Mobile Game

Facebook and online game developers need to watch their players carefully to ensure success. The result is a new generation of companies that social gaming analysis. This is what he knows about your favorite game you freemium

Picture this. You 're in a deep commitment of the many free-to-play adventure games available online, if you decide to buy a bigger sword. It could be that you have the tactical decision to expand your arsenal, or that you panic when you see a giant dragon lumbering toward you, you might not even know why you did it. You have just imagined a bigger sword. But this action has to be under two percent of free-to-play gamers who actually pay for content - and the game makers want to know why.

The Freemium gaming business is expanding rapidly. We all know about the Facebook Behemoth Zynga, which now claims over 250 million monthly players, and is valued somewhere between $ 5-10 billion. But online, there are dozens of global companies Hawking a series of in-depth gaming experience. It is the German publisher and operator of the portal Bigpoint, the massively multiplayer browser game runs like Legend: Legacy of the Dragons and claimed Battlestar Galactica Online and, more than 150 million subscribers. There are Korean Webzen veteran with his long-running fantasy role-player game Mu Online, which alone has 56 million users. In addition to these giants, there are dozens of new freemium social, browser and phone games start to win every month, looking for a foothold in the crowded market.

And what the big players have learned that come with a big game concept is just the beginning. A successful free-to-play game is all about inspection and iteration, it is to us already, quietly, watching for review and fine-tune the experience all the time how the players respond, listening, feedback and re-building. This is how the likes of PopCap and Playfish came at super-addictive titles such as Fifa superstars and Plants vs. Zombies. And now an entirely new business segment is being created to provide developers an understanding of their players.

Alan Miller has in the games industry for over 30 years. He was one of the first programmers Atari \ join 's home console business, and he later Activision, which is currently the world \ cofounder largest third-party game publishers. For the past ten years, though he 's work in the online space, including a stint working with other advergames Atari Legend David Crane. Earlier this year he was playing in Analytics, a new UK based company specializing in the data mining and monetization of online games. It 'sa real-time service that continuously monitors every player in a virtual world, it' s in order to work. It 's constantly monitored by CCTV as psychologists and statisticians.

In his experience, it's rarely great big design errors that trip up growing freemium games – it's tiny, often over-looked alterations. "We're working with a big MMO at the moment. We studied the last five years of their operations and we noticed that there was a huge change in just one month in the retention rate of new players. It turned out the publisher had made just one change that caused the game to be less appealing for newcomers - they didn't even notice it; this is one of their worlds! So now they're trying to digest that information and work out what they did wrong."

It's a strange business. In the free-to-play universe, every player action is a potential metric in a revenue model. In-game behaviour is an algorithm that needs to be unraveled and de-coded. Developers have to operate like a sort of secret police agency, effectively bugging players – the Playmetrix software allows them to embed 'call backs' into their game code that trigger when players do something of interest. This is all visualised via graphics and charts so activities become infographics. It sounds kind of sinister, but understanding every intricate player activity is what makes a game in this sector successful. With no financial outlay at the beginning, players have much less impetus to keep playing; hence, 'funnel analysis' – tracking a player from the moment they register, though their actions in the game, to their first purchase. At any moment along this journey they may quit out. Understanding this is the key to lowering the dreaded 'attrition rate' – the numbers of people leaving the game.

But it's not just about data mining and statistics. Miller argues that good freemium analysts have to know about traditional game design too. "Let's say that in a certain MMO there are ten common behaviour patterns that ultimately result in players becoming paying customers. Clearly, our identification of these patterns won't account for every player, but they'll account for significant groups of players that went through the process. And we might discover that along the chain of events that lead to monetisation, the player has to, say, kill a dragon. Well, we can identify bottlenecks and say well maybe 89% of the players who tried to kill that dragon failed. Then we would advise the publisher to reduce the threshold. That's a combination of using the analytical tools coupled with our experience of game design to improve the situation for both the publishers and the players."

So why isn't this sort of analysis part of every social or online game? Johnson reckons it's down to cost and time. "Some developers have rolled their own solution but they are generally ad-hoc and fairly crude. Producing meaningful analysis capabilities isn't trivial - segmentation, funnels and cohort analysis requires a lot of thought and before you know it you're dealing with scalability, uptime commitments and a whole host of technical and operational issues that are far removed from creatively delivering a game." He likens the use of third-party analytics software to licensing a 3D engine like Unreal – it's about freeing up time and resources within the development process.