to the Devdog team for organizing such a special Christmas!

Back in October, we held our second Making Hit Casual Games event, this time focusing on idle games. As usual, we invited the best minds within this particular genre, and was joined by idle experts Homa Games and Kolibri Games. If you would like to see what expert advice they shared, you can find a copy of their decks and recordings here.

But for this post, we’ll be digging into our very own session ‘The Latest Trends for Idle Games”, while seeing how idle particularly compares to the hyper-casual genre. Here’s a copy of the recording, if you’d prefer to watch instead.

A bit about our data

We featured a heck of a lot of insights in this talk, with aggregated data from over 1.2 billion monthly players, across 80K games from Q3 2018 through to Q2 2019. For this session, we primarily showcased our data in two different plot points: time-series (for trends), and stacked bar charts (for genre benchmarks). They both show a number of different quantiles (bottom 25%, median, top 25% etc).

We’ve actually just launched an interactive dashboard featuring our large dataset, which lets you filter down by genre level for up to the top 5% of games. Check it out for yourself here.

Now that you’re familiar with our graph types, let’s dig in…

TLDR; Stats at a glance

• Players of idle games show a stickiness of 18% (whereas it’s 10.5% for hyper-casual titles).
• Idle gamers show a higher number of sessions per day (5.3 sessions vs 4.6 sessions in hyper-casual titles).
• They have a higher average session length than hyper-casual – 8 minutes.
• There’s a steady decrease in retention for idle games (a sign that the market is growing).
• Idle is the leading performer within the Arcade genre (their position stays within the top 5 from D1 to D28).
• Their average revenue per daily active user (ARPDAU) is 9 times as much as the hyper-casual genre.

Idle gamers play longer and more frequently than hyper-casual players

When we look at the daily active users (DAU) of both genres alone, hyper-casual games seem to be taking the lead – especially when a hyper-casual title in the top 25% can have over 70K active users on an average day.

But what idle games lack in DAU, they make up in session length and stickiness. For example, players in this genre are more engaged. They play marginally more sessions per day (5.3) than hyper-casual gamers (4.6 per day).

And when we looked at stickiness, we found out idle games are showing a much higher stickiness (18%) and are in the lead within the Arcade genre. Which means players are returning regularly. We also saw that players actually spend twice as much time per session than the hyper-casual genre. Their average session length is 8 minutes, whereas it’s only 4.5 minutes for hyper-casual.

In short, hyper-casual may have more users playing every day, idle gamers are more engaged, and actually play more frequently than hyper-casual players. For anyone making an idle game, perhaps keep this in mind when developing your games’ average session time. If it doesn’t last for up to 8 minutes, then it may not be enough for your players.

A steady decrease in retention for idle titles

For retention, the top 25% of idle games take the lead right from D1 – reaching as high as 42%. And in general, retention also appears to be always rising above the median – which is around 35-36%. Comparing the retention rate for idle against the overall Arcade genre, we can see that it’s generally easier for this genre to retain users.

If we dive a little deeper and look at D7 retention for all the subgenres within the Casual category, idle drops to third place (14.5%) –  falling behind Word & Trivia (17%) and Match3 (18%). By day 28, this category slips to fifth place (5.5%) but still ends up outperforming the rest of the sub-genres within the Arcade category again.

In a nutshell, there has been a steady decrease in retention for idle games, which could be interpreted as a possible sign that the idle market is not only growing in size, but also in competition.

If you see your D28 retention decreasing, then it’s worth focusing your attention on game content. As Nate Barker from Kolibri Games has put it in his session, keeping your players engaged is a way of keeping your retention healthy. He also added a list of things that you can do to keep players hooked on your title (see lesson #7).

If you’re interested in learning more about how you can boost your game’s retention and engagement, have a look at these five key lessons as well.

Monetize this – Idle’s IAP upper hand

Idle plays the IAP game better than a large number of genres. How so? The genre is more at home with this kind of revenue stream, so much so that we estimate as many as 37% of Idle games primarily monetize using this strategy. It’s something of an outlier compared to other genres, as the nearest best-performer at IAPs is Shoot ‘Em Ups, of which 27% use IAPs.

To put this into perspective, just 5% of hyper-casual games are able to work this way. And as Idle has almost double the time to play with (thanks to those longer sessions), it’s worth pushing those IAPs out.

As mentioned in Kolibri’s session, you should base your monetization strategy on ‘pay or wait’. But it’s important to keep new content going out if you are going to do this, or risk your retention taking a hit.

How does your game perform compared to its genre?

In this post,  we took a quick look at how idle and hyper-casual games have been performing for metrics like engagement, retention, and monetization from Q3 2018 to Q2 2019. If you’re interested in diving deeper and seeing how your own mobile game compares to its genre, then you should definitely check out our new mobile gaming intelligence platform, Benchmarks+.

Psst… To celebrate the launch, we’re actually offering a 30% discount to all users who sign up by Dec 5th. You can learn more about all of our current features and capabilities here.

If you have any questions or would like to get in touch to chat more about our event series or Benchmarks+, feel free to ping us at insights@gameanalytics.com. Our next event will be on Puzzlers, which we’re hoping to host again in London either February/March.