Posts Categorized: Customer economics

Finding the “Whales” of Your Game

Author icon Owen Martin|Comments icon 3

Let’s say you’re developing a game and you want to see who your most profitable players are. Imagine you’ve got a power-law so heavy-tailed you don’t even have a mean. You want to estimate your shape parameter and your statistics are all over the place as expected (no pun intended). Looks like you’re going to have to chop off that long tail and treat it separately. Looks like you’re going whale hunting.

In the casino industry, so-called “high-rollers” are often referred to as whales. It’s easy to see why: while they might come in with an attitude of being able to beat the house by wagering enough money, ultimately they wind up providing the biggest payouts to the casino. A somewhat disparaging term, to be sure, but it’s easy to understand how casinos view their revenue stream: lots of small change with the occasional big kill. Continue Reading…

Jogonaut CEO on Using Data-Driven Game Design to Acquire High-Value Players

Author icon Catherine Mylinh|Comments icon 0

Jogonaut is a social gaming company. Its debut title, OJO AGENT, is aimed at mid-core gamers who are predominantly male ages 21 to 39. In OJO AGENT, players act as sports agents who must pitch and sign real athletes as clients. The game is built using HTML5 and serves as both an interactive platform for players to enjoy a social sports game and a marketing platform for some of the world’s biggest brands.

We spoke with Jogonaut Founder and CEO Barry Carpe on the importance of data-driven design, and how he’s using analytics to continually provide the best user experience to his players. He also shared some great game marketing and development tips. Continue Reading…

Casino Games are the New Battlefield. Choose Your Weapon

Author icon David Gutierrez|Comments icon 0

Ready the troops
Even though online casino games have been around for a while, the social and mobile versions of these games have just started gaining traction recently; now, these social and mobile developers are fighting even harder to dominate these spaces and to cash in on the high-value players in the casino gaming genre.

Why? Because to further complicate things, there’s also a new competitor on the battlefield: traditional, land-based casinos.

Guys like Caesars Entertainment and MGM Resorts International have years of experience on slot machines, poker, blackjack, bingo and other games. And, they’re forming alliances with or acquiring game studios to get into the social and mobile spaces.

There’s a lot at stake–from creating new acquisition channels (via social and mobile games) to monetizing players to extending the experience of real-life casinos to the online world. There are only so many whales, and it’s a fight to get their mind and wallet share. Continue Reading…

The Colliding Worlds of Real and Virtual Casinos

Author icon Catherine Mylinh|Comments icon 1

Click here to view our popular webinar, A Look at Building Irresistible Casino Social Games.

by kScope guest contributor
Andrew Hughes, CEO of AbZorba Games

My father once said to me, “Son, everything in life is a gamble. Just know the odds.”

Now that I’m an adult and working in the online casino games business, his words of wisdom are helping guide me (and those like me) through a fast-changing industry.

Gamers’ growing appetite for social and mobile casino app games
Social and mobile casino games are trending, and will continue to do so. Games such as blackjack, poker and bingo, to name a few, have become outrageously popular.

The mobile format in particular offers the “perfect storm” of smartphone penetration, network reliability and app popularity. Throw in live multiplayers, like we did with AbZorba’s Live Blackjack21, and it’s seriously a compelling format.

Its proper, grown-up gaming with proper in-app spending power. Average revenue per user (ARPU) can get in the double digits, and the lifespans are incredibly long! We’ve seen players spend up to $3,000 for virtual chips—chips that they cannot cash out!

Online gambling is a multibillion-dollar market, but what are the risks?
So, why should a perfectly good social or mobile casino game that is generating good revenue from virtual goods take risks by venturing into “real” gambling, as in gambling with real payouts? Continue Reading…

Applying Lessons Learned on Facebook to Mobile App Development

Author icon Josh Williams|Comments icon 0

The ARM funnel shows a typical customer lifecycle, which is comprised of three stages: acquisition, retention and monetization.

Mobile app developers and marketers can gain a huge advantage by looking at the way social app developers scientifically build and optimize their games around customer data on social platforms. They use that data to learn about what is and isn’t working in their applications, and iterate quickly for increasingly stronger returns. From Acquisition to Retention to Monetization–the three stages in the ARM funnel–successful developers have created entire organizations around data-driven design at each level and across all facets of their businesses.

At Kontagent, we’ve witnessed firsthand the ARM funnel’s crucial role in the success of a large majority of studios that publish games on Facebook–and now on iOS and Android as well. Insights garnered from this model help to focus resources and marketing investment. And, having a perpetual flow of data and a supporting data science infrastructure (with the expertise to act on it), has enabled game studies to acquire users more profitably. Teams of data scientists and developers at Zynga, Popcap, Crowdstar and Gaia, for example, have measured, iterated, tested and optimized relentlessly to acquire more users at better customer acquisition cost and with higher yield ratios than most. It’s no coincidence these are the same guys succeeding on mobile platforms as well. Continue Reading…

Mobile App Developers: You Don’t Have to Start at Square One

Author icon Conor Nash|Comments icon 1

 

Many of the metrics we measure in social apply to mobile users, too.

If you’re developing or have launched a mobile app, are you tracking it properly to ensure that it’s profitable? Do you know what metrics are important, and how to track them?

The remarkable thing about mobile apps is we’re not starting from square one, like we did several years ago in social. Because we now have years of experience developing successful social games, we can hit the ground running in mobile–because many of the same metrics from social games apply to mobile apps.

