開發者談手遊盈利能力評估以及營銷和產品的互助關係

摘要： 開發者談如何評估一款手遊的盈利能力以及營銷和產品的互助關係 原作者：Alexandr Enin 譯者：Vivian Xue 我已經在My.Com工作了十三年。這是一家由超過十個不同的工作室組成的大型公司，主要製作手機遊戲。公司平均每年要發行3至4款產品。可想而知，在這種工作節奏下，我們...

開發者談如何評估一款手遊的盈利能力以及營銷和產品的互助關係

原作者：Alexandr Enin 譯者：Vivian Xue

我已經在My.Com工作了十三年。這是一家由超過十個不同的工作室組成的大型公司，主要製作手機遊戲。公司平均每年要發行3至4款產品。可想而知，在這種工作節奏下，我們需要在專案的每個開發階段對其進行快速而準確的評估，這對專業性的要求是極高的。

在評估過程中，最令我們頭疼的是結果喜憂參半的專案。我們都清楚該如何處理弱勢和強勢專案，但當你衡量這些專案的資料和增長潛力時，問題就來了。

舉個例子，如果一款休閒遊戲的首日留存率是20%，那麼它顯然是一個需要被終止的弱勢專案。但如果是一款首日留存率為30%的中核遊戲呢？事情看上去沒那麼簡單了，對吧？

當然，你完全可以放棄這款中核遊戲，可你承擔了錯失一款熱門作品的風險。也許遊戲的潛力尚未被挖掘出來，也許開發者再花個一年時間，就能讓這隻醜小鴨變天鵝了呢。

但若你真給了開發者一年時間，遊戲最終卻沒蛻變成天鵝，你的公司就失去了時間和機會，因為開發者本可以開發另一款遊戲，並且，它本可能成為那隻天鵝。

要解決這一難題，你需要學習如何評估專案的潛力，而不是它的當前資料。但我如何才能使用行業標準來計算潛力呢？很抱歉，你不能。行業標準太過模糊和寬泛，無法幫你看清專案的本質。一塊放大鏡是不足以看到潛力的，你需要一臺工業顯微鏡。

以我的經驗來看，人們在專案中遇到這樣模稜兩可的情況時，總是依靠直覺、信任，或是無盡的測試發行來做判斷。這使得這一過程代價高昂、不可預測，有時甚至令人痛苦。

因此今天我想談談這個“顯微鏡”，以及我使用它的感覺。也許這些資訊將幫助一些有才華的開發者在正確的時刻做出正確的決定，並促成一個優秀遊戲的誕生。

個體潛力被高估了

讓我們開始討論吧，首先我們要對目前我們評估專案潛力以及判斷一款遊戲成敗的認知提出質疑。當然，我們對這些事情都持有自己的觀點，但我們的觀點很可能是錯誤的，因為它基於我們對專案的主觀看法，受到認知扭曲的影響。

在My.Com工作久了之後，我們逐漸意識到能夠正確評估一個又一個遊戲潛力的專家根本不存在。當一個遊戲大獲成功後，許多專家都冒出來說他們早就料到了這一點並且為此發聲過。但如果你認真研究他們過往的預測，你會發現大部分都不太準確……

那麼我們該如何解決這個問題呢？我的方法是，通過研究自身經歷獲得啟發。

我的工作室是My.Com集團公司的一部分，這意味著我和所有其他開發者一樣，可以訪問公司旗下所有工作室的統計資料。因此我可以訪問幾十個不同的專案。我從中選擇了符合我成功標準的專案並分析它們的資料，以尋找可以揭示公式的常見元素。

什麼是成功？

為了繼續這一討論，我們需要對一款遊戲的成功標準形成統一認識。在我看來，成功的遊戲在扣除了App Store和Google+Play/">Google Play分成後，收入至少應該達到100萬美元，並且在全球發行一年後，利潤率應該超過30%。

