Previously a senior director at Sony's Liverpool Studio, Clemens Wangerin is a co-founder and the MD of UK games analytics provider Setgo.

Whether you're creating games for mobile, social networks or browser, analytics remains a hot topic.

As far as mobile games are concerned, developers have generally come to understand the value of tracking general usage metrics.

By knowing the number of installs, session lengths, player locations, level progression, assumed demographics or in-app purchases, you can obtain solid snapshots of how your game is performing at any given time, after it's released into the wild.

Full extent

But what if you're more interested in analytics from a game design point of view? None of those metrics provide any direct insights into how people are playing the game, only that they are playing.

There are lots of reasons why a designer would be interested in analytics, and not all of them are about trying to get the user to pay more. It would be narrow minded to only consider that aspect.

Of course, analytics are essential for monetisation but using them in a way to take advantage of your players is to throw the baby out with the bath water.

Silver bullets

As a designer, Engagement and Balance are the two most important areas where you can obtain valuable insights about your audience. Get both right, and you've taken a significant step towards having a successful game.

From a design point of view, figuring out and understanding which is which is crucial.

Engagement relates to when everyone in your game is playing Arcade game mode but very few people are playing Challenge mode.

Typically you would use session length to measure Engagement but that only tells you whether players are engaged or not. You need more context to glean really useful insights. You'll want to know frequency of play, how many sessions per day, how often do they check the leaderboards, how often do they use social features such as gifting, etc.

You want to know not just whether players are engaged or not. You'll want to know exactly what it is that's actually engaging them, and whether any of the changes or additions you've made to a particular game mode are producing a desired upswing in numbers.

All about flow

Balance, on the other hand, is focusing on the people who are playing a particular game mode.

If players are playing Challenge mode once but always quit out, figuring out why they only played it once and addressing it is probably more to do with balancing.

Balancing will not only tell you whether your game is too hard or too easy, it will tell you why or where it's too hard or too easy.

If a player always runs out of bullets at certain points in your game, you'll know you need to place more ammo packs or that the previous areas were too taxing.

Hence, in free-to-play games, you would use balancing for your in-game economy to make sure you have the right balance between sinks and sources, so that players can spend in-game currency as frequently as they can earn it.

Keep it smooth

Through Balancing you are also able to spot any exploits.

For example, in a Facebook game we developed, we spotted a massive spike in spears being sold and in-game currency being earned. Upon investigation we realised that players could buy materials to build spears for less than they were able to sell them for, earning them a nice profit in the process until we revised the balance in item values.

But why and when are you interested in those aspects?

If you're doing a free-to-play game that's developed in an iterative manner, or a game for which you frequently release updates, it's a no brainer. You will always want to make the game more engaging and improve the balancing.

If you're doing a pay-to-play 99c/69p app or a console game, you're not going to iterate so often, but you still have an opportunity to learn.

Forgeting monetisation for a second, purely as a craft you should want to know what people liked about your game. Relying on sales data isn't good enough, Maybe that was more about the marketing than actual enjoyment.

Balance and Engagement are interlinked, of course, because if a game is too easy or too hard people will quickly lose interest. If you don't get the Balance right, your Engagement will suffer. If you get the Balance right, your Engagement will be good.

And remember, when working on improving your metrics, always pick one area for improvement at a time. If you don't get the desired improvement in that area, or your numbers end up worse, don't be afraid to roll back the update or try again.
You can find about more about Setgo Analytics via Twitter and its website.