Platform Metrics

noobprime
noobprime Posts: 403
edited July 2014 in MPQ General Discussion
Anyone else have stats that we can look at to see how the game is doing?
Seems like quite poorly on Steam.
http://steamcharts.com/app/234330#All

Comments

  • Unknown
    Unknown
    Wow. 1755 users to 855 in 6 months. If that doesn't tell you something....
  • noobprime
    noobprime Posts: 403
    Honestly I think steam is most likely the worst platform for the game simply due to the vast availability of other higher quality games and the penalty of needing to be at a computer to play. The PVP nature puts mobile gamers at a huge advantage.
    *Side rant, non-PVP game modes please and seamless transition between platforms.
  • Unknown
    Unknown
    Virtually every game on Steam trends downwards, and the way games get buried behind new games mean the longer they're around, the harder they are to find. Add that to the Summer Sale that just ended, and it's hard to draw any real conclusions from those numbers.

    The number of negative reviews on Steam and the ratings drop in the iStore are probably better metrics.
  • mischiefmaker
    mischiefmaker Posts: 932
    I signed up for an appannie account for this exact purpose (well, mostly to see if all the forum claims of the game dying are true).

    Accounts are free so you can sign up for one yourself and play with the data, but here are the all-time charts for download rank and top-grossing rank on iphone:

    YpFCAng.png

    7f3fI2z.png

    Android graphs are pretty similar, and so are graphs for more recent timeframes -- there's a slight downward trend over the last 30 days, but things look pretty flat for last 60 and last 90.

    Based only on what we can see here, the game looks quite healthy: mostly flat in terms of both download rank and grossing rank. Now, the one thing we're missing from these numbers is active users, and that's quite important because there are a few possibilities:

    - active users going up: all those downloads are users who stick with the game, but the amount of money spent by the average user is going down. I think this is unlikely given all the effort around increasing ARPDAU.
    - active users staying flat: some people are quitting or new users are not sticking to the game. Amount of money spent by the average user is roughly flat (possibly going a bit up or down, depending on how the app store revenue in general is doing).
    - active users going down: lots of people are quitting and there are not enough new users coming in to replace them. Amount of money spent by the average user is going up. This is a really dangerous place for the game to be because it means the game is getting stratified into a small number of whales and a bunch of new players who the whales beat up on, and over time it gets harder and harder to create content that's appealing for both groups.

    I tried Distmo, Flurry, and Appfigures, but none of them had this data. It's tempting to assume based on forum sentiment that this last one is the reality, but we really don't know. Ooh, I thought of a way we can get this data -- I'll make a new thread.

    ETA: For people who care about this kind of stuff, the new thread is here.
  • noobprime
    noobprime Posts: 403
    That's the type of data I was looking for! Does appannie also do raw downloads or do they only do rankings? Unfortunately these don't show engagement levels. I've been looking at the thinkgaming as well:
    http://thinkgaming.com/app-sales-data/4302/marvel-puzzle-quest-dark-reign/
    Both the daily active users and revenue estimates have been dropped in the 3 months that I've paid attention (10-15%), but nothing major like the Steam charts.

    RockMonster, I checked out some of the recommended reviews on Steam and they are absolutely brutal.
  • mischiefmaker
    mischiefmaker Posts: 932
    I only see rankings, no raw numbers, though I only have the free account. If you want some idea of engagement metrics, you might try something like appdata, which will give you those metrics for people who've connected to facebook (fair warning: their search functionality is completely horrible bordering on unusable and broken). Not perfect, since people who facebook connect are probably more engaged overall, and doesn't include steam users, but will at least give you an idea.

    Thinkgaming is pretty nice -- that's the only site I've seen that does an active users estimate.
  • Nemek
    Nemek Posts: 1,511
    Edit: Wow, I should have read the two posts above me...old news, already...

    The other one that I like to look at is thinkgaming: http://thinkgaming.com/app-sales-data/4302/marvel-puzzle-quest-dark-reign/

    It only looks at iOS and only the US market, so it's a little narrow. But, it also tries to give an estimate of daily revenue and daily users. (Just for US iPhone/iPad, the estimates are $16K/day and 55K daily users.)
    I think there's a lot more historical data if you have an account, though...? I don't really know how the site works.
  • mischiefmaker
    mischiefmaker Posts: 932
    If it makes you feel better, I actually got a lot out of your post, specifically the reminder that thinkgaming is ios/US only. I was going to say that the daily average user count looks pretty bad (the Hulk event back in March was 60k+ on day 1 and 75k on day 2*, though I can't remember what it ended up at), but if that's ios/US only, that's pretty darned good.

    * Source: this post. If anyone wants to try searching that thread to see if they can find what number we ended up at, that would be lovely.

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