My.com發行的很多遊戲都滿足這一點，因此我擁有充足的資料繼續討論下去，並很快得出我的第一個結論。我把這一結論分解為兩點：

1.沒有成功的營銷就沒有成功的遊戲。

2.沒有成功的遊戲就沒有成功的營銷。

沒錯，我們內部的產品研究結果顯示，成功的產品需同時具備優秀的品質和優秀的營銷戰略。儘管這兩個因素間不存在直接相關性，但我們發現二者的交叉點代表著某種程度的成功。

這也是為什麼我想要強調的另一點：我們在對比兩個專案時，應同時考慮遊戲指標和營銷指標，否則這種比較是無效的。這就好比通過只觀察事物的影子來討論它的顏色。

因此，我們需要從兩個不同的角度進一步定義成功的標準：營銷和遊戲指標。

評估一款產品的成功——從營銷角度來看

在研究了我們最成功的遊戲的營銷歷史之後，我們很快發現，它們成功的關鍵在於它們吸引大量廉價安裝的能力。我們通過這些廉價安裝達到了收入目標，並在進一步優化後，達到了利潤目標。

要確定一個專案的引流能力，我們需要看它的廣告投放安裝率（IR of Advertising）。我認為它是判斷專案營銷成功與否的引數，它與點選率（CTR）和轉化率(CR)直接相關。因此，計算一個專案的IR的公式是：IR=CTR*CR。

為了實現高安裝率，你需要創意的廣告介面和商店介面來獲取高點選率和轉化率，並且前提是廣告介面和商店介面的內容需保持一致。這將吸引觀眾並使他們產生正確的期待——這一點對於使用者留存至關重要，如果你的資訊很吸引人，但它導致玩家對遊戲產生了過高的期待，他們很快就會解除安裝遊戲，而你花在吸引玩家上的成本也一去不回了。

根據我的經驗，遊戲介紹視訊的高點選率(>1%)是成功的第一個跡象。接下來你要讓商店頁面的內容支撐和擴充套件視訊內容；如果能做好這些，你將得到一個30%-40%的轉化率，那麼安裝率大致可以達到0.4至0.5。這些是專案營銷成功的證明，並且意味著無論專案存在任何其他問題，它都應該被開發。

我們能怎樣影響安裝率？

安裝率反映了受眾的反饋，因此它應該被視為一個外部因素，它只能被計算而無法被控制。這是製作人在預開發階段（確定遊戲概念背景和發行時間）的工作結果。因此一個專案的通過對於製作人來說可能是福也可能是禍。

顯然，我的論斷建立在以下兩點被滿足的前提下：

該專案的定位正確並且廣告資源投放得當，沒出現什麼重大的錯誤。

我們看待的是長期的發展。在短期內，你可以通過投入一兩個大廣告資源促進安裝率提升，但這些資源很快就會消耗完，到時專案又會回到基礎水平。從長遠來看，我們真正能做的是減緩指標的下跌速度。

我們應該在什麼時候測算安裝率？

立刻！一旦你對遊戲的概念背景有所瞭解就可以開始了。你甚至不需要等待合適的時機檢視投資回報率和目標留存率。正如我之前提到的，遊戲介紹視訊的高點選率是遊戲成功的第一個跡象，並且你不需要等到測試發行時再測算它，某些情況下，你甚至在專案開發啟動前就可以測算它。

要做到這一點，你需要把你的視訊廣告投放到網路平臺中，鑑於它們的受眾是廣泛的，你得到的資料將比較真實。這些資料能夠使你客觀地比較各個專案。

在比較專案時應關注它們各自的生命週期，這也是非常重要的，否則你會得出錯誤的結論。忽視專案生命週期是一個嚴重的錯誤，即使是專業人士也常犯這個錯誤。這裡有一個例子，下面這張圖展示了我們的兩個熱門遊戲發行一年後投資回報率的變化。（虛線代表專案開始的狀況，實線代表一年後的狀況）

