Numerical characteristics of online games
8 years ago, a small team of developers, almost former students, decided to make their first big game, as it seemed to them then. They performed all the functions interspersed. And game design, and programming, and art. Who that was able. The resulting game was called Retribution. It was a browser. It showed good results: revenues from the game increased from a few dozen to hundreds of thousands of rubles in the first months. For a group of several people this is already some kind of money. In this mode, the game lasted about a year. And then the audience began to decline, income began to fall. The developers thought: "Probably not enough content." The game was content-dependent, i.e. constantly lived on updates. They put pressure, began to produce more locations, objects, levels, artisan recipes - everything that they did before. But users continued to leave anyway. And it was not clear why this is happening. As a result, the project, having existed for three years, was closed - sooner or later such an end awaits all online games.
Art character browser game Retribution
Then we did not realize how important the analyst and understanding of the processes that go within the game. Acting intuitively, we did everything to make the game die faster, although correcting the situation and donating the project one more year was not so difficult. Now we already understand it. I would like to tell you about the importance of analytics in online projects.
So, first of all, analytics is necessary to understand the essence of the current situation that has developed within the online game. The same can be said about any other online project, such as an online store, forum or entertainment portal. The analyst offers the developer to look at the gaming community and the game as a whole as a complex mathematical system, the dynamics of which in some approximation are described by fairly simple models. Secondly, when we understand what is happening in the game, we set ourselves the goal - to influence the processes. There is a need to understand what indicators you need to have and how to reach the calculated values.
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Let's start with conversions. The term "conversion" refers to any action that we want to get from the player, or rather, the proportion of players who have committed the desired action relative to the total number of people who could have committed it. For example, the most banal - conversion to registration. So that a person went to the site or application, and then registered. Accordingly, we consider the proportion of registered visitors from all visitors. Say, 10% of registered users is a good value. In some games, it is much higher, in some lower. Conversions are very dependent on the platform on which the game is focused. In mobile games, some conversions, in browser and social networks - others.
In browser games, the total conversion may be higher than in those where the user must download the client part. However, it happens the other way around. For example, many European gaming portals, such as Kongregate, recommend their users to abandon Google Chrome. It would seem a very popular browser. And the reason is very simple: Chrome has stopped supporting Java Runtime, a plugin used by individual games. As a result, games running on these portals are blocked. Therefore, they recommend switching to Internet Explorer 11 or Firefox. This happens very often, the problem is serious. For example, several years ago we collected statistics and found that the Unity browser plugin was not installed by almost any user. Now the situation has changed. But the Flash Player Unity plugin is still far away. Flash coverage is very good: most users have a Flash plugin. Nevertheless, we remember a number of other problems associated with its support, especially on mobile platforms. On such things, projects lose a significant part of the audience.
When we talk about conversions, we need to understand that excluding one type of conversion does not automatically increase the total conversion to its value. For example, half of people fall off on registrations. Let's do the so-called deferred registration. So that a person does not need to enter a login, password, and so on. He clicks "Play", he is assigned an ID, and that's it. It would seem that everyone should immediately get into the game, and the total conversion should increase. In fact, practice shows that users who have not fallen off during registration fall off later. Therefore, the total conversion will increase not by 50%, but significantly lower.
Art from the download page of the game Panzar
When I worked in the studio Panzar, we conducted a study of the audience of the same client game. We did a pending registration procedure for her when the user downloads a special launcher program. She weighed about 10 MB and automatically started downloading the rest of the content, the person did not need to do anything. He could register directly in the launcher or launch the client without registering, and it was not necessary to register on the site. It seemed to us that this would increase conversions, more people would install the game and launch it. But it turned out the opposite - the situation has worsened. For ourselves, we explained this by a decrease in motivation. When a person gets something for free, and he does not make any effort even to register, then parting with it is much easier. Many users did not even download the client part. When we returned the usual, classic registration, the percentage of the game that went on to increase significantly. We set up experiments with deferred registration on different traffic channels in order to eliminate the induced effect.
