Solitaire FRVR Analytics #3 - A line in the sand
With the release of Solitaire FRVR 3.0.0 on iOS I count the game as complete. The next few months will therefore be spend working on growing the userbase, improving retention and building revenue while preparing to build the next titles.
Although Solitaire FRVR was not yet complete I already a substantial amount of time on marketing. I therefore wanted to post a numbers update to act as baseline for the next few months work.
For cost and revenue numbers, please see my last KPI update.
While I don’t think spending time promoting the game, before now, was the best use of my time, I have been fairly successful in doing so. By putting a coordinated effort into link building, social promotions and 3rd party website embedding I have once again managed to grow the game significantly.
Even better, I ensured the work is reproducible, hopefully allowing me to grow future titles much faster.
Let’s dive into the details, staring with the customary screenshot of the Google Analytics dashboard. (Showing users on the top graph)
Let’s compare with the numbers from the last analytics update.
Amazing growth, with 806% more monthly sessions, played by 826% more monthly users. I do however still find it more significant to look at the average user behaviour to judge if the game actually improved.
- Average sessions per average user
- Before: 2.18
- After: 2.14
- Improvement: -2%
- Average sessions per average returning user
- Before: 5.60
- After: 5.00
- Improvement: -10%
Auch! Both sessions per average user and sessions per average returning users has dropped. So while the overall numbers looks amazing, the game is actually performing worse on a per user basis.
Let’s see if this effect spills over in actual in-game user behaviour. (Showing games played)
Again the overall numbers looks amazing with 829% more games played by new users and 1138% more games played by returning users. Breaking it down to per user averages we get:
- Games played per average new user
- Before: 3.0
- After: 2.7
- Improvement: -10%
- Games played per average returning user
- Before: 7.8
- After: 8
- Improvement: 3%
Again the game is actually performing worse for new users with the only bright spot being a minor 3% growth for returning users.
It’s worth mention here that version 3.0.0 really did horribly bad with existing users. The game mechanic issue was solved a few days later in 3.1.0 but I already lost a lot of engaged returning users, with the returning user numbers only getting back to normal now.
The graph shows how incredibly bad Solitaire FRVR 3.0.0 did with existing users. More details about the issue at the bottom of this post.
Lastly, to make sure we have the full picture, let’s compare average session times:
- Average time spend per average new user
- Before: 24:54 minutes
- After: 32:01 minutes
- Improvement: 29%
- Average time spend per average returning user
- Before: 30:26 minutes
- After: 59:15 minutes
- Improvement: 95%
Finally numbers that looks better!
What I think is happening here, is that the game itself has actually improved, resulting in a longer avg. session times. However the improved game has not, as hoped, resulted in an increase in users returning to play on subsequent days.
Therefore, while I count Solitaire FRVR as complete I will have to make an investment into creating more retention channels. Thankfully the integrations will be re-used across multiple games allowing me to split the effective development cost across them. The next few months I will therefore experiment and blog about at-least the following retention channels:
- Notifications: Via Facebook, Chrome Browser, OSX Notifications, Mobile Notifications.
- Bookmarks: Promoting the user to bookmark the game
- Emails: Asking the user to receive emails for updates / news.
- Social: Solitaire FRVR currently has 3513 Facebook Likes, but I have not done a lot to engage these users.