對比十分鮮明，剛開始接觸目標受眾所需的成本很低，報酬還高。但到了某個時刻，它回到了正常的水平，即便經過上一年的調整，投資回報仍然枯竭了。因此當你在比較兩個專案時，切記要關注它們的生命週期。

評估一款產品的成功——從遊戲指標的角度來看

正如我在文章開頭所指出的，營銷指標只是衡量專案潛力的因素之一。另一個是遊戲指標。

與營銷指標相比，遊戲指標很難比較。在公司工作的十三年間，我們多次嘗試討論歸納出一個評估遊戲質量好壞的標準，但我們從未成功過，而是每每陷入關於不同型別遊戲的爭論中。

我們所有的產品都被稱為遊戲，但事實上它們有很大的不同，唯一的共同點是它們的娛樂性。所有的遊戲都能娛樂玩家，但是每種型別都有各自的特點。這意味著只有把相同型別的遊戲拿來比較才是合理的。但如果你觀察手遊型別的變化歷程，你會發現它們在不斷進化，不同型別混合併產生了各種各樣的新型別或者亞型別。

這種情況是由手遊市場的天性導致的；在手遊市場上，那些能夠最先提供獨特並具長期盈利性的體驗的遊戲總是佔據優勢。這使得遊戲成為一個極具彈性和活躍性的產品，不同型別間的界限是模糊的，並且將遊戲分解成不同指標是一個挑戰。

因此，當我們評估手遊的遊戲指標時，我們無法從資料的角度進行比較。在這種條件下，我們只能粗略比較那些極端的指標，但這把遊戲簡單分成了好遊戲和壞遊戲，而無法分析那些介於這兩者之間的遊戲的潛力。

那麼我們該怎麼辦？是否存在一個以資料為支撐的評估方式?

我想是存在的。

我們花了一定的時間才找到了這種方式。它不是系統性地被發現的，而是出於偶然，關於這一點我們要感謝Google Play。基於他們的市場分析我們開始了研究，從而找到了答案。

是這樣的，2017年，Google Play在巴西為他們的開發者舉辦了一次會議，並分享了各種資訊。其中的一張演示幻燈片上展示了四組成功遊戲前10分鐘的留存曲線。

當時的我們正忙於研究如何提高《劍聖戰爭》（Juggernaut Wars）的留存率，因此這項調查結果極大地鼓舞了我們。它使我們從一個全新的角度思考留存率，即遊戲在開始的幾分鐘內留存率有多高，以及從那之後它是如何增長的。

Google Play的資料顯示，起始資料越高、前幾分鐘內的增長越快，遊戲的潛在受歡迎程度就越高。我們研究了自己的遊戲，結果是相符的！

上面這張圖示反映了我們的兩款熱門遊戲和一款中等遊戲的留存率曲線，結果和Google Play的描述相當一致。（黃實線和藍實線代表熱門遊戲，綠實線代表中等遊戲）

“哇哦，你可以通過遊戲前10分鐘的表現來評估它的潛力，”我們想。

為了充分理解這個結論，請你試想一下：玩家願意花一分鐘玩一款遊戲意味著他們第二天很可能再次玩這個遊戲。並且如果我們討論的是一款熱門遊戲，那麼一分鐘對於一款尚未確定的熱門遊戲的留存率來說具有足夠大的影響力。玩家在一分鐘內能做什麼呢？幾乎什麼都做不了。他們最多瀏覽一下游戲的設定和基本操作。他們不會仔細考察整個遊戲，而是看看什麼是不能改變的。你可以把它稱作這個專案的DNA。

因此我們假設每個專案都有各自的DNA，它可以被理解為一種以資料的方式向你呈現遊戲潛力的指標。

一個專案的DNA指的是玩家在遊戲的前幾分鐘內探索的一些基本的遊戲內容。它決定了幾分鐘後的留存情況，以及從那之後的留存率的邊際增長。起始值越高，邊際增長越高，DNA及和遊戲潛力越強。

