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DevelopmentExclusive Interviews

Vasiliy Sabirov: Making Games Better with Analytics

September 19, 2018 — by Catherine Quinton

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Vasiliy Sabirov is Lead Analyst at devtodev, a full-cycle analytics platform that helps developers to improve their games. Vasiliy has seven years of experience in game analytics and describes his transition to devtodev as smooth and effortless. He began as a business analyst, then worked in a B2B service for games. He followed that with working for a game development company and from there to devtodev.

Making Decisions That Mean Something

Vasiliy Sabirov is Lead Analyst for devtodev

Vasiliy’s work as Lead Analyst covers three major areas. The first is helping developers understand why analytics is so important to games and how analyzing their games can make them better. At devtodev, this has included writing books, hosting webinars and, most recently, launching a free online course in game analytics. Vasiliy also participates in international gamedev events as a guest speaker, something that involves a great deal of travel and offers opportunities to exchange ideas and opinions with other professionals.

His second major area of responsibility is creating and improving the devtodev platform. He generates ideas for reports that are useful for different game projects in different genres and that help developers understand the meaning behind the numbers in their games. And he is also responsible for analytics outsourcing for some of their clients.

Vasiliy describes, “It is really important for me to feel that my decisions mean something and influence something for the best. And the more things I can influence, the faster those decisions are implemented, the better. I’m getting all those things working at devtodev.”

Kyiv 2017Video Coverage

Alexander Shlygin: Unity Goes Beyond | Casual Connect Video

April 2, 2018 — by Industry Contributions

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Among the key pillars is democratizing game developments and solving hard problems. - Alexander…Click To Tweet

By Arno Copley

Solution Consultant Alexander Shlygin for Unity spoke at Casual Connect Kyiv 2017 about Timeline and Cinemachine by Unity. These features include: post processing stack, analytis event tracker, totally new features for artists, numerous improvements in animation and more! In the talk entitled Unity 2017 and Beyond, Alexander provided an overview of all key features and improvements of the current Unity version. Get insights on what’s next with Unity by tuning in to the full session below.

USA 2018Video Coverage

Grant Cohen: Finding Your Most Effective Mobile Attribution Strategy | Casual Connect Video

February 24, 2018 — by Catherine Quinton

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How is mobile advertising working for you? Do you have an effective mobile attribution strategy? Today’s mobile advertising landscape is so complex that these questions might be difficult to answer. There are thousands of networks, publishers and sub-publishers that you must navigate to most efficiently reach the highest ROI.

If you feel you could use a little help figuring all this out, you couldn’t find a better person to ask than Grant Cohen. Grant is the General Manager at Kochava, a leading mobile measurement company. Kochava provides attribution and analytics services to many of the top apps.

At Casual Connect USA 2018, Grant presented the session Evolving Your Mobile Attribution Strategy in 2018. In it he explained how you can drive your 2018 success with fraud prevention, configurable attribution and full funnel analysis. You can learn more about succeeding with mobile attribution, watch this video of Grant’s session.

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USA 2018Video Coverage

Nick Berry: Using Data Science to Succeed | Casual Connect Video

February 14, 2018 — by Catherine Quinton

Click To TweetI’ve picked up the skills more based on osmosis and common sense than from a classroom. - Nick Berry”

The majority of developer revenue comes from in-game micro transactions, with money that is spent inside games that are F2P. For the last six years, Nick Berry, Data Scientist, has sifted through the data of all the minnows and whales on every penny spent worldwide on every web-based game on Facebook. In this presentation from Casual Connect USA, he revealed what’s behind the curtain and present this data. Nick proclaimed, “If you have the greatest game in the world and no one knows about it, it is just the greatest game in the world that nobody knows about. Content is king! Distribution is God!” He also reminded the audience that, “It’s cheaper to bring somebody back from the dead than to find somebody new.

EventsIndustry

yellowHEAD to provide key UA insights at Casual Connect USA

July 14, 2017 — by Gamesauce Staff

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yellowHEAD will be on hand at Casual Connect USA this August in Seattle to provide developers and publishers with valuable insights on UA, ASO, SEO, and more. The company has a long and storied relationship with the conference, including recently at February’s European show where yellowHEAD Head of ASO Sagi Dekel discussed effective ASO strategies. At Casual Connect USA, Head of Social Ori Meiry will join a panel of experts on user acquisition and retention – where he will discuss yellowHEAD’s unique approaches to these topics and how they’ve helped others meet their marketing goals and grow their business.

