Development of the analytic platform for Flash games

Ben discusses their analytic platform for casual games

You can download the podcast here…
http://www.indiegamepod.com/podcasts/flash-analytics-gdc-2010-interview.mp3

Or listen to it here…

Show Notes:
Interviewer: I’m here at the San Francisco Game Developers Conference and with me today is a special guest. How about you introduce yourself?

Ben: My name is Ben. I run an analytics platform for casual games for Flash casual games.

Interviewer: So, what does that exactly entail, and what’s the benefit of such a thing? What would anyone even need that?

Ben: The benefit is to find out what players are actually doing inside your game and to find out where your game is failing them, where your game is performing strongly and how the decisions you make are affecting their experience in your game to drive better performance from it.

Interviewer: OK. So, basically, people would sign up for your service, drop in your code and then you would tell them how long they’re playing the game. What kind of steps do you keep track of, and where do people have to drop the code into their xx?

Ben: It attracts a variety of things. It doesn’t tell you how many people play it, but then depending on how deeply you integrate it, you can track the information as detailed as how many people die on each level, how many times they click restart on every level, who turns your music off, all of this information, anything you can imagine, really.

Interviewer: What’s next in store then for this service for other people to use?

Ben: I have a few more features coming out. I have some more detailed AB testing, so you can monitor exactly how the changes you make are affecting your game and chart notations, of course, so that you can record important events as well as micro transaction tracking, irrelevant of who you’re using as your provider or even for comparison of providers if you’re using multiple ones in your game. Features like that are coming out at the moment, in the next month or two.

Interviewer: What about social games? Can people use this for social games right now?

Ben: Yes. You can use it in any Flash game at the moment. For social games the micro transaction tracking and the AB testing are the most critical features which are still in development, but it can drop into any xx of Flash right now.

Interviewer: How long will it take to go from signing up for your service to actually getting it and tracking analytics in a game?

Ben: It’s a really painless process. You just sign up and you add your game, and that’s just you type in the name of the game. Then you download the API which is a very simple Action 3+ and all the API codes are just a single function, like SwiftStats.log, dotCustomMetric, TurnSoundOff.

Interviewer: Nice. And so any suggestions for game developers and how they can use Analytics to benefit their games. Have you seen any results based on some of the people that have Beta tested your own service?

Ben: The most important data you can track is the per level stuff to find out the difficulty progression, how people are actually responding in your levels and why they’re really abandoning your game and giving it that horrible rating xx on the way out. If you can capture these people and keep them interested in your game longer, then the ratings should follow and your game should deliver better value for you, your sponsor and everyone.

Interviewer: And so, what’s the site that developers can visit to start using the service?

Ben: The site is SwiftStats.com, just Swift as in the Flash files and Stats.com.

Interviewer: OK. And the pricing right now? What’s the pricing?

Ben: It’s in Beta for, at least, another couple months and it’s free while it’s in Beta. In the long term it’s going to have a flat rate charge for casual games and a subscription rate for social games. but most of your sponsors will carry that for you, I think, because it’s in their interest as much if not more that your game performed the best that it can.

Interviewer: And so, that’s SwiftStats.com. Thank you very much.