這種微觀分析法打破了型別的限制，使我們從最原始的角度看待一個專案。通過評估一名玩家在一分鐘後繼續玩遊戲的意願，並估算他們接下來玩遊戲的意願，我們得知了玩家的潛意識反應。這麼短的時間範圍幾乎無法呈現玩家有意識的選擇的情況，但我們可以瞭解他們的下意識選擇。如果一款遊戲的概念足夠強大、實施效果足夠好，它將使玩家下意識地參與，並且玩家玩的時間越長，遊戲的影響力就越大。

什麼時候才是評估專案DNA的合適時機？

當你們做出了一個大於10分鐘的高質量成品時，就可以對它進行評估了。

只要你的遊戲運作良好，從理論上說，你可以在垂直切片（vertical slice）階段評估它的潛力。事實上，由於你需要大量的資料，你可以選擇在內測之後進行評估，採用經典的按分鐘計算留存的方式。你需要招募具有代表性的使用者群體，據我們估計至少需要40,000名使用者。只要你為這樣規模的使用者們提供你的10分鐘高質量成品，你將能夠確定專案的DNA。

如何解讀專案DNA？

按照這樣的方式，最終你將獲得一條曲線。這條曲線的資料只有同其它以相同方式獲得的曲線進行比較時才有意義。當你研究每分鐘的留存率時，研究很大程度上取決於專案。瞭解使用者是如何登入和退出、伺服器如何讀取這些資料是非常重要的。當你把專案與其它具有相同伺服器解決方案（server solutions）的專案進行對比時，你將能確定它的最大價值。

即使你找不到可對比的案例，你仍然可以通過觀察專案的增長情況來評估它。一款成功遊戲的留存率呈每分鐘遞增的狀態，這也就意味著玩家的數量越多，他們對遊戲的喜愛程度越大。如果留存率不增反降，意味著遊戲存在一個根本問題。我把這個問題稱作一個蟲眼（wormhole）。下面這張圖反映了我們的遊戲中存在的一個明顯的蟲眼。

從圖中你可以看出，在最初的10分鐘內，留存率的增長緩慢。我們最暢銷的遊戲可以達到250%，但此處只有20%。同時，第二分鐘的留存率比第一分鐘結束後要低，這表明玩家們不僅沒被遊戲吸引，還流失了。只要一個專案存在這樣的蟲眼，它就不可能有效地獲取新玩家。

總結

在一家旗下擁有10多個的工作室、不同工作室手頭進行多個專案的公司工作，我有機會了解我們所有的成功開發經歷，並通過分析報告和親身實踐對它們進行評估。

我的任務是評估專案，不只是把它們分成強勢專案和弱勢專案，還要通過分析它們的增長潛力，創造出一種用於評估優劣性尚不明確的專案的方法。儘管專案的增長潛力時常不明顯。

我希望我的研究能幫助有才能的開發者在專案啟動或收尾時解決所遇到的複雜問題。因為製作遊戲不僅要付出精力，還有時間。儘管開發者們總是不辭辛勞，但時間是非常有限的資源，因此還是要明智地使用它。祝好運!

本文由遊戲邦編譯，轉載請註明來源，或諮詢微信zhengjintiao

Dissecting Success

I’ve been working at My.Com for the past 13 years. This is a very big company comprised of more than 10 different studios making mostly mobile games. The company releases 3-4 games a year on average. This type of workflow understandably demands huge expertise when it comes to the quick and accurate evaluation of projects at every step of their development.

The biggest challenge in this process comes with projects showing mixed results. While it’s quite clear what to do with weak or strong projects, these projects generate problems as you shift from evaluating stats to evaluating growth potential.

For instance, if a casual project has a Day 1 retention of 20%, then it’s definitely a weak project that needs to be ended. But what if it’s a midcore game with a Day 1 retention of 30%? Not so simple now, is it?

