Deconstructor of Fun and Solsten team up for a discussion on player analytics.
Co-founder of Solsten, Joe Schaeppi, joined Michail Katkoff of the Deconstructor of Fun podcast to discuss how traditional player analytics in gaming are falling short and how psychographically-based insights can help your team build maximum resonance with your player base.
Katkoff outlines 4 resources gaming companies currently have to collect and analyze data:
- Traditional in-app analytics — the KPIs and metrics that tell us the basics about what is happening inside our game. Session lengths, retention, monetization, and level progression are a few examples.
- Community feedback — what we read and hear from our social media outlets. Often a small minority of highly-engaged users who help us inform our product roadmap and give realtime feedback on new feature implementations.
- Customer support — all the channels we have set up to support tech-related bugs as well as app store ratings and feedback.
- Gut feeling — the intangible things we know as gamers and game designers!
As game studios work more and more to validate product and marketing decisions with hard, quantifiable data, Solsten wants to empower companies and designers, with the use of psychologically-based analytics, to tap further into their intuition and innovate with confidence.
Listen in as Katkoff and Schaeppi explore the ins and outs of personalities and how the 12traits tool can provide valuable insights on your player bases’ habits, hobbies, motivations, pain points, and communication styles so your team can spend less time validating and more time creating and innovating.
“KPIs such as DAUs, ARPPUs, IPMs, and CTRs are all vital. But they are not enough.
Understanding your players more intimately is important because it allows you to create experiences, which optimize for healthy long-term engagement. And that, in turn, drives the LTV. After all, your players’ best interest is aligned with your company’s best interest.” — Katkoff
Deconstructor of Fun: Your Analytics Are Not Even Scratching The Surface can be found here.