In today’s digital landscape, analytics play a crucial role in the success of any industry. While analytics have been widely adopted in various sectors, the gaming industry has also recognized their importance. Game developers are now leveraging analytics solutions to gain valuable insights into player behavior, improve game performance, and drive revenue growth. With numerous analytics solutions available in the market, selecting the right one can be a challenging task.
This article aims to simplify the decision-making process by highlighting the four best analytics solutions for games in 2023. From highly accurate data collection to advanced player segmentation and engagement analytics, these solutions are tailored to meet the specific needs of game developers and help them elevate their gaming experiences to new heights. Whether you are an indie developer or a large gaming studio, this article has got you covered with the top analytics solutions that are shaping the future of the gaming industry.
The best analytics solutions for game developers
- Game Analytics for simple dashboard and ease of integration
- Google Analytics for ease of integration and easy to use interface
- Unity Game Insights and Analytics for easy integration with Unity engine
- Getgud.io for ease of integration, a variety of features and an AI-driven analytics approach
What makes a great analytics tool?
Several factors drive the increasing importance and adoption of game analytics in the gaming industry:
- Player-Centric Approach: Game analytics allow developers to gain valuable insights into player behavior and preferences. By understanding how players interact with their games, developers can tailor experiences, create targeted marketing campaigns, and optimize game mechanics to enhance player satisfaction and retention.
- Data-Driven Decision Making: Game analytics provide developers with a wealth of data and metrics, enabling them to make informed decisions. Whether it’s adjusting difficulty levels, refining game mechanics, or identifying areas for improvement, data-driven decision making helps developers create more engaging and successful games.
- Revenue Optimization: Analytics solutions help identify monetization opportunities within games. By analyzing player spending patterns, identifying high-value players, and optimizing in-game purchases, developers can boost their revenue streams and maximize their return on investment.
- Continuous Improvement: Game analytics allow developers to gather feedback on gameplay performance and identify improvement areas. By monitoring key metrics and tracking player feedback, developers can implement updates, bug fixes, and feature enhancements to continuously improve the game experience.
- Competitive Advantage: In a highly competitive gaming market, analytics provide a competitive edge. By understanding player preferences and market trends, developers can create unique and differentiated games that stand out among the competition.
- Live Operations: Game analytics enable developers to monitor real-time player activity, identify issues or bottlenecks, and provide timely updates or fixes. This live operations approach ensures that games stay up-to-date, relevant, and engaging to players, leading to increased player loyalty and retention.
Overall, game analytics empower developers to build better games, optimize revenue streams, and create more satisfying experiences for players. As the gaming industry continues to evolve, leveraging analytics becomes essential for developers to stay competitive and deliver exceptional gaming experiences.
The best game analytics solutions at a glance
| Name | Best for | Stand-out feature | Price |
|---|---|---|---|
| Game Analytics | Easy setup and integration, insights on user behavior, ad event tracking, error alerts, customizable events, and first-party analytics | Comprehensive overview of entire game portfolio. Supports 30+ game engines and services. | Core analytics is free |
| Google Analytics | Track how players interact with the game, type of hardware they are using, screen resolutions and operating systems. | Easy integration, widespread | Free |
| Unity Game Insights and Analytics | Deep data insights, real-time secure data, dynamic reporting and insights, understanding game performance and player behaviors, A/B testing, event tracking. | Easy integration with Unity | Free |
| Getgud.io | AI-driven approach, dynamic dashboard with 1000+ custom metrics and insights targeting your specific game. | Advanced In-game analytics that allow you understand everything about your game, including map and level analytics. | Starting from $50/month for small games |
Game Analytics
GameAnalytics provides a 4-step setup guide for a quick start. Its powerful suite of analytics tools supports data-driven decision-making, offering insights into player behavior and interactions, game design issues, and event analysis. It enables testing of design assumptions, execution of data-backed updates, and monitoring of real-time in-game performance.
The platform provides a suite of tools to keep a close eye on player behavior, spot game design issues, drill down into events, run growth experiments, and centralize your insights. It offers customizable tracking for every game interaction, including business events, resource events, progression events, error events, design events, ad events, and impression events.
Apart from data collection and analysis, GameAnalytics imparts valuable insights through well-researched reports, case studies, exclusive interviews, and relevant market commentary.
To integrate with GameAnalytics:
- Choose one of the supported integrations for data collection – using an SDK or Collection API. The integration setup for SDK varies based on the game engine you are using.
- Configuring integration with supported Attribution providers helps filter analytics by acquisition source while integrating mediation partners enables collection of Impression Level Revenue Data. To support manual data collection, the Collection API can be used when there isn’t an SDK.
You can check full set up guide here.
Google Analytics
Google Analytics is a powerful tool for developers, especially in the realm of game analytics. You can use Google Analytics to understand your players better, get insights on their hardware choices, screen resolutions, operating systems, and other crucial data.
For many, Google Analytics is a familiar tool used extensively for tracking web and mobile app data. However, it seems less utilized for desktop software, likely due to the lack of an easily integrated pre-packaged solution like SDKs used for iOS and Android apps.
To integrate with Google Analytics:
- Create a Google Analytics account (if you don’t already have one), set up a new tracking property and obtain a tracking ID, and then send data hits to Google Analytics using HTTP through the Measurement Protocol.