Of course, you can always shut down this midcore game, but then you risk ending a hit. Its potential may not have been explored yet and it is possible that developers need another year for this ugly duckling to transform into a swan.

But if you do give developers this extra year and there’s still no swan in the end, the company ends up losing money and opportunity since these same developers could have been working on another game which, maybe, could have been that swan.

To find your way around this conundrum, what you need to do is learn to evaluate the potential as opposed to the current state of a project. But how can you calculate potential using industry standards? Unfortunately, you can’t. Industry standards are too vague and universal to look into the soul of a specific project. A magnifying glass isn’t enough to see the potential; you need an industrial microscope to do that.

In my experience, all decisions involving these ambiguous projects are made with the help of intuition, a credit of trust, or endless soft launches. This makes the process costly, unpredictable, and sometimes even painful.

So today I would like to talk about this microscope and what it’s been like using it in my experience. Maybe this information will help some talented developer make the right decision at the right moment and result in the birth of an excellent game.

Individual Potential is Overestimated

Let’s start our discussion by questioning what we currently know about assessing a project’s potential and predicting success of one game or another. We all have our own opinion about these things, naturally, but this is most likely wrong as it is based on subjective points of view regarding projects, making it hostage to all sorts of cognitive distortions.

We here at My.Com have had to go through a long journey to understand that experts who can correctly evaluate the potential of one game after another simply do not exist. Evidently you will find situations where a game’s success draws multiple experts to say they correctly wager that it will do well and have been vocal about it. But if you study the history of their predictions, you will see a large proportion of their forecasts were simply off target…

So how do you solve this? My solution was inspired by our own track record.

My studio is part of the My.Com group of companies, which means I, like all of our other developers, have access to the statistics of all our partners’ studios, and not just my own. So I had access to dozens of various projects, and I picked the ones that filled my criteria of success and started crunching data to find common elements that would reveal a formula.

What Counts as a Success?

In order to continue this discussion, we need to agree on the criteria which make a game successful. According to my system, these games should make at least $1 million after App Store and Google Play fees, and have a margin of more than 30% one year after global launch.

My.Com releases quite a few of these games on a regular basis, therefore I had enough data to go on and draw my first conclusions pretty soon. I have broken them down into two postulates:

1. There are no successful games without successful marketing

2. There is no successful marketing without a successful game

That’s right, our internal product research has shown that successful products always have a history of success for both the game and its marketing. Despite the fact that these factors are not in direct correlation, it’s where their lines cross that we find the necessary level of success.

This is why the next strong point that I would like to note is that it is futile to compare projects using game metrics without combining them with marketing metrics. It’s the same as talking about an object’s color by looking only at its shadow.

So now we need to further define criteria for success from two separate perspectives: marketing and game metrics.

Evaluating a Product’s Success – Marketing

After studying the marketing of our greatest games, it quickly became evident that the key to their success is in the project’s ability to attract many cheap registrations. Revenue targets were reached through these registrations, and after further optimization, we reached the required margins.

To describe the effect that allows a project to attract a lot of traffic, we need to look at the Install Rate (IR) of advertising. In my opinion, it is the parameter to look at when considering a project’s marketing success, and it is directly tied to Click-Through Rate (CTR) and Conversion Rate (CR). So the calculation for determining one’s Install Rate is IR = CTR * CR.

In order to achieve a high IR you need to have a high click-through rate on your creative elements and a high store page conversion rate. And you can achieve this only in the case where both your creative elements and your store page carry the same message. This will captivate the audience and form the correct expectations from the product. This is a must to retain the attracted user. If your message is captivating but it creates false expectations, the players will leave quickly and the costs of luring them in won’t be compensated.

In my experience, the first sign of looming success is high CTR on gameplay video creative content (>1%). The store page’s next goal is to support and expand the message of the video content, and if all is done right, you get a CR of 30-40%, which combine for an overall IR of 0.4-0.5. These are signature values of a project’s successful marketing, and it means the project should be developed despite any other problems it may have.

