Lean analytics by Will Perone, CTO at Wicked Fun. Wicked Fun is a design driven game studio founded by industry veterans Terry Redfield and Will Perone. Discover all the shortcuts it's taken to get the biggest 'bang for the buck' in regard to analytics, supporting systems, and staffing

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3. Lean Analytics
Will Perone
CTO & Cofounder
August 2015

4. 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

5. State of Wicked Fun
• Venture backed
• 16 employees
• Cross-platform real time multiplayer game
• Pre-revenue
• Iterating the product fast
• Iterating UA/Marketing fast

6. A Conundrum
Be as lean as possible
Iterate as fast as possible
Execute the highest quality bar possible

7. 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

8. 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

9. 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)

10. 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

11. 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

12. 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

13. Questions?
will@wickedfun.com
@willperone

14. JOIN IN THE CONVERSATION PARTICIPATE IN THE NEXT GIAF
Analytics for Games events@deltaDNA.com
www.deltaDNA.com/GIAF