- Facilitate communication with Google Analytics via HTTP POST requests, using the open-source library libCURL to accomplish this. Using this library, you can send data to Google Analytics including the game version and operating system information.
- Additionally, all requests to Google Analytics must include certain parameters such as Protocol Version, Tracking ID, Client ID, and Hit Type. To ensure Google Analytics recognizes data as coming from a single user, it is crucial to always send the Client ID parameter with each HTTP request.
Google Analytics can track various hits, ranging from basic page views to more specific events like transactions, social interactions, and exceptions. Developers can effectively mark the beginning and end of a game session using the start and end commands, which can indicate when a player started and finished playing.
However, it is crucial to adhere to Google’s stipulated frequency limits, like not sending data more often than once every two seconds and limiting to 500 events per session.
Game analytics with Google Analytics can be done asynchronously, with one part of the game filling a buffer of requests, and a separate thread processing these buffered requests and sending them to Google Analytics. This ensures that the sending speed is within Google’s accepted limits and doesn’t exceed the set quotas.
Overall, integrating Google Analytics into your game can provide you with valuable insights into how your players interact with your game. By understanding their behavior better, you can make adjustments and improvements to your game to improve the overall user experience.
Unity Game Insights and Analytics
Unity Analytics is a powerful platform that provides an end-to-end solution for deep data insights about a game. It facilitates game developers to comprehend game performance and player behaviors better. With Unity Analytics, developers can collect, analyze, and understand valuable player data and use it to optimize their games, improve player engagement, and monetize more effectively.
Primarily, Unity Analytics focuses on tracking player behavior and game performance. The platform captures insights quickly using prebuilt dashboards and visualizations powered by reliable, real-time data. Then developers can apply these insights to improve their project and make it more compelling and engaging for the audience.
Unity Analytics offers dynamic reporting and insights. Developers can track important data for their game with custom audiences, events, and flexible reporting. They can create unique and dynamic reports using SQL data explorer and data visualizations using funnels.
To integrate with Unity Game Analytics:
- Within Unity, navigate to the window, proceed to General and open up the services tab.
- Create the Unity project ID.
- Once the project has been created, open up the analytics option and enable it.
- After the analytics have been enabled, developers can then code the specific events that they want to track. This could be tracking player deaths, wins, or other custom events.
- After the implementation, developers would need to wait for a few hours to a day for the stats to show up in the dashboard.
Once the system is set up, Unity Analytics allows game developers to analyze a variety of statistics. Be it gameplay events, monetization, game crashes, or player behavior patterns, Unity Analytics serves as a valuable tool for developers to understand their players and continuously enhance their gaming experience.
Getgud.io
Getgud.io is a game observability platform offering unparalleled gaming analytics that is set to revolutionize the industry. It brings in-depth insights by analyzing in-game player behavior, paving the way for developers to make more informed decisions.
Getgud.io provides granular data on various essential aspects, such as player activity, retention, playtime, daily active users (DAU), player reputation, and Lifetime Value (LTV) reports. It offers unique features like player hit-maps, statistics, in-match trends, and behaviors. Additionally, it presents an online First-Person Shooter (FPS) Modeler for all your streamed matches, literally allowing you to “see” your players.
Achieving game balance is a pivotal part of any gamer’s experience, and Getgud.io is designed to provide detailed insights that can help developers achieve a more nuanced balance in terms of character and weapon damage statistics and team matchmaking balance reports.
The platform also offers valuable information, such as which weapon or character is favored by players, or what map or mode gets the most playtime, answering essential questions profound to game development and marketing. It also suggests strategic elements like where the loot boxes should be dropped in-map to get the most exposure and the typical movement and exposure patterns of players.
What sets Getgud.io apart is its commitment to protect games from toxicity. It analyzes in-match player behavior autonomously to identify toxic ones, from griefers like campers, spawn killers, and boosters, to cheaters, including aimbotters, wallhackers, and speedhackers.
Moreover, Getgud.io serves as a server-side solution with no client-side interference. This approach ensures game performance doesn’t degrade and supports all FPS games across various platforms, including PC, PlayStation, Xbox, and mobile.
To integrate Getgud:
- Start by requesting access to the Getgud Beta to receive the integration package.
- The integration process involves feeding data into the Getgud platform using a simple SDK which supports multiple programming languages and most common game development platforms.
- Once the data is fed, Getgud begins analyzing player behaviors and detecting fraud.
- You gain access to analytical tools, including Getgud Modeler, Dashboard, and Webhooks, which allow you to take immediate action and better understand your game.
By implementing Getgud.io, developers can expect to decrease player churn rate significantly and significantly improve player retention. Moreover, its robust tools and real-time analytics can help create a more balanced, inclusive, and toxicity-free gaming environment.
Conclusion
In conclusion, the dynamic nature of the gaming industry calls for detailed and robust analytics. The use of game and player analytics is no longer a luxury, but a necessity for any game developer wanting to succeed in this competitive environment. Understanding players’ behavior, their preferences, and how they interact with the game is key to optimized game design, improved engagement, and maximizing revenue.
Moreover, analytics solutions like Getgud.io, provide valuable data-driven insights that help in decision-making, game performance enhancement, and player retention. By implementing these analytics solutions, developers can fine-tune their gaming experiences, satisfy their players, and ultimately succeed in the market landscape. With such informational powers, developers are better equipped to deliver engaging and satisfying experiences that resonate with players’ expectations and lead the game towards success.
