Power Great Gaming with New Analytics from Play Games

By Ben Frenkel, Google Play Games team

A few weeks ago at the Game Developers Conference (GDC), we announced Play Games Player Analytics, a new set of free reports to help you manage your games business and understand in-game player behavior. Today, we’re excited to make these new tools available to you in the Google Play Developer Console.

Analytics is a key component of running a game as a service, which is increasingly becoming a necessity for running a successful mobile gaming business. When you take a closer look at large developers that do this successfully, you find that they do three things really well:

• Manage their business to revenue targets


• Identify hot spots in their business metrics so they can continuously focus on the game updates that will drive the most impact


• Use analytics to understand how players are progressing, spending, and churning

“With player engagement and revenue data living under one roof, developers get a level of data quality that is simply not available to smaller teams without dedicated staff. As the tools evolve, I think Google Play Games Player Analytics will finally allow indie devs to confidently make data-driven changes that actually improve revenue.”

Kevin Pazirandeh

Developer of Zombie Highway 2

With Player Analytics, we wanted to make these capabilities available to the entire developer ecosystem on Google Play in a frictionless, easy-to-use way, freeing up your precious time to create great gaming experiences. Small studios, including the makers of Zombie Highway 2 and Bombsquad, have already started to see the benefits and impact of Player Analytics on their business.

Further, if you integrate with Google Play game services, you get this set of analytics with no incremental effort. But, for a little extra work, you can also unlock another set of high impact reports by integrating Google Play game services Events, starting with the Sources and Sinks report, a report to help you balance your in-game economy.

If you already have a game integrated with Google Play game services, go check out the new reports in the Google Play Developer Console today. For everyone else, enabling Player Analytics is as simple as adding a handful of lines of code to your game to integrate Google Play game services.

Manage your business to revenue targets

Set your spend target in Player Analytics by choosing a daily goal

To help assess the health of your games business, Player Analytics enables you to select a daily in-app purchase revenue target and then assess how you're doing against that goal through the Target vs Actual report depicted below. Learn more.

Identify hot spots using benchmarks with the Business Drivers report

Ever wonder how your game’s performance stacks up against other games? Player Analytics tells you exactly how well you are doing compared to similar games in your category.

Metrics highlighted in red are below the benchmark. Arrows indicate whether a metric is trending up or down, and any cell with the icon can be clicked to see more details about the underlying drivers of the change. Learn more.

Track player retention by new user cohort

In the Retention report, you can see the percentage of players that continued to play your game on the following seven days after installing your game.

Learn more.

See where players are spending their time, struggling, and churning with the Player Progression report

Measured by the number of achievements players have earned, the Player Progression funnel helps you identify where your players are struggling and churning to help you refine your game and, ultimately, improve retention. Add more achievements to make progression tracking more precise.

Learn more.

Manage your in-game economy with the Sources and Sinks report

The Sources and Sinks report helps you balance your in-game economy by showing the relationship between how quickly players are earning or buying and using resources.

For example, Eric Froemling, one man developer of BombSquad, used the Sources & Sinks report to help balance the rate at which players earned and spent tickets.

Read more about Eric’s experience with Player Analytics in his recent blog post.

To enable the Sources and Sinks report you will need to create and integrate Play game services Events that track sources of premium currency (e.g., gold coins earned), and sinks of premium currency (e.g., gold coins spent to buy in-app items).

Do You Read Magazines on Your Android?

With Google’s Newsstand app, digital copies of all major magazines are available on Android today. But how many of you actually read magazines on your Android device? Let us know if you prefer to read digital copies through Newsstand or whether you like to read the traditional hard copies more.

The post Do You Read Magazines on Your Android? appeared first on xda-developers.

Casio Edifice EQB-510D and ECB-500D show world time

Casio has unveiled a couple new models of watches that fall into its Edifice family. The new models are the EQB-510D and ECB-500D. While these watches are designed to interface with an app running on your Android smartphone, they aren’t designed to give you notifications like a smartwatch.

Casio has designed the Edifice line to cater to people who need to know what time it is all around the world. Both of the watches have analog faces that are easy to read. When linked with the smartphone app the watches can tell time in 300 cities around the world and in 40 time zones using a sub dial.

Both watches use Global Time Sync and are based on the Smartphone Link EQB-500 watch that came before. To adjust the time to fit the current time zone, all the wearer has to do is press a button to update the watch automatically.

The watches can also correct automatically for daylight savings time if needed. Daylight savings time on the watch is kept up to date by using the app on the smartphone. Alarms and other time settings can be changed using the app as well. The watch also has a phone finder function that activates an alarm on the smartphone with the press of a button on the watch.

SOURCE: Casio

EE offers free Power Bar portable charger for subscribers

Probably one of the most frustrating things for mobile users nowadays is that smartphones and tablets' battery problems still persist despite the "best efforts" from OEMs to give us better charging devices. One mobile network company wants to help out their consumers (and themselves too of course) by giving out free portable chargers for those who are always on the go.

Calling it their "Power to the People" campaign (and they mean it literally), current active subscribers to the network will be able to get a free Power Bar portable charger, simply by opting-in to the promo through SMS. The 2,600 mAh charger can fully charge one cycle for a smartphone. And in case your charger runs out of juice while you're still out, you can just go to any EE store and swap it for a fully charged power bank. But you also have the option of keeping your depleted charger and just juicing it up again once you reach a place where there's a charger or power outlet.

To be eligible to join this free charger program, you need to have a 30-day or 12-24 month plan for their mobile, fixed line or broadband services. Subscribers to their other program, PAYG or Pay As You Go, can also join but they should have been a customer for at least three months.

This is a good move for EE to take care of its small base while also attracting new users. And of course the more battery your device has, the more data, calls, and messages you consume so it should benefit EE as well in the long run.

VIA: The Next Web

Facebook’s new app Riff lets you collaborate on videos with friends

First it was video sharing apps. Then it became ephemeral video sharing. Now, it looks like collaborative video creation and sharing will be the name of the social media video game. Facebook has released the newest app from their Creative Labs. It's called Riff and its main purpose in life is to get you and your friends to collaborate on interesting and fun videos and then share them with the world.

A few years ago you would need video editing software and for your friends to email or message you their videos, then a few more hours (or even days) for you to stitch them together. But now, you can do all that in just a few minutes (maybe even seconds) with collaborative video apps. Riff makes it even easier as it is connected to your Facebook account so no need to convince other people to join a new social network. It's also pretty easy to use so that birthday greeting or funny video or viral clip that you've always wanted to do is just a few clicks away.

Start a video that you've thought of, put a catchy title that can also serve as the instructions for your friends, and then post them on Riff. Your friends will be able to see it and then add their own take on the topic, and then their friends will also be able to see and add, and so on and so forth. It's like an elaborate but fun video message chain (but without the threats that you will get bad luck if you don't do it). You can also look at what other people are doing, and then add your own clip to theirs.

The folks over at Riff will also be posting some nifty videos which might just inspire and/or challenge you. You can download Riff from the Google Play Store for free.

SOURCE: Facebook

Story Timeline

• Facebook Messenger opens up its platform to developers


• Facebook launches new products, tools to connect family of apps


• Facebook now lets you make digital scrapbooks of your kid's pictures

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