作者：Hannah Smalltree

现在正当推出含有IAP功能的免费游戏的大好时机。人们对免费游戏的兴趣持续增长，而能够提供引人入胜体验的创新型免费游戏也虏获了大量愿意反复为富有价值的内容和体验付费的忠诚玩家。预计2014年手机游戏市场规模将增长35%。如果你准备获得成功，就不能不关注这个消息。

你已经追踪了每款免费手机游戏的海量不同数据点，但如果有款游戏人气爆涨，你就会面临一波庞大的额外数据。你还会需要新型而特殊的分析工具，以便推动游戏的盈利性，并且需要快速执行分析和适应游戏的敏捷性。你能否从第一天起就调整现有的分析解决方案？你的游戏团队有可能需要该分析解决方法所无法提供的准确信息，从而导致团队做出糟糕的决策并错失良机。

考虑一下如果你拥有性能有限的定制分析工具或界面导向软件所面临的挑战之一。你的解决方案可能是是用于解答一系列你今天必须提出的简单问题，例如：有多少玩家，多少收益等等。但随着你游戏的变化，以及玩家基础的扩大，你的开发者、设计师和产品管理人员将需要与游戏机制直接相关的有用信息。他们需要快速开始追踪新的关键表现指标（KPI），这样他们才能够够提出自己所需数据的相关问题。例如，一名在4月份注册的玩家在完成游戏第三个任务时会创造多少收益？或者用户首次下载至首次消费之间平均隔了多长时间？

如果无法以足够的灵活性快速找到这些问题的答案，你的团队反应可能就会延迟，并永远也无法获得充分利用机会的洞察力。显然，现在就应该找到一个长期免费手机游戏分析解决方案，以下就是你应该从中得到的分析服务。

Tracking Your Data(from dhs.state)

跨游戏，跨题材，跨部门分析

能够分别分析单款游戏还是不够的。高管们想了解他们所有的手机游戏。来自移动平台的平均每用户收益是多少？手机版本与社交版本的收益对比表现如何？你还需要跨题材分析。例如，哪个题材的游戏拥有最高的玩家粘性，哪个题材收益最高？这对未来三五年的战略投资意味着什么？

快速调整指标

灵敏性是关键。你无法知道明年什么分析会变得很重要，所以你需要一个有助于你快速解答关键问题的解决方案。你应该通过查看你目前拥有的数量，以及明天可能帮助到你的新数据来创建表现良好的内容。这一点尤其重要，因为当新补丁、更新内容和续作发布时，游戏机制会频繁发生变化。你必须能够在达到统计显著性时快速调整数据，创造相关的指标，分析数据，之后再制定关于玩法和盈利的战略决策——这一切都要在数分钟和数小时内，而不是几天几周内完成。

彻底的可扩展性

在含有IAP交易的免费手机游戏中，数据范围不但会因为调整而放大，还会因为你想追求每个用户的大量事件（以便完整分析和优化所有可能提升表现的手段）而放大。如果你的分析解决方案无法调整范围，你之后可能就需要在用量飙升的时候找到一个新方案，破坏你自己的势头。要确保你的解决方案没有理论上的发展上限——这种范围调整可能递增，具有成本效益，并且不会影响表现。

自助服务技术

你不应该寄希望于IT——为了团队所需的信息来支持产品团队。你应该做的是告诉游戏开发者应该追踪哪些数据，然后自动将其载入系统，以便用户快速查询到相关数据。没错，这是有可能的！你还可以借助动态生成数据透视表的工具，或者实时分析功能制作特别的查询。

并非所有分析解决方案都是相同的。如果你等到游戏人气飙升时才去寻找合适的分析工具，那就太迟了。（本文为游戏邦/gamerboom.com编译，拒绝任何不保留版权的转载，如需转载请联系：游戏邦）

Great, your game’s successful. Here’s the 4 analytics you need to deal with it

Hannah Smalltree

It’s a great time to be rolling out free-to-play mobile games with in-app purchases. Interest continues to build, and innovative free-to-play games that offer a compelling experience are rewarded by a torrent of loyal players who are willing to pay repeatedly for valuable content and experiences. Mobile gaming is expected to grow 35 percent in 2014 . This is terrific news—as long as you’re prepared for success.

You’re already tracking a sea of various data points in each free-to-play mobile game, but if one swells into popularity, you’ll face a tidal wave of additional data. You’ll also need new and very specific analytics for your game in order to drive monetization as it “rides the demand curve,” and you’ll need the agility to quickly perform the analytics and adapt the game accordingly. Can your existing analytics solution adapt from day one? Or will your game teams be begging for precise information that the analytics solution is incapable of providing, leading to poor decision-making and lost opportunities?

Consider just one of the challenges you’ll face if you have custom-built analytics or interface-driven software with limited capabilities. Your solution is probably designed to answer a simple set of questions that you know you need to ask today: how many players, how much revenue, etc. But as your game changes and the player base grows, your developers, designers, and product managers will need useful information that directly relates to the game’s mechanics. They will need to quickly start tracking new key performance indicators (KPIs), and they should be able to ask any questions they want of the data. For example, how much revenue did a player who signed up in April generate after completing the game’s third quest? Or what is the average duration from a download to a first-time purchase, segmented by time of day?

Without the flexibility to quickly find answers to such questions, your team will be slow to react and will never gain the insight it needs to take full advantage of the opportunity. Clearly, the time to find a long-term free-to-play mobile gaming analytics solution is now, and here’s what you need to demand from it.

Cross-title, cross-genre, cross-division analytics

It’s not enough to be able to analyze individual games in isolation. Senior executives want to know about all their mobile titles. What’s the average revenue per user from mobile? How does mobile compare to social — are the revenue metrics better or worse? You’ll also need cross-genre analytics. For example, which genres have the most player engagement and which drive the most revenue? And what does this mean for strategic investment over the next three to five years?

Adapting metrics in minutes

Agility is critical. You can’t know what analytics will be important next year, so you need a solution that enables you to quickly answer key questions whenever they are asked. You need to build things that perform well by looking at whatever data you have now and whatever new data will help you tomorrow. This is especially relevant when a game’s mechanics change frequently as new patches, updates, and sequels come out. You must be able to adapt the data quickly, generate relevant metrics, analyze data when it reaches statistical significance, and then make strategic decisions on gameplay and monetization — all measured in minutes and hours, not days and weeks.

Complete scalability

With free-to-play mobile games with in-app transactions, the scale of data is amplified not only by adoption, but also by the massive variety of events you want to track for each individual user in order to fully analyze and optimize all the possible levers for improving performance. If your analytics solution can’t scale, you’ll then have to find a new one right in the middle of a usage surge, destroying your momentum. Make sure your solution has no theoretical growth limit — and that scaling can occur incrementally, cost-effectively, and without impacting performance.

Self-service tech

You shouldn’t have to burden IT — or wait on IT — in order to support your product teams with the information they need. All you should have to do is tell the game developers what data to track so they can tag it, which is then automatically fed into the system where users can query the data immediately. Yes, it’s possible! You must also be able to make ad hoc queries, either through tools like dynamically generated pivot tables, or through real-time analysis capabilities.

Not all analytics solutions are created equal. And if you wait until after an explosion of popularity to find the right one, it will be too late.（source：venturebeat）