The company also often hosts a booth at Casual Connect conferences – and Casual Connect USA will be no different. yellowHEAD Head of Growth Merav Katz Gershuni notes that it provides a dedicated space to meet game developers and publishers and discuss ways to help them succeed in their advertising and UA goals. “We’re also looking forward to meeting our clients and friends, catching up on their new games, and raising a glass or two to our fruitful cooperation,” Merav says of Casual Connect USA.

ContributionsIndustry

Behavioral Analytics: Understanding Player Behavior

July 13, 2017 — by Industry Contributions

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By Tsahi Levy, CMO, CoolaData

Today’s mobile gaming industry is thriving, with a rapidly growing number of players across the globe. According to Newzoo‘s Global Games Market Report, 2.2 billion gamers are expected to generate $108.9 billion in 2017, an increase of 7.8% compared to 2016. Mobile games are a marvel of code, challenging gaming operators at different levels: Dev teams must constantly deliver bigger and more complex updates, develop highly personalized systems, and keep up with trends like VR and synchronous multiplayer. Marketing teams are faced with high churn rates, and need to familiarize themselves with multiple user profiles, from whales through FTDs to annoying bonus abusers.

ContributionsIndustryResearch

5 Steps for Building the RIGHT Mobile Game

May 21, 2017 — by Industry Contributions

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By Peter Fodor, founder of AppAgent

Surprisingly, many developers invest enormous amounts of time, effort and resources in developing games or apps that are built on very shallow foundations. It’s great to have a strong product vision, but without understanding the market situation, competition, target group, acquisition costs and performance benchmarks, you are navigating blindly. As a result, it’s highly likely that you will run into trouble - wasting your time and your money in the process.

The cost of producing a mobile game has increased dramatically, and so have the marketing costs associated with getting your game noticed. Big publishers like Kabam work with strong IPs - Marvel in this case – and budgets of around $14M per game. They also have a large user base waiting for new titles. If you’re looking to compete with these industry giants, it’s vital to start the journey by heading in the right direction.

ContributionsResearch

Predictive Analytics in Games

May 12, 2017 — by Industry Contributions

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By devtodev analysts, Vera Karpova and Vasiliy Sabirov

Currently, product analytics reached a sufficiently high level of development. Many analytical systems are equipped with a variety of tools that will tell in detail how users behave in the application: when they buy, where they live, how much they cost for the company and how they leave.

These tools have become a part of daily life, regular monitoring; assistants in the decision-making process - now it is a must-have for any project.

Funnels and segments don’t surprise anybody anymore, and as in any other business, having reached the top of one reveals a will to go further and improve.

In this regard, the sphere of analytics is no exception, and in the past few years a new kind of data analysis - predictive analytics - began to develop.

You’ll also have an idea of predictive analytics, if you monitor the metrics on a daily or even hourly basis.

For example, you know that usually at 12 a.m. there are about 20,000 users in your game, and today this indicator is much lower. It equals 15,000 users. You understand that there is a trend for decline, which means that it is necessary to find the cause as soon as possible and improve the situation before the indicator falls even more.

ContributionsPR & Marketing

19 Metrics You May Have Never Heard About

March 13, 2017 — by Industry Contributions

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By devtodev lead analyst Vasiliy Sabirov

Analytics in most cases is simply the monitoring of key metrics: DAU, MAU, WAU, ARPU, ARPPU and other abbreviations. Basic analytics metrics represent the 20% of the functional of analytic systems, which provide 80% of the result.

But are these 80% enough?

If not, then our article is for you. We will talk about some of the metrics that are also worthwhile to keep in mind if you want to fully understand all the processes that occur in your application.

Acquisition Metrics

So, users start to use your application. You measure the number of new users (New Users), the total number of users on a particular date (Total Users). You calculate the price to attract users (CPI), the effectiveness of your investment (ROI).

But in order to start the flow of traffic from the partner, first you have to find a partner, sign the contract (agreement with lawyers is often not so fast to be done), integrate and agree on everything. That is to spend both time and money either to pay your employees or on one-time payment to the partner (this also happens). Therefore we recommend to calculate not only the usual CPI, but also the effective cost of user acquisition (eCPI), which includes all third-party costs.

Accordingly, it is better to calculate ROI by putting eCPI in the denominator. Thus, you get eROI. And it may well be so, that on the basis of eCPI and eROI you choose completely different partners.

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