GameAnalytics

What do you like best?

Cost is free! The sdk is easy to integrate. It's designed with gaming in mind so they have already predefined data structures. Liked their resources data model to track sources and sinks for monitoring your economy. They also offer benchmarks against your peer set which is interesting to see how you compare with other games in your genre.

They offer the following dashboards:

- Engagement

- Benchmarks

- Resources (economy)

- Monetization (rev)

- Progression (leveling up)

- Ads

- Quality (can report errors in the game)

- Remote config

- Funnels

- A/B testing capability

What do you dislike?

Since it's free, support is weak to non-existence. You can email support but it will take awhile to get a response.

There's several bugs on the dashboard when drilling down on analytics which make it sometimes frustrating to use.

There's some data export capabilities but not always in the format or granularity needed.

It's going through revamps so parts of the dashboard is old whereas other parts are revamped and sometimes the transitions between sections are jarring if not just broken.

It's a work in progress where it feels there's good stuff there but does need some more investments to be really great.

Recommendations to others considering the product:

It's worth evaluation and integrating but don't rely on it for your sole data source (you really get what you pay for). For game specific metrics it's not bad but they do need to fix some of their analytics explorer bugs to be useful and be able to drill down to identify issues.

For overall dashboards and a secondary source it's a good choice.

What problems are you solving with the product? What benefits have you realized?

Overall dashboards are good and can be useful for:

1) a secondary data source as a sanity check on key metrics

2) resource tracking, the data model offers several layers of granularity which is good to identify any leaks or issues in the economy

3) they also offer industry comparison benchmarks which may or may not be that useful

4) the monetization dashboard offers automatic IAP tracking as well as key high-level KPIs, however to do deep cohort/segmentation on payers is difficult or not possible

5) progression is a useful tool to understand players progression in the game and areas players maybe getting stuck or areas of the game which requires re-tuning