What is the best engagement metric?

[Vertigo]

I ask this because I have issue with the Circana tracker charts and how it frames engagement.

Circana seems to be taking data from a handful of let’s say a thousand users thru their own random selection. This is flawed and very far and away from an accurate snapshot of the country or territories tracked. When comparing to Xbox or Steam engagements often cited by the public … things are off. Why?

Well… Circana does number of users logging in for the month. XBL’s “most played” and windows store’s “most popular” seems to be tracking number of hours put in. As does steam’s trackers … this will include both total users and the time invested by them

Circana only ranks by number of users. This includes the type to download a f2p game and dip after 5 mins. So is engagement including time invested by the player not the best way to view things?

Keep in mind that those steam and Microsoft charts are the most accurate data available. Including the totality of what is played by users on consoles connected to the internet and not flawed estimates and incomplete data. Sony has “top 10 in your country” for similar information but unsure if this is engagement, revenue, page clicks etc…

 

[Johnic]

Engagement metric are useless. Unless they break each user down, they're just PR.

 

[Gediminas]

Engagement metric are useless. Unless they break each user down, they're just PR.

i can't agree with one type of games. it is F2P games. Engagement shows pretty good how good the game is or that it is doing something right, plus, more engagement, the bigger pool of people to support the game. so in some sense, you can equivalently draw a line between engagement and success.

 

[Johnic]

i can't agree with one type of games. it is F2P games. Engagement shows pretty good how good the game is or that it is doing something right, plus, more engagement, the bigger pool of people to support the game. so in some sense, you can equivalently draw a line between engagement and success.

Unless it's detailed, and these things never are, engagement is useless to us. Companies with access to details can put it to use.

Having millions of people "play" a game in a month tells us nothing. How many hours has each player put in? How many just started the game and never played it again? It's why these companies like MAU numbers. They're vague and good for PR.

Companies have acess to all the juicy data. How many hours each player played, how much time spent in each game mode, favorite weapon, transaction spending. All the useful stuff. We can't see any of it.

One thing that can give us a bit of insight are Steam CCU numbers on launch day. But even that isn't accurate as not everyone who bought the game will play at the same time.

I don't pay attention to any of these metrics. They're just fluff for publishers to use.

 

[Vertigo]

Engagement that track hours put in by the user is a very important data point for online games in particular. It is also a good anecdotal metric of player reception and retention for single player games as well (see Baldur’s gate).

 

[Jim Ryan]

For me, the issue is that metrics are used so selectively. Unless most of the important metrics are outlined and the majority positive and negative trends for each game are outlined, they usually are just used to pump up games for investors.

 

[ethomaz]

Sales.

After all what matters is what being sold and how much companies are getting from it.
If I have a game that millions are playing but it didn't generate revenue to cover even the costs it is fated to die.

Engagement is a metric executives use like "Look I have a big userbase here playing... how can I get money from them?".
It is like hype before a game is launched... it is not a sale but just a potential to turn into sale.
So if you can turn the hype in sales or the engagement in revenue then that game failed.

 

[Yurinka]

What is the best engagement metric?

In general the most important metric is revenue and after it profitability. Only in case of services/GaaS/F2P the engagement metrics are important. And among the engagement metric, its on what you want to measure, each one is important for a different thing.

As an example DAU, WAU or MAU are to know the size of the active userbase on a point of time. It's useful to compare it against similar games/services, to see if it's growing, decreasing or stable, to have an estimate of server costs needed. It also means it's the population available to be further monetized (with IAP, passes, expansions, etc). And helpful to spot in which point of the year or the week is better to include things like offers, promotions, events, etc: as dev you may want to do some thing to pump people in the slowest days and take advantage of when everybody is connected.

ARPU (average revenue per user) self explanatory, one of the key ones for F2P because a gazillion users doesn't mean anything if they are there for free just consuming server costs.

In GaaS/F2P often ARPU is the average money spent only a specific day, while LTV (lifetime value) is the money spent since the day installed the game until today. In F2P there's also ARPPU (average revenue per paid user) to only count those who pay. Daily ARPU must be than the average daily cost per user (of servers etc). LTV must be higher than the "acquisition cost" marketing metric (average marketing cost to get a new user via ads and so on).

For GaaS the most important metric is retention, because by improving it statistically most of the other ones indirectly improve. Normally it's measured in D1, D3, D7, D14, D30, D90, D180 plus others, but these are the key ones. These metrics represent the percent of players that played again after that amount of days after the first time they played the game and are useful for different reasons.

Example: having 3% in D1 means that the landing experience, intro, tutorial, first actions/matches etc. and what is shown there aren't appealing enough and that this portion of the game must be improved to make future new players last longer, and that makes more sense to fix that portion than to invest on paying marketing to bring more player or invest a lot of money on content for players who have been playing for a year.

Instead, having a great D180 means the game an insane retention and that is worth it to invest on bringing new players and on content and feature like yearly expansions, cosmetics, high level focused players content, features and rebalancing, etc.

CCU (concurrent users) is only useful for the server team: help to spot the points of the day with a smaller amount of players connected (so a better moment to make a maintenance if it requires to temporally shut down all the servers at the same time) or if the game is reaching a too high or too low activity level, which may require them to take some action. As could be to add more servers or optimize what they have to allow more players per server in case of high level, or to in the opposite case when the activity level is low maybe if they have people in many empty servers try to move these players to the same servers and shut down the not needed one. And/or migrating them to cheaper servers/platforms/etc.

But well, server folks they have their own dedicated internal metrics about % oc CPU/memory/HDD usage, how full is each server, if each server is online or down, error logs, etc.

 

[Hatefield]

There is no good metric cause companies look at users as potential buyers of microtransaction. They only brag about monthly users to convince others to join in and spend money. This is literally what the Oscars were made for.

 

[anonpuffs]

The best engagement metric is revenue numbers

 

[2spooky5me]

The best engagement metric is: whatever Xbox wants to prop up for a specific quarter or game!

 

[BroodCorp]

I go by what I see and hear in the world. A lot of these games that are cited as great came and went. The zeitgeist is the greatest indicator of what’s happening out here.

 

[RE4-Station]

revenue, how much money a game brought in. you could argue profit is more important for bottom line but higher revenue usually goes in hand with more profits unless if a game just had an insane budget

 

[voke]

x copies sold