Another conversion that needs to be mentioned is the conversion to a paying audience. This is one of the very important values, indicating what proportion of the active audience regularly makes payments. Conversion to a paying audience usually does not take into account the so-called random payers. They are classified according to the frequency of making payments and the size of the average check. There is a terminology in the gaming community that compares the payer with the inhabitants of the ocean. So "whales" are those who make the maximum payments, often multi-million. Such an audience is very small, no more than 5% of all paying players. But the revenue from them can be significant and depends on the specific game. Usually whales make a significant contribution to the income of projects with the Asian monetization model.
Speaking of conversions, we should not forget about the so-called “effective registration” or “effective loading”. By this most often means the user who came into the game a second time during a certain period. Such a person is considered to be an effective registration or, in other words, an active player. Criteria are platform dependent. For example, in the mobile segment, if a person just launched the game a second time, then most often he is already considered active. We are interested in measuring, first of all, the volume of the active audience, and not the total number of registrations or downloads in a project. When we speak simply about the traffic that came to our website or to the entrance gates of the game, this does not give us any important information that can be used. Therefore, criteria such as DAU, WAU, MAU, etc., describing the size of the active audience, are often introduced. That is Daily Active Users - the number of active players per day, per week, per month.
It is clear that in client games we can operate with monthly periods. Mobile games use shorter periods of time. But these are not the only characteristics describing the scope of our project. There are also such important values ​​as CCU and PCCU - the number of players online. Peak CCU - the maximum number for a certain period of time, say, per day. For different analytical tasks, it is advisable to use different characteristics, it all depends on the situation, on those calculations that we want to carry out and which values ​​we want to calculate. There is a definite relationship between MAU, DAU and CCU. Thanks to it, one can roughly derive one characteristic from another.
In addition to the size of the audience, we operate with such a group of statistical characteristics as “devotion” - involving the audience in the game process. There are different criteria for evaluating the project. Previously, they most often talked about such a value as retention, that is, about the ability of a game to accumulate an audience. You can calculate it differently. For example, to take the difference between the number of monthly audience at the beginning and end of the period, subtract all the traffic that came from advertising, the result attributed to the number of players who were at the beginning of the month - we get retention. If the retention of the project is 60%, this means that 60% of the audience at the beginning of the period reached the end of the period. This is the simplest definition. There are others.
Ret = (E - N) / S * 100%
Here E is the number of players at the end of the period, N is the number of new players acquired during the period, S is the number of players at the beginning of the period.
Recently, however, analysts are more inclined to the importance of another value, describing the loyalty of the audience. This is the so-called sticky-factor or “stickiness”. In fact, he describes how people like the game. For client, browser and some other games, it is considered to be considered as the ratio of DAU to MAU. It correlates with the number of days in the period during which the player enters the game relative to the entire period. For example, if all players enter the game every day of the month, then DAU = MAU, this is 100% stickiness, an ideal state. But this does not happen. Usually pretty cool when the sticky-factor is at 20%. For example, Mail.Ru Mini-games have extremely high stickiness for such a casual project. For many games of the company, this value varies in the region of 16-20%. Some hardcore client games, such as Allods Online, also have fairly high retention and stickiness rates. Equally high rates are able to generate social networks, a significant proportion of users of which visit such projects daily.
So, the sticky factor is calculated as the ratio of DAU to MAU and characterizes the involvement of the audience in the project, and retention characterizes the project's ability to accumulate an audience in itself. When they speak of “devotion,” other quantities are sometimes used. One of them is the churn rate - burnout or loss of an audience. This, in a sense, reverse retention is proportional to the departure of the audience.
It is necessary to understand that there is a natural obsolescence of the project - a period when all indicators start to fall. This is almost inevitable process. There are units of games on the market that can work for decades - for example, World of Warcraft.
However, counting conversions, audience size and loyalty is not enough. Not the last role in the group of statistical values ​​is played by the characteristics describing the virality of the project. For example, the so-called coefficient of attraction (virality). He describes the so-called word of mouth. It is believed that the project Angry Birds successfully gained its audience because of this. At the start, when the game was just launched, the project was not able to quickly gain popularity and audience, despite good marketing budgets. Only huge budgets and game pre-installation on a number of the latest mobile devices produced a viral effect. Many analysts agree that the "birds" so coolly gained an audience, having formed in the mass consciousness of the understanding that Angry Birds is a brand, something popular and everyday.
