Estimated read time: 35 minutes, 32 seconds
With so many marketing channels to manage to promote your game, combined with the complexity of monetizing your games on multiple platforms, in PC marketplaces, or even D2C via your own webshop, your head might be spinning keeping up with where to focus your efforts.
In this episode of Growth Stage, we interview Adam Lieb of Gamesight about his thoughts on:
- Why video game marketing is so complex.
- What KPI can help you cut through the noise.
- Key strategies for interpreting your KPI over time.
If you’re wondering how to focus your team where it matters the most, don’t miss this episode of Growth Stage. Listen now!
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Podcast Full Interview: Video
Transcript
David Vogelpohl (00:04)
Hello everyone, and welcome to Growth Stage, a podcast by FastSpring, where we discuss how digital product companies grow revenue, build meaningful products, and increase the value of their business. I’m your host, David Vogelpohl. I support the digital product community as part of my role at FastSpring, and I love bringing the best of the community to you here on the Growth Stage podcast. In this episode, we’re going to be talking about developing a winning KPI strategy for game marketing.
And joining us for that conversation is someone who knows quite a bit about that from Gamesight. I would like to welcome Adam Lieb. Adam, welcome.
Adam Lieb (00:39)
Thanks for having me, David.
David Vogelpohl (00:40)
I’m so glad that you’re here. I’m so interested in this topic. And for those who are listening and watching, what Adam’s going to share today are his thoughts on why game marketing is so complex to begin with, what KPI you can use to help cut through the noise and focus on what matters most, and key strategies to use when interpreting your KPI. Sometimes we look at our KPI and don’t know what we’re seeing. So I think these are really…
interesting topics and I’m really curious to get your perspective Adam coming from Gamesight and all the data and strategies that you see with your customers. So before we kick it off into the subject matter, Adam, I wanted to start with the question I often ask, which is what was the first game or in -game item you bought with your own money? Not like a gift, but like it was Adam’s money.
Adam Lieb (01:32)
Yeah, that’s a good question. I probably bought my first game with my own money when I was eight. I was into games and into games enough that I was saving up my money to buy my own games at that age. So let’s see. I can do some quick math. When I was eight years old, what games would have been like the sort of the hot ones? I don’t have a specific memory, but it’s probably something like
probably a Final Fantasy game, maybe Final Fantasy 3 on SNES, probably something like that, that I could remember saving up for. When I was a kid, it was great because we still had Blockbuster, you go to Blockbuster and you’d rent a game and you’d have that game to play for the weekend. So it was kind of the like, you know, as a young kid during those days, it was sort of rare that you bought a game, right? That it was like worth buying and owning the game versus the, you know, whatever it was, three or four dollar rental
you’d have for the weekend, but there was a few that definitely stood out. So yeah, I’ll probably I’ll guess that it was Final Fantasy 3 on SNES.
David Vogelpohl (02:37)
You know, I like the Blockbuster rental reference, you know, that’s such an interesting one. I think for me, it would have been a quarter and an arcade machine if I really thought about it. But that’s pretty impressive. Final Fantasy for an eight year old.
Adam Lieb (02:50)
I’ve always loved JRPGs and captured me very young for sure.
David Vogelpohl (02:55)
Excellent. All right. Well, could you tell me a little bit about what Gamesight does and what you do there?
Adam Lieb (03:03)
Yeah, sure. Gamesight is, we make publishing tools and marketing tools for video game companies. We primarily work with PC and console game developers. We have a bunch of different parts of our business. I think that probably most germane to this conversation would be our measurement platform where we provide marketing attribution and measurement for pretty much all digital marketing. So we have the most used product in market for PC console games.
So through that lens, we are working with many, many companies to help measure the billions of dollars they’re spending to reach gamers and grow their games. And yeah, definitely through that lens, we spend a lot of time talking about KPIs and numbers and metrics and what are the right ones and what are the ones that are wasted everyone’s time and what are the ones that confuse everyone that mean nothing. So it’s definitely an interesting topic in one where, you know,
I like it because there’s no answer. Like there’s no one, it’s this, everyone knows you just use this one number and your whole life is easy. It’s like, it doesn’t work that way. I wish it worked that way, but it doesn’t work that way. So definitely talk about that, at least the useful, useful tactics that I see for looking at your business and trying to understand your game and how it is growing or how it could go.
David Vogelpohl (04:17)
Yeah, and you mentioned a lot of complexity in the way you described that you talked about.
different platforms the game might be on. You talked about different marketing tactics and how you’re attributing amongst all these different elements. And I think like just marketers in general are overwhelmed with the amount of data available to them and like, where do they focus their time? So with that, you know, kind of flood of information and possibilities, why is having a core set of KPI important to you? Why not just go off on these magic data adventures all the time?
Adam Lieb (04:50)
Yeah, I think the best answer for that is because people won’t understand it. So even if it’s the right number and you’re right about how you calculated it and you pulled the data correctly, even if everything was right, if people don’t understand it, it doesn’t matter. If you can’t get your whole team on board, your partners, your vendors, if everyone’s not understanding what we’re talking about, then it doesn’t really matter if you’re right. And I think that’s just the unique facet of this type of problem where like,
being right isn’t what matters, but being understood often is the thing that matters. And I think that’s where I just.
It’s hard for certain, and I’m the type of person that’s hard for me too, because I want to find this sort of like ground truth. What is the right answer? But sometimes it’s not the right answer, it’s what’s the most useful answer. And certainly the complexity of games distribution has changed a lot. When I bought Final Fantasy III, broadly they sold it one way, they shipped it to stores like Best Buy or GameStop or whatever, and people bought it. And so Square’s job, Nintendo’s job was to get distribution and make sure that stores carried their games. And as long as they did,
You know, everything else after that, like sort of didn’t matter so much. And I think that’s a very, very different world that we live in now where games are available on. Certainly they’re still stored in storage. You can go buy one. You still go buy the new Final Fantasy game. They still sell the box version of Final Fantasy 16. That’s where the minority of sales are. Majority are digital and they’re going to be digital on different platforms, on PC, on console, various streaming services. I think that’s certainly a huge challenge. It’s just games are…
distributed in a bunch of different places. So figuring out where they are and what’s working and how to track that is hard. But then also the business model of games different. Yeah, Final Fantasy III, it was probably 40 bucks. I don’t actually know what in that time of life, what a game cost. But my guess is it’s like 40 bucks is probably what we paid for Final Fantasy III, something like that. Everyone paid the same price. That’s what the game cost. And there was no way to pay any more or less for it. It was a $40 game. I guess you could rent it at Blockbuster.
David Vogelpohl (06:52)
Get in a clearance bin at some point or something.
Adam Lieb (06:54)
Yeah, maybe, maybe. But from the publisher’s perspective, they don’t care about that, right? Because their job was to sell it to Best Buy. And then what Best Buy does with it later is it’s a sort of secondary problem. So I think that’s changed a lot. Certainly, you can still buy the games that way. But most games now, most especially big AAA games, they’re going to have some sort of subscription service, DLCs, secondary parts of the product that you can buy. Obviously, there’s in -game currencies and free to play games is kind of a whole other thing.
the different ways you can give games money has just gone through the roof. There’s a lot of ways to do it, and some games employ a few of those tactics, and I’ll employ all of them. And so again, picking what’s the number that matters can be really challenging. I didn’t work in games marketing in 1992, but if I did, my guess is they broadly looked at