5 Real Cases Where Better Data Questions Drove Game Growth

By Elad Levy, Founder of Dive - a data company born from his Playtika exit, bringing enterprise-level analytics to any game studio.   That’s because everyone tends to ask the same questions, relying on pretty much the same standard dashboards. Real insights happen when the developers begin asking specific questions.

Asking the right questions leads to specific insights, which in turn help business owners take better actions and drive product growth.     So, how do you ask better questions? ” “How long does it take players to reach key milestones?

” This piece is a collection of real moments we’ve seen with our clients, places where someone looked closer, asked the right question, and the needle finally moved. 1. The Game Economy Trap One lifestyle mobile game team came to us with a classic problem: players weren’t sticking, and revenue was stagnant.

The data showed that the economy was pretty balanced on a daily average. On some days, it had a net positive, meaning players were gaining more currency than spending in the game, and on some days, the net was negative. There were no extreme trend spikes either way.

But when we split the data by player seniority, it clicked: New players (seniority 0) had a negative net economic flow. Meaning, they were spending more currency than they obtained in the game on average. Not enough freebies, too many sinks that leave new players without currency to play with.

That frustration can lead to early churn. Older players (seniority 15-30) had a positive net economic flow. Meaning, they were getting more currency than they spent on average.

These are players who love the game and sit on piles of currency with nothing to spend it on. They only had one sink. What the studio changed: Boosted early-game rewards to avoid punishing onboarding, plus reduced effort level.

Added late-game currency sinks for hoarding veterans, including special offers and features that open at higher levels. The studio personalized the economy experience for new and older players. Different user segments require different game experiences.

5% increase  Although D1 is not the only indicator of a game’s success, it is a critical metric to optimize before investing in user acquisition (UA). For this studio stage, it was important to increase D1 so they could show investors that their UA money would not go to waste. 2.

The 1% Dip That Broke Revenue At one huge social casino game, we saw a tiny dip in the loading funnel, just a 1% drop in users making it into the game. But revenue took a disproportionate hit. We took three top engineers and added 30+ tracking events to break down every step: We analyzed everything: how assets were loading, how users were connecting to the game server, how the user ID was being fetched, and the performance of various CDN calls.