Let's take a closer look at the coefficient of attraction. When we pour into the game advertising traffic, its influence is not limited to the audience that came from advertising. The delayed effect is no less important for us: the audience that will come later thanks to this advertising traffic. In this case, the virality will work. For example, in the multiplayer session action Panzar, 50% of the audience that came to us from advertising traffic accounted for about 45% of the audience, which came at the expense of virality. The remaining 5% generated referral system. The figures are approximate, because as the project progressed and traffic sources changed, they significantly changed both towards an increase in the share of free traffic and vice versa. In a rough approximation, the traffic generated by the attraction ratio is the share of the traffic generated by advertising that came to the project later.
Fan Art by World of Warcraft
What is this strange mythical viral audience? For example, when a person looked at an advertising banner, but did not click on it. Then he drove the name of the game into the search engine, because he saw the advertisement more than once and it was deposited in his memory, and finally he wanted to come and see. Either a friend told a man playing in Panzar, and he went to inquire. Thus, we can say that advertising has a double effect. It leads not only direct traffic, but also creates a certain delayed “tail”, in which there will be viral traffic. Viral traffic is good because it has very high conversions. If the person entered the search engine himself, entered the name of the game, found it, read about it, or switched from some review, then, most likely, he is more interested than the player who simply clicked on the banner with the elf against the sawmill and “ I will give you on the fifth level. "
By the way, such banners do not work very well. But a good result was given by some mailings with busty, naked elves, which in some places were covered with boxes of gifts, and with a large “Take” button in the pelvic region. On such mailings, about 6% of the audience returned. And here we come to another parameter - the return coefficient. It also characterizes virality. Returned audiences often cost us much less than a new one from scratch. The same World of Warcraft sifted through itself so huge traffic that it became very expensive for them to attract new players. How can one estimate the value of a single player in WoW? The roughest grades can be obtained from referral. They have a system "Invite a friend." She gives a number of in-game bonuses. But the main thing is that if a friend whom you invite to the game pays for a monthly subscription, you will also receive a subscription for a month. Accordingly, it can be concluded that the cost of one player in WoW should be higher than the monthly subscription fee, since such a system is beneficial for the company. There is an opinion that 1.5 - 2 times. Since retention in WoW is quite high, and if a player subscribes, he pays several months at a time, and it’s conditional to pay 400 rubles for it — quite cheap for Blizzard.
In conclusion of the bloc on virality, let me remind you quite a captain's truth. Viral is translated as viral in English. So, the success of many viral mechanisms lies in the viral impact on the audience, suggesting that players will share information with each other.
Screenshot of the viral video "WoW Veterans"
The key monetization parameters are ARPU and ARPPU. Average Revenue Per User, i.e. The average income from any active player is like the average temperature in a hospital. ARPPU (Average Revenue Per Paying User) is the average income per payer. Again, by “payer” we mean someone who pays with a certain periodicity. If the user has made a payment only once in a lifetime, then we usually do not take it into account in these statistics. It is reasonable to assume that the simplest estimate of project profitability can be obtained by multiplying MAU by ARPU. This is a rather rough, but effective assessment.
Speaking of monetization, we also use the term “time before the first payment”, which is relevant in browser and client games. In mobile games in this regard, everything is quite bad. If a person has not paid in the first game sessions or on the first day, then most likely he will never pay. The sad truth of mobile games is that most players leave the project right away. Monthly retention of games on a mobile platform rarely exceeds 10-15%. In client games, this time can reach a week, but it very much depends on the game. In browser games - from 3 to 7 days, it happens more.
In addition to the described parameters, we also calculate the “shopping basket volume”. You can compare it with ARPPU and estimate, is it possible that a person does not pay us extra? And finally, there is such a thing as "price elasticity of demand." It means how much the demand for a particular paid service will change if the price for it increases or decreases by 1%. Here it is important to understand that in games, the elasticity of demand differs significantly from the real market. If the store doubles the price of the jacket, we will lose a large majority of the buyers. If the games double the cost of a service, then we can get a total increase in profitability by 20-30%. Even despite the fact that some of the audience will stop buying. With this, you should always experiment. For example, in Mail.Ru Mini-Games, the price of gold is recalculated with a given frequency, taking into account the elasticity of demand and the amount emitted within the framework of the shares of the paid currency.