This is especially true when it comes to the what we call the ARM funnel of Acquisition, Retention and Monetization. It’s the analytics framework by which our social customers have used to develop and iterate their games–and has helped to make them successful. When it comes to mobile devs, here are some metrics in social they can use to improve their apps in mobile: Continue Reading…

To Build or Buy a Social/Mobile Analytics Solution: That is (Sometimes) the Question

Author icon Rohan Sardesai|Comments icon 0

Build vs. Buy: A First-Hand Analysis

The social/mobile gaming space is relatively new, yet the evolution of the space has been rapid. Despite ever-changing tech and design trends, using analytics as a tool to drive success in this space remains critical.

Newcomers to social/mobile gaming must become overnight experts or risk becoming overnight failures. The first wave of successful social gaming companies, such as Zynga, Playdom and other innovators invested heavily in their analytics and business intelligence (BI) tools from day one. Over time they have built large analytics/BI teams, scalable infrastructure and robust A/B testing tools; all of which give them the ability to quickly optimize core game metrics. These companies, now behemoths in the industry, made massive investments in analytics from the start because no commercial solution specific to “social” existed at the time. These sophisticated tools, built from the ground up, gave them incredible insight, and a massive advantage over second- and third-wave gaming companies.

With new platforms being developed every day, and previously untapped “gamers” entering the space through free-to-play channels, the opportunity to build successful games is bigger than ever. So, how do up-and-coming companies get a comparable level of analytics into their games? Do they build it themselves or buy something commercially available?

I have worked in social gaming in a first-wave company (where we built our own analytics) and in the second-wave where we decided to buy an off-the-shelf solution. The goal of this post is to outline some of the factors to consider while making a Buy vs. Build decision at this point in the industry’s life cycle. Continue Reading…

Kontagent kScope Social & Mobile News Weekly Roundup

Author icon Catherine Mylinh|Comments icon 0

Mobilewalla found that mobile apps released on Sundays statistically performed the best.

Launch your mobile app on Sunday
According to new research from mobile analytics service Mobilewalla, Sunday is the best day to release a mobile app; however, Wednesday appears to be the most popular day among developers. Find out the worst day to release your app. (Hint: It’s different for Android and iOS.)

A tiny gaming company has Zynga in its crosshairs
Rumble Games wants you to “swing your sword or fire your gun, not decorate your castle and spam your friends with invitations.” It was a big enough idea to prompt investors from Google Ventures and Khosla Ventures to drop $15 million into the company in its first round of funding after it was founded less than a year ago.

This is what the company has to say about the current state of social gaming. Kixeye wasn’t amused by Rumble Games’ comments, calling it “smack talk.” Read Kixeye CEO Will Harbin’s response. (Disclosure: Kixeye is a Kontagent customer.)

On a related note, a recent move by the Justice Department could give Zynga a new billion-dollar opportunity. Continue Reading…

Gaia Online CEO on Important Mobile App Metrics to Track

Author icon Catherine Mylinh|Comments icon 0

Gaia Online CEO Mike Sego discusses the lessons he learned in social app development that Gaia is applying to mobile.

Happy New Year!

Here at Kontagent, we’ve helped hundreds of social customers win by helping them gain better insights into their users’ behaviors. And, we have even more exciting product features planned this year. (Sign up for our newsletter for the latest Kontagent news and updates.)

We’re always improving our already-powerful, best-in-class analytics platform. We’ve been leveraging our knowledge and experience to help many of our social customers make a successful transition into the mobile space, too.

Whether you’re in the early stages of developing a mobile application, or you’ve already launched it and have a substantial user base, looking to social app developers for a history lesson on how to do it right can give you a huge head-start, and greater chance at success.

Kontagent Konnect Interview:
Gaia Online CEO Mike Sego

Gaia Online has been able to do this with Monster Galaxy–a hit on both Facebook and iOS. In the first installment of our Kontagent Konnect Executive Interview Series, we spoke with CEO Mike Sego on how the company is applying many of the lessons it learned in social to mobile, including:

  • The metrics that are most important to succeeding on mobile
  • How to monetize on the F2P model
  • How to successfully split-test on iOS (yes, it is possible!)
  • Other tactics used to keep players engaged and coming back for more Continue Reading…

How Does Zynga Really Make Money from Free Games?

Author icon Dan Kimball|Comments icon 0

Source: The New York Times

Recently, I was talking to a colleague about how there is now technology that enables non-verbal brainwave communication between two people. Essentially, you put a device on your head that translates chemical synapses in your brain into patterns that are recognized as words, phrases or entire ideas. A person on the receiving end of this communication can then absorb these patterns in their own brain device, which will then interact with his chemical synapses. And, a conversation occurs.

It is absolutely mind-numbing to think about how much data needs to be processed in order to create patterns out of chemical synapses that an individual experiences at any given time. In fact, the adult human brain is estimated to contain from 100 to 500 trillion synapses! How could there possibly be a technology powerful enough (or scientists insightful enough) to process and interpret that volume of data, and then find a way to translate that into meaningful communication?

Well, on a much (much) (much) smaller scale, Zynga (public as of this morning) and other social game companies have achieved a similar feat. (Side note: VentureBeat’s Dean Takahashi penned a great piece on the history of Zynga.)

In our view, the Internet has been through three defining phases of its short life in the modern era: Continue Reading…