Hyper-casual games publisher Voodoo has tapped the services of GameAnalytics to help identify and refine the games most likely to become an app store hit.
The French company has experienced huge success over the last few years after developing its own titles, such as Paper.io, as well as publishing games including H8 Games’ Helix Jump (310-plus million downloads) and Taichi Kobayashi’s Tenkyu (30m-plus).
Its extensive, regular international chart-topping portfolio also includes the likes of Snake VS Block (87m-plus downloads), Dune! (56 million-plus), Rolly Vortex (44m-plus) and Hole.io (40m-plus). Since 2016, it has published more than 15 games that have reached the top 20 in the App Store charts.
The company has become synonymous with the hyper-casual genre - quick, simple games that largely utilise ad monetisation to bring in the majority of revenue rather than in-app purchases.
How Voodoo discovers killer apps
When Voodoo decided to take the shift to publishing, the team wrote a script to scrape the Google Play store, which allowed them to compile details of thousands of studios for outreach campaigns.
Once it finds promising developers to work with, and after pitching to the company, Voodoo uses GameAnalytics’ tools to sift through the games with the most market potential.
Voodoo uses the platform to review key performance indicators like Day One and Day Seven retention rates. Typically, Voodoo eyes Day One retention of 50 per cent or greater. Around 19 out of 20 studios fail to pass this process.
GameAnalytics is also used by the publisher to gather feedback based on the data, which it uses to provide actionable advice to the developers on improving their game design and strengthening their metrics.
Following the release of a game, Voodoo still uses GameAnalytics’ services to track game progress, with a custom integration via the GameAnalytics Rest API which feeds data into the publisher’s own proprietary dashboard.
"At Voodoo we review hundreds of games each month,” said Voodoo publishing expert Hugo Peyron.
“Thanks to the data collected with GameAnalytics we’re able to help our partners with upcoming trends, clear creation guidelines, features to increase retention and a unique ideation process."
"One of the great perks of working as a publisher is seeing how the titles of enthusiastic developers can be optimised to make a huge impact on their success.
“With the many different GameAnalytics SDKs and a custom API integration into our own platform, we can synchronise insights and feedback with our partners and streamline the consultancy process.
“Using data to make judgements and informed decisions has proved critical to our success."
GameAnalytics recently published a report entitled ‘A Global Analysis of Mobile Gaming Benchmarks’, which presented the results of a study into ideal D1 to D28 retention rates, as well as covering other KPIs such as average session length and ARPPU. It also delved into game stickiness and conversion.
You can view the full report here and learn more about GameAnalytics’ services on the company’s website.