How can the Install Rate be affected?

Because the IR is a reflection of the audience’s reaction, it should be considered an external factor as it can only be calculated and not controlled. This is the result of the producer’s work during pre-production when the game’s concept was approved along with its setting and time of release. Greenlighting a project therefore can become the producer’s blessing or curse.

Evidently, I can only say this so confidently if the following clauses have been met:

● The project’s positioning has been executed correctly and advertising assets were produced at a decent quality level without any major mistakes.

● We are looking at the longer term. In the short term, you can give your IR a nitro boost from time to time with a great advertising asset or two, but those burn out quickly and the project descends back to its baseline. In the long run, all we can really do with the index is to slow down its drop.

When should we measure the Install Rate?

Right off the bat! Pretty much as soon as you have an understanding of the game’s concept and setting. You don’t even have to wait for the right conditions to check the index through positive ROI and target retention. As I said earlier, the first sign of a successful game is a high CTR on gameplay videos and you don’t need to wait for the soft launch to measure it. In some cases you don’t even need to wait for the project’s development to kick off.

To do that, you need to carry out your video ads’ UA in video networks, as their target audiences are broad, so your results will be as unbiased as they can get. The results allow for an objective comparison of various projects.

It is also very important to bear in mind the life cycle of the projects you are comparing. If they are different ages, you will end up drawing the wrong conclusions. Ignoring the life cycle is a grave mistake that even professionals tend to make. Here’s an example of how the ROI for two of our hit projects’ marketing campaigns changed just one year after launch.

This sharp contrast in ROI illustrates how the target audience you engage from the start is very cheap and pays well. But there comes a time when it runs its course, and returns dry up despite the past year’s tweaks. So when you’re comparing two projects, always mind their life cycles.

Evaluating a Product’s Success – Game Metrics

As I indicated at the beginning of the article, marketing metrics are just one of the main pieces of the puzzle that is a project’s potential. The other one would be gaming metrics.

Unlike marketing IR, gaming metrics are very hard to compare. Over the 13 years I’ve been at the company we’ve had plenty of “Holy Wars” in an attempt to narrow it down to one concept of evaluating a game’s quality. None of these attempts were successful since they would always crash into counter-arguments about different genres.

All of our products are called games, but in truth they are all very different products that are united only by their entertaining nature. All games entertain players, but every genre has its specifics. This means that it is only correct to compare games of the same genre. But if you look at the genres of mobile games on a timeline, you will see that they evolve perpetually and you get all sorts of explosive combinations when genres mix and give birth to new genres and subgenres.

This happens because of the nature of the mobile games market; it rewards the games that were the first to provide a unique experience that can be monetized in the long run. This makes games an extremely elastic and dynamic product where genre borders are blurred and breaking games down to gaming metrics is a challenge.

So when we speak about mobile games and forming the criteria to evaluate their game metrics, we find ourselves in an extremely chaotic environment which does not allow us to carry out comparisons based on mathematical calculations. The only thing we can do in these conditions is to carry out a rough comparison of game metrics in their extremes, which could split games into good and bad, but cannot provide any insight into a mixed feeling game’s potential.

So what do we do? Is there a mathematically backed solution rather than one based on trusting this or that developer?

I think so.

We did not come to this understanding straight away in our studio. It wasn’t discovered systemically. It was circumstantial, and for that we should thank Google Play. It is their market analysis that was the starting point for our own research, which in turn gave us the answer.

This happened in Brazil in 2017. Google Play held a conference there for its developers and shared all sorts of information with them. One of their presentation slides revealed four groups of projects whose success is measured by the retention curve in the first 10 minutes of the game.

At that moment in time we were obsessed with improving retention in our game Juggernaut Wars, so this research inspired us greatly. It suggested looking at retention for a new point of view, i.e. how high it is from the first minute of the game and moving into quality growth straight after that.