We turn to the key parameters that describe the ability of the entire project to make a profit. One of them is LTV (Lifetime Value) - a lifetime income from a player, that is, how much money one player will bring us, one registration, for the entire existence of the game. We must compare this value with CPA (Cost Per Action), the cost of attracting a person to the project. And if it turns out that LTV exceeds CPA, then perhaps the project will pay off. Otherwise, the project is unprofitable.
Last in the list, but not least in importance monetization characteristic - ROI (Return On Investment). Sometimes they say ROR: Rate of Return. This is an indicator describing the total return on investment, that is, the payback of the project, taking into account the funds invested in it. Often we ask ourselves: how much money will our project bring if we invest a million in it? And two million? He will bring more money or revenue will not change? ROI just answers these questions. You can consider it by a simplified or complete formula. A full ROI calculation can be quite complicated. It depends on the specific costs of the project and sources of profit. In a simple embodiment, ROI is considered as:
ROI = (Income - Cost) / Investment
When we consider our entire project from the point of view of an analyst, game designer, the set of all the characteristics mentioned here is important to us. That is, the game is considered as a business process, at the entrance of which there is a certain main and additional traffic generated by the coefficient of attraction, there is traffic from the return of the audience, there is a funnel of input conversions that sifts our players, bringing to the active audience some of them; there is retention, which washes out the audience from the game, and that naturally loses some players monthly; There is ARPPU and the percentage of people paying us money. Enough cumbersome. Both game designers and analysts try to operate with all of these depending on specific tasks. Producers look at the game in the same way.
How does the investor look at the game? Is he interested in everything that is told here? In principle, the investor does not care about everything that was considered here. He has his own criterion, the “width of the entrance gate”. For a game designer, it doesn't matter how much money you can pour into a project. It is important to him how the project processes this money. Because he does not operate with the amount of funds, he operates with the game. And for the investor, the opposite is true. He has 200 billion dollars. He built Skolkovo, Moscow-City or invests in the Crimea. He has a lot of money. And your game is able to accumulate and process only 20-30 million dollars. Where to invest the rest of the money? Therefore, only two values ​​are important for him: this is the width of the entrance gate, how much he can invest in you, and ROI - how much he can get back.
Approaches of the developer and investor are fundamentally different.
All questions about the use of statistical values ​​in game design will be glad to answer in the comments.
Art character browser game Retribution
Then we did not realize how important the analyst and understanding of the processes that go within the game. Acting intuitively, we did everything to make the game die faster, although correcting the situation and donating the project one more year was not so difficult. Now we already understand it. I would like to tell you about the importance of analytics in online projects.
What is an analyst for?
So, first of all, analytics is necessary to understand the essence of the current situation that has developed within the online game. The same can be said about any other online project, such as an online store, forum or entertainment portal. The analyst offers the developer to look at the gaming community and the game as a whole as a complex mathematical system, the dynamics of which in some approximation are described by fairly simple models. Secondly, when we understand what is happening in the game, we set ourselves the goal - to influence the processes. There is a need to understand what indicators you need to have and how to reach the calculated values.
')
Conversion
Let's start with conversions. The term "conversion" refers to any action that we want to get from the player, or rather, the proportion of players who have committed the desired action relative to the total number of people who could have committed it. For example, the most banal - conversion to registration. So that a person went to the site or application, and then registered. Accordingly, we consider the proportion of registered visitors from all visitors. Say, 10% of registered users is a good value. In some games, it is much higher, in some lower. Conversions are very dependent on the platform on which the game is focused. In mobile games, some conversions, in browser and social networks - others.
In browser games, the total conversion may be higher than in those where the user must download the client part. However, it happens the other way around. For example, many European gaming portals, such as Kongregate, recommend their users to abandon Google Chrome. It would seem a very popular browser. And the reason is very simple: Chrome has stopped supporting Java Runtime, a plugin used by individual games. As a result, games running on these portals are blocked. Therefore, they recommend switching to Internet Explorer 11 or Firefox. This happens very often, the problem is serious. For example, several years ago we collected statistics and found that the Unity browser plugin was not installed by almost any user. Now the situation has changed. But the Flash Player Unity plugin is still far away. Flash coverage is very good: most users have a Flash plugin. Nevertheless, we remember a number of other problems associated with its support, especially on mobile platforms. On such things, projects lose a significant part of the audience.
