Data never lies – the most important factor in developing a mobile game
For me, looking at data is like listening to users telling me what they do and do not love about our game. You just have to listen for the right feedback. Otherwise, all decisions on product changes or marketing campaigns made without data input are just a wild (or perhaps an educated) guess, which often leads to product or marketing performance downgrade.
That is why here at Peaksel, we rely heavily on all sorts of data when it comes to decision-making. As the Head of Publishing, being familiar with all performance metrics is a must. A big chunk of my daily activities is looking at the data on revenue measurement and UA campaigns in order to be able to push forward any UA activity. In addition, tracking product quality metrics allows for joint work with dev teams in order to improve product performance and ASO activities.
Backing up our decisions with data has been a standard procedure for us for quite some time when it comes to both the development and publishing teams. With a large portfolio like ours, having a data analyst has made it so much easier to track everything.
However, in addition to the data analyst and myself, our dev managers as well as QA specialists and UA managers look at data on a daily basis. We try to constantly improve the process by looking at data from a variety of angles and creating reports that will give us appropriate actionable steps in order to continuously improve our games and make the user experience the best possible.
Looking at the Serbian mobile gaming community, several larger companies have already been heavily relying on data while smaller studios may not be there yet. It is important to know, however, that you do not need a data analyst to start making data-based decisions. In case there is no data analyst on the team, a product or UA manager should be the one to work with data until this becomes overwhelming, which is a good signal that the team requires a data analyst to only work with data.
Whatever your situation on the data team is, it is very important to start analyzing data and making data-based decisions as early as possible as it will greatly influence business growth.
In conclusion, I believe that basing your decisions on data will leave very little room for mistakes, which many big players both locally and globally have already proven true. Therefore, I expect to see big companies continuing to rely on data for business growth and product quality improvements. On the other hand, I expect smaller studios to start acknowledging the importance of data soon and I also expect them to start viewing data as something worth their time and money.