Google Play’s data suggested that the stronger the starting point and growth in the first minutes, the higher the game’s potential popularity. We used this concept for our own research and it worked!

We ended up having this chart with reflected retention of two of our hit games and one middle game and it correlated with their commercial success very accurately.

“Wow, you can actually assess a game’s hit potential by its first 10 minutes,” we thought.

To fully understand the power of that conclusion, think of this equation: just one minute spent playing a game provides a stable mathematical chance of re-visiting this game the following day. And if we’re talking about a hit game, then one minute is enough to make a huge difference when it comes to retention for a game that isn’t a definite hit. And what can a player really see over just one minute? Next to nothing. It will only mean glancing at the setting and base mechanics. They will see what is impossible to change without overhauling the whole project. You could say this is the project’s DNA.

This is how the hypothesis that every project has DNA was born. It can be interpreted as the metric that gives you a mathematical representation of a game’s potential.

A project’s DNA is a set of fundamental aspects of a game that a player dives into in the first minutes of playing. This determines the chance of retention after the first minute as well as the marginal chance of growth with every consecutive minute in the game. The higher the starting value and the higher the marginal growth, the strong the DNA and its potential.

This microanalysis allows looking beyond genre boundaries and seeing a project completely raw. When we assess a player’s will to continue playing after the first minute and measure how much more they’re inclined to keep playing with every other minute, what we get is a player’s subconscious reaction. This short timeframe provides very little to no data for a gamer to make a conscious decision. But it is made subconsciously. If a game’s concept and its implementation are strong enough, this will keep the player engaged subconsciously and the longer they play the stronger its influence.

When is the right moment to assess the DNA?

This concept works once a project has at least 10 minutes of ready-for-release quality gameplay.

Once you get the game up and running well enough, its hit potential can theoretically be measured at the vertical slice stage. You can, in reality, measure it no earlier than at the closed alpha stage since you need a large volume of data to form a graph. This research is based on classic by-the-minute retention. In order to compile the data into a chart, you need representational groups of users for each of the 10 minutes. Our estimations suggest that at least 40,000 registrations are the required minimum. As soon as you can provide that volume of users for 10 minutes of ready-for-release quality gameplay, you will be to determine the project’s DNA.

How to interpret the DNA?

Your result will be in the form of a curve with the base data only providing value when compared to other curves calculated the same way. When you’re dealing with minute-by-minute retention, the task depends very much on the project. It’s important to know how users log in and log out and how the server is reading this data. Your maximum value will be determined in comparing projects with similar server solutions.

Even if you have nothing to compare with, you can still assess the project by looking at the growth dynamics. A successful game would have retention growing with every passing minute, so it means the more that players play, the more they like it. If retention is not growing or even dropping, it indicates a fundamental problem. I call this problem a wormhole. Here’s an example of an evident wormhole in one of our games.

As you can see from the chart, retention growth over the first 10 minutes is very low. While our best-selling games see it at 250%, here it’s just 20%. At the same time retention at the second minute is lower than after the first minute, and that means the game is not only failing to engage, it is losing its attracted audience. As long as a project has a wormhole, it cannot effectively acquire new players.

Making the call

Working at a large company which unites more than 10 different studios, each of which is constantly engaged in several projects, I had the opportunity to look at all of our positive experiences and study our success cases, assessing them through analysis and from my own experience.

My task was to learn to evaluate projects not only splitting them into strong or weak, but also by creating a method to assess mixed-feeling projects by analyzing their growth potential, which at times was not evident yet.

I hope my research helps talented developers make weighed decisions when dealing with complex issues as the launch or closing of a project. Because working on a game is not just effort but also time. While developers are always eager to put in the hard work, time is a very limited resource, so use it wisely. Good luck!（source： ofollow,noindex" target="_blank">Gamesindustry.biz ）