When we talk about conversions, we need to understand that excluding one type of conversion does not automatically increase the total conversion to its value. For example, half of people fall off on registrations. Let's do the so-called deferred registration. So that a person does not need to enter a login, password, and so on. He clicks "Play", he is assigned an ID, and that's it. It would seem that everyone should immediately get into the game, and the total conversion should increase. In fact, practice shows that users who have not fallen off during registration fall off later. Therefore, the total conversion will increase not by 50%, but significantly lower.
Art from the download page of the game Panzar
When I worked in the studio Panzar, we conducted a study of the audience of the same client game. We did a pending registration procedure for her when the user downloads a special launcher program. She weighed about 10 MB and automatically started downloading the rest of the content, the person did not need to do anything. He could register directly in the launcher or launch the client without registering, and it was not necessary to register on the site. It seemed to us that this would increase conversions, more people would install the game and launch it. But it turned out the opposite - the situation has worsened. For ourselves, we explained this by a decrease in motivation. When a person gets something for free, and he does not make any effort even to register, then parting with it is much easier. Many users did not even download the client part. When we returned the usual, classic registration, the percentage of the game that went on to increase significantly. We set up experiments with deferred registration on different traffic channels in order to eliminate the induced effect.
Another conversion that needs to be mentioned is the conversion to a paying audience. This is one of the very important values, indicating what proportion of the active audience regularly makes payments. Conversion to a paying audience usually does not take into account the so-called random payers. They are classified according to the frequency of making payments and the size of the average check. There is a terminology in the gaming community that compares the payer with the inhabitants of the ocean. So "whales" are those who make the maximum payments, often multi-million. Such an audience is very small, no more than 5% of all paying players. But the revenue from them can be significant and depends on the specific game. Usually whales make a significant contribution to the income of projects with the Asian monetization model.
Audience size
Speaking of conversions, we should not forget about the so-called “effective registration” or “effective loading”. By this most often means the user who came into the game a second time during a certain period. Such a person is considered to be an effective registration or, in other words, an active player. Criteria are platform dependent. For example, in the mobile segment, if a person just launched the game a second time, then most often he is already considered active. We are interested in measuring, first of all, the volume of the active audience, and not the total number of registrations or downloads in a project. When we speak simply about the traffic that came to our website or to the entrance gates of the game, this does not give us any important information that can be used. Therefore, criteria such as DAU, WAU, MAU, etc., describing the size of the active audience, are often introduced. That is Daily Active Users - the number of active players per day, per week, per month.
It is clear that in client games we can operate with monthly periods. Mobile games use shorter periods of time. But these are not the only characteristics describing the scope of our project. There are also such important values ​​as CCU and PCCU - the number of players online. Peak CCU - the maximum number for a certain period of time, say, per day. For different analytical tasks, it is advisable to use different characteristics, it all depends on the situation, on those calculations that we want to carry out and which values ​​we want to calculate. There is a definite relationship between MAU, DAU and CCU. Thanks to it, one can roughly derive one characteristic from another.
Audience loyalty
In addition to the size of the audience, we operate with such a group of statistical characteristics as “devotion” - involving the audience in the game process. There are different criteria for evaluating the project. Previously, they most often talked about such a value as retention, that is, about the ability of a game to accumulate an audience. You can calculate it differently. For example, to take the difference between the number of monthly audience at the beginning and end of the period, subtract all the traffic that came from advertising, the result attributed to the number of players who were at the beginning of the month - we get retention. If the retention of the project is 60%, this means that 60% of the audience at the beginning of the period reached the end of the period. This is the simplest definition. There are others.
Ret = (E - N) / S * 100%
Here E is the number of players at the end of the period, N is the number of new players acquired during the period, S is the number of players at the beginning of the period.
Recently, however, analysts are more inclined to the importance of another value, describing the loyalty of the audience. This is the so-called sticky-factor or “stickiness”. In fact, he describes how people like the game. For client, browser and some other games, it is considered to be considered as the ratio of DAU to MAU. It correlates with the number of days in the period during which the player enters the game relative to the entire period. For example, if all players enter the game every day of the month, then DAU = MAU, this is 100% stickiness, an ideal state. But this does not happen. Usually pretty cool when the sticky-factor is at 20%. For example, Mail.Ru Mini-games have extremely high stickiness for such a casual project. For many games of the company, this value varies in the region of 16-20%. Some hardcore client games, such as Allods Online, also have fairly high retention and stickiness rates. Equally high rates are able to generate social networks, a significant proportion of users of which visit such projects daily.
So, the sticky factor is calculated as the ratio of DAU to MAU and characterizes the involvement of the audience in the project, and retention characterizes the project's ability to accumulate an audience in itself. When they speak of “devotion,” other quantities are sometimes used. One of them is the churn rate - burnout or loss of an audience. This, in a sense, reverse retention is proportional to the departure of the audience.
It is necessary to understand that there is a natural obsolescence of the project - a period when all indicators start to fall. This is almost inevitable process. There are units of games on the market that can work for decades - for example, World of Warcraft.
Traffic
However, counting conversions, audience size and loyalty is not enough. Not the last role in the group of statistical values ​​is played by the characteristics describing the virality of the project. For example, the so-called coefficient of attraction (virality). He describes the so-called word of mouth. It is believed that the project Angry Birds successfully gained its audience because of this. At the start, when the game was just launched, the project was not able to quickly gain popularity and audience, despite good marketing budgets. Only huge budgets and game pre-installation on a number of the latest mobile devices produced a viral effect. Many analysts agree that the "birds" so coolly gained an audience, having formed in the mass consciousness of the understanding that Angry Birds is a brand, something popular and everyday.
Let's take a closer look at the coefficient of attraction. When we pour into the game advertising traffic, its influence is not limited to the audience that came from advertising. The delayed effect is no less important for us: the audience that will come later thanks to this advertising traffic. In this case, the virality will work. For example, in the multiplayer session action Panzar, 50% of the audience that came to us from advertising traffic accounted for about 45% of the audience, which came at the expense of virality. The remaining 5% generated referral system. The figures are approximate, because as the project progressed and traffic sources changed, they significantly changed both towards an increase in the share of free traffic and vice versa. In a rough approximation, the traffic generated by the attraction ratio is the share of the traffic generated by advertising that came to the project later.
Fan Art by World of Warcraft
What is this strange mythical viral audience? For example, when a person looked at an advertising banner, but did not click on it. Then he drove the name of the game into the search engine, because he saw the advertisement more than once and it was deposited in his memory, and finally he wanted to come and see. Either a friend told a man playing in Panzar, and he went to inquire. Thus, we can say that advertising has a double effect. It leads not only direct traffic, but also creates a certain delayed “tail”, in which there will be viral traffic. Viral traffic is good because it has very high conversions. If the person entered the search engine himself, entered the name of the game, found it, read about it, or switched from some review, then, most likely, he is more interested than the player who simply clicked on the banner with the elf against the sawmill and “ I will give you on the fifth level. "
By the way, such banners do not work very well. But a good result was given by some mailings with busty, naked elves, which in some places were covered with boxes of gifts, and with a large “Take” button in the pelvic region. On such mailings, about 6% of the audience returned. And here we come to another parameter - the return coefficient. It also characterizes virality. Returned audiences often cost us much less than a new one from scratch. The same World of Warcraft sifted through itself so huge traffic that it became very expensive for them to attract new players. How can one estimate the value of a single player in WoW? The roughest grades can be obtained from referral. They have a system "Invite a friend." She gives a number of in-game bonuses. But the main thing is that if a friend whom you invite to the game pays for a monthly subscription, you will also receive a subscription for a month. Accordingly, it can be concluded that the cost of one player in WoW should be higher than the monthly subscription fee, since such a system is beneficial for the company. There is an opinion that 1.5 - 2 times. Since retention in WoW is quite high, and if a player subscribes, he pays several months at a time, and it’s conditional to pay 400 rubles for it — quite cheap for Blizzard.
In conclusion of the bloc on virality, let me remind you quite a captain's truth. Viral is translated as viral in English. So, the success of many viral mechanisms lies in the viral impact on the audience, suggesting that players will share information with each other.
Screenshot of the viral video "WoW Veterans"
Monetization
The key monetization parameters are ARPU and ARPPU. Average Revenue Per User, i.e. The average income from any active player is like the average temperature in a hospital. ARPPU (Average Revenue Per Paying User) is the average income per payer. Again, by “payer” we mean someone who pays with a certain periodicity. If the user has made a payment only once in a lifetime, then we usually do not take it into account in these statistics. It is reasonable to assume that the simplest estimate of project profitability can be obtained by multiplying MAU by ARPU. This is a rather rough, but effective assessment.
Speaking of monetization, we also use the term “time before the first payment”, which is relevant in browser and client games. In mobile games in this regard, everything is quite bad. If a person has not paid in the first game sessions or on the first day, then most likely he will never pay. The sad truth of mobile games is that most players leave the project right away. Monthly retention of games on a mobile platform rarely exceeds 10-15%. In client games, this time can reach a week, but it very much depends on the game. In browser games - from 3 to 7 days, it happens more.
In addition to the described parameters, we also calculate the “shopping basket volume”. You can compare it with ARPPU and estimate, is it possible that a person does not pay us extra? And finally, there is such a thing as "price elasticity of demand." It means how much the demand for a particular paid service will change if the price for it increases or decreases by 1%. Here it is important to understand that in games, the elasticity of demand differs significantly from the real market. If the store doubles the price of the jacket, we will lose a large majority of the buyers. If the games double the cost of a service, then we can get a total increase in profitability by 20-30%. Even despite the fact that some of the audience will stop buying. With this, you should always experiment. For example, in Mail.Ru Mini-Games, the price of gold is recalculated with a given frequency, taking into account the elasticity of demand and the amount emitted within the framework of the shares of the paid currency.
We turn to the key parameters that describe the ability of the entire project to make a profit. One of them is LTV (Lifetime Value) - a lifetime income from a player, that is, how much money one player will bring us, one registration, for the entire existence of the game. We must compare this value with CPA (Cost Per Action), the cost of attracting a person to the project. And if it turns out that LTV exceeds CPA, then perhaps the project will pay off. Otherwise, the project is unprofitable.
Last in the list, but not least in importance monetization characteristic - ROI (Return On Investment). Sometimes they say ROR: Rate of Return. This is an indicator describing the total return on investment, that is, the payback of the project, taking into account the funds invested in it. Often we ask ourselves: how much money will our project bring if we invest a million in it? And two million? He will bring more money or revenue will not change? ROI just answers these questions. You can consider it by a simplified or complete formula. A full ROI calculation can be quite complicated. It depends on the specific costs of the project and sources of profit. In a simple embodiment, ROI is considered as:
ROI = (Income - Cost) / Investment
Conclusion
When we consider our entire project from the point of view of an analyst, game designer, the set of all the characteristics mentioned here is important to us. That is, the game is considered as a business process, at the entrance of which there is a certain main and additional traffic generated by the coefficient of attraction, there is traffic from the return of the audience, there is a funnel of input conversions that sifts our players, bringing to the active audience some of them; there is retention, which washes out the audience from the game, and that naturally loses some players monthly; There is ARPPU and the percentage of people paying us money. Enough cumbersome. Both game designers and analysts try to operate with all of these depending on specific tasks. Producers look at the game in the same way.
How does the investor look at the game? Is he interested in everything that is told here? In principle, the investor does not care about everything that was considered here. He has his own criterion, the “width of the entrance gate”. For a game designer, it doesn't matter how much money you can pour into a project. It is important to him how the project processes this money. Because he does not operate with the amount of funds, he operates with the game. And for the investor, the opposite is true. He has 200 billion dollars. He built Skolkovo, Moscow-City or invests in the Crimea. He has a lot of money. And your game is able to accumulate and process only 20-30 million dollars. Where to invest the rest of the money? Therefore, only two values ​​are important for him: this is the width of the entrance gate, how much he can invest in you, and ROI - how much he can get back.
Approaches of the developer and investor are fundamentally different.
All questions about the use of statistical values ​​in game design will be glad to answer in the comments.
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/258463/
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