Launched browser game analytics (I): User’s definition

Hardcore user

On various Analytics platforms we could see a lot of helpful information. You know your website or game performance. You know there are bouncers and long-runners. But what is the definition of your most valuable user?

When talking about users quality you need to decide whether your goal is to have a lot of hardcore players or hardcore payers. These two are very different by their definition:

1. Hardcore player - player who spends a lot of time and performs a lot of actions in your game

2. Hardcore payer - player who spends a lot of money in a game for different reasons

The reason you need to decide this is because sometimes you’ll have more income in one case, sometimes in another. For example, social games have to have a lot of players to be playable. You need your neighbours in tasks or without them you don’t feel any competition. This way your main goal is to have a lot of hardcore players.

On the other hand there are a lot of games without interaction to other players and you would like to know why one player is paying more than another.

KPI and its ranges

The second thing you need to define is the key performance indicators of your hardcore user. For Hardcore payer it is mostly number of $cash$ they spent in a game. For hardcore players the easy KPI is their level.

For payers:

Get the range of money spent per user. For example my users spend from 0 to 75$ a week. Now split the range into significant pieces:

For players:

Get the range of levels accomplished by users. For example my users accomplish from 0 to 26 levels. I want to take a look at each:

What do you know about users who spend 66-75$ (reached level 26)?

How many of users reach level 26?

Lets assume, that 0-75$ reached by 100% of your users:

Or level 0-26:

If you don’t have any levels you could mix more metrics who defines your best user. For example:

1. User spends 0 - 5min in a game each week

2. User performs 0-150 specific actions in a game each week

3. User returns to the game 1-18 times a week.

Following this example we could define that our hardcore user may have these characteristics:

5min, 150 actions and 18 times / week. But in some cases there are none of users who reach exact maximum of all metrics so my advice would be to have one performance indicator for this kind of analysis.

Your user definition is done. In the next article we’ll try to get to know with users and try to define our To-Do list.