How do you know if your game is performing well?

How do you know if your game is performing well?

You’ve built your mobile game, developed your graphics and sound effects, published to app stores, and you’re getting downloads. Fantastic! But how do you know if the people who downloaded your game are actually playing it? And if they are, for how long, and is there a point in your game where your players lose interest and “drop off”? Knowing is better than guessing, and Blazesoft’s backend as a service takes the guessing right out of it.

Player retention

Getting players to download your game is an important first step, but it’s just that – a first step. There is a big difference between a user who downloads your game and plays it once and a user who keeps coming back, unlocks achievements, plays several games, and spends time with your app. It’s pretty hard to monetize a one-time player, and much easier to monetize a dedicated one. In a nutshell, the better your app’s player retention, the more successful your app can be a achieving your goals.

With Blazesoft’s game backend, the ability to easily track player retention is built right into you game from the beginning, allowing you to quickly understand what proportion of your players stick with your game over time. If only 10% of your players continue to play your game after the first day they downloaded it, for example, you know that for some reason your game isn’t enticing players to return (you would hope that your Day 1, or D1, retention is at least 40%, because you can expect your retention rate to fall off to some extent over time). With our service you can track retention for D1, D7, D14, D30, or any custom timeframes to better understand how your game is performing over time.

Player engagement and lifetime value (LTV)

Knowing your player retention rates is incredibly important, and once you have a good understanding of your retention, it’s time to drill down further. You’ve figured out how to get your players to return to your game, but how much time are they spending with it? Are they progressing through your levels? If your app has several games in it, are your users actually playing all of them, and which are most popular? Are your users earning achievements too quickly or too slowly? These are all indicators of player engagement, and Blazesoft’s game backend makes it easy to know all of this all through our intuitive CRM.

And finally, while keeping your eye and player retention and engagement are critical to understanding the performance of your game, they are all a means to an end: understanding and optimizing average user lifetime value (LTV). Having a game that users keep coming back to and engage with is converted to high monetization if these players also make in-game purchases throughout their relationship with your game. Games that do this have a high average LTV – your ultimate monetization goal. With Blazesoft’s gaming platform you can easily know, track, and optimize your game’s LTV.

And there you have it. With Blazesoft’s backend as a service, know everything you need to know to take your game from published to successful.

Thanks for your interest in our Blazesoft gaming platform, stay tuned for more feature posts! If you would like a free live demo of the Blazesoft backend as a service interface, we encourage you to contact us to book your demo.