Key Game Metrics
Key Performance Indicator (KPI) metrics you can follow for all phases of your game launch
Key Performance Indicator (KPI) metrics you can follow for all phases of your game launch
If you don't measure it, you can't improve it! Here is a list of the important metrics to know as you design, develop, launch, and improve your game.
The various systems of your game should work in concert to drive retention and completion as well as create demand for game purchases to drive revenue.
Key Metrics
There are two popular ways of measuring retention by day:
The calendar-based method will tend to generate higher numbers, which looks good in a report--but isn’t a valid comparison to a more conservative 24-hour method. For some the benchmarking we share below, it assumes the 24-hour method.
Every game is different. Depending on the quality of the game, the competitiveness of the genre, and the mechanics of game play, you might achieve completely different metrics.
In many games, a lower retention can be more than made up by higher revenue metrics and higher long-term retention. A more casual, easy-to-pick-up game may have lower ARPDAU but much higher retention. In our metrics benchmarking, we share some numbers for a hypothetical “average” game that sits in the middle of most of these.
At Beamable, we believe in a series of Soft Launches (SL) followed by the world wide global launch. At each stage of launch, the metric targets are different. The regions listed below are Beamable's suggested soft launch areas based on years of building and testing AAA mobile titles.
The following chart lays out each phase of game launch and what your metrics should be to achieve success at that phase. As you reach those numbers, you graduate to the next launch phase.
If you are not meeting these numbers, you should consider iterating on the features of your game that can move those numbers.
SL 1 | SL 2 (Nordics) | SL 3 | World Wide | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| D0 Sessions per User | 2.5 | 5 | 5 | 8 |
| D1 Retention | 30% | 35% | 40% | 45% |
| D7 Retention | 10% | 15% | 15% | 17% |
| D30 Retention | 5% | 7% | 8% | 10% |
| Tutorial Completion | 35% | 40% | 60% | 70% |
| Ad Engagement | 35% | 45% | 50% | 60% |
| Total Conversion Rate | 1% | 2% | 3% | 4% |
| Daily Conversion Rate | 1% | 2% | 3% | 4% |
During soft launch, if you find that your game achieves very high retention--higher than what you can realistically run your soft-launch for--then you may not be able to calculate a true lifetime value. However, you can still estimate it based on what you observe about the customer’s behavior.
One way to do this is to graph the daily revenue generation per player, and observe whether there’s a drop-off in the ARPDAU contribution of a player based on how many days they’ve played.
Does it fall off sharply after a certain amount of time? Then this may be an area where the game may benefit from additional features, or a combination of events and merchandising to generate further revenue from the later-stage audience.
Does revenue take some time to generate before a player makes purchases? That could result from players not understanding the value of making purchases early enough in the game.
The main advantage of understanding your LTVs is that not only can you predict your future revenue more accurately--you’ll also be able to know whether you can profitably invest in paid user acquisition such as Facebook, Google or Unity ads. Even if paid user acquisition doesn’t make sense for your game, it is possible to thrive if there are organic channels, search traffic or social influence that results in customer acquisition, and a solid understanding of LTV will help you decide how much you should continue to invest in a game’s feature development.
The good news is that LTV can often be improved during the lifetime of a game.
One of the tried-and-true methods is to implement a robust event system that includes opportunities for purchasing new items and currency.
Events with effective merchandising and/or “battle pass” systems will typically increase ARPDAUs by a factor of 2-3X during the event’s duration, and if structured in a repeatable way it will yield sustainable improvements in LTV rather than simply short-term revenue acceleration.
Now that you have a sense of the metrics you should hit with your game, head over to Beamable.com and learn about the social and commerce features that can help you hit your numbers!
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Cover photo by Jamie Street on Unsplash