The Blog - Ninja Metrics^®

F2P Long-term Player Retention

Making a great first impression for your players with an engaging and fun experience is the start to success of any video game, but it doesn’t end there - the next important step (especially in Free-to-Play) is getting them to stay hooked and come back for more.

With F2P games, player retention is the most important piece to the puzzle - you aren’t going to make any revenue if you can’t keep players engaged and convince them to buy IAP’s. Even more important is planning for the long-term, for example, engaging player by creating a vision of what the player might become if some time, and possibly some money, is put into the game.

Effectiveness of In-app Purchases

In-app purchases are arguably one of the most popular forms of video game monetization - just take a quick look at the latest App Store charts, and you’ll find that most of the top games are freemium/free-to-play, including popular titles like Clash of Clans and Candy Crush Saga. But how effective are IAP’s compared to ads or even the traditional pay-to-download method?

VentureBeat Intel recently created a report, collecting data from 176 developers and over 1,000 games, to compare popularity of over 10 monetization methods versus their cost effectiveness. What they found isn’t particularly surprising - IAP’s reigned supreme over other

Publishing Indies in the Era of Self-Publishing

As an indie game developer, team members are often a jack-of-all-trades - marketing and promoting a game, working with a PR team, finding the right ads, and doing many other things all the while developing the actual game.

As indie gaming has exploded in recent years and digital marketing requires more attention with the popularity of social media, independent publishers need help more than ever, says Steve Escalante, head of Versus Evil.

Amazon Announces the Fire TV

In a never-ending war of set-top boxes including the Apple TV, Roku and even Chromecast, Amazon earlier today announced its foray into the competition: the Fire TV. As a “streaming device to end all streaming devices”, the company boasted the device’s $99 price-point, quad-core processor, 2GB of memory, and most importantly a dedicated GPU.

Wearables: Untethering Video Games from the Living Room

Five years ago at E3, we saw the first glimpse of wearable video game tech as Nintendo CEO Satoru Iwata unveiled the Wii Vitality Sensor. While it was a very early prototype that confined users to a living room space, it paved the way for the future of wearable video game tech and got people talking. Fast forward to 2014, and we have the Oculus Rift, which has spawned a revival in VR and wearable gaming tech.

Can Players Handle Smart Enemy NPCs and AI?

There’s no doubt that video game AI has been getting progressively smarter over the years. In an old shooter like Doom, enemy NPCs would simply charge at the player. Nowadays, video games like Call of Duty take in several surrounding and situational factors, resulting in enemy NPCs taking a “flank and cover fire” stance for example - to provide a more realistic and tougher gameplay experience.

A writer on Kotaku posted a great discussion earlier on whether video game players can handle this “Smart” AI from enemy NPCs, as she outlined a few surprising results based on a playtest study.

Gaming The App Store

Charting on Apple’s App Store can be the primary source of revenue for an app or mobile game, so there’s no doubt that many game developers are “gaming” the system these days - by faking positive reviews and downloads to trick the charting algorithm.

When Apple’s charting algorithms become compromised through these “gaming” methods, it affects both the developer’s reputation and Apple’s, resulting in loss of customer trust while also not giving quality indie games a chance.

30 Years of Creating Strategy Games

Game developer and designer Julian Gollop recently wrote an article on GamaSutra about his 30-years of experience in creating strategy games. He’s helped create AAA games like the X-Com series and Assassin’s Creed III.

Julian offers some great insight into how the game industry has changed since the 1980’s until now, as he’s shifted from indie, to big-box and back to Kickstarter-backed game development. He also discussed how strategy games specifically have changed throughout the years, and why many of the modern strategy games fail. “I think the biggest problem is an inadequate pre-production phase where the core gameplay has not been proven with an effective prototype," he says. "The key for building a good prototype is to 'find the fun' quickly and test it regularly with people who haven't been exposed to it before."

King Files $500M IPO

Just over two years ago, social games company Zynga went public at $10 per share, as its popular games like FarmVille and Texas HoldEm Poker gained in popularity. Shares rose to almost $15 in March 2012, but quickly tapered off and are now worth only $5.

The Short Rise and Fall of Flappy Bird

Just a few weeks ago, Flappy Bird was the #1 free app in the App Store - played by millions of users and talked about by the majority of tech/gaming websites. Its extremely simple “one-touch” gameplay frustrated players with its extreme difficulty, yet it retained an addictiveness reminiscent to the 8-bit console gaming days. 

Unfortunately, the game’s Vietnamese developer, Dong Nguyen didn’t appreciate the fact that people were becoming so addictive to his game, and had trouble coping with the amount of press Flappy Bird was receiving - so he took it down from the App Store earlier this week. Since then, a slew of copycats have made an App Store appearance and iPhones preloaded with the game started appearing on eBay (the company has since taken the listings down).

12 Best Games for the iPad

It’s been almost four years since the iPad first made its debut, and since then over 500,000 native iPad apps have been uploaded to the app store, totaling $10B in sales across both the iPad and iPhone. While the iPad isn’t always the first iOS device that developers choose to prioritize upon, the recent 9.7 inch Retina screen and A7 chip in the iPad Air has become ideal as a primary platform for iOS game development.

Recent games like The Room are proof that prioritizing native iPad development can be successful, and only time will tell whether or not we’ll see more developers adopting this model - in the mean time, Kotaku wrote a good article on the 12 best

Is Nintendo Going to Release Smartphone Games?

Nintendo has taken up a majority of the past week’s gaming industry news - and unfortunately it hasn’t been great. The company announced a $211M loss of income for Q4 2013, attributed to  low Wii U sales over the holidays

Just yesterday morning, president and CEO Satoru Iwata announced that he’d be taking a 50% cut in salary, while other execs would face a 20-30% reduction in pay. While the company is known for going against the grain with its non-conventional systems (compared to the Xbox and PlayStation), Satoru did admit that Nintendo “misread the market”, and is possibly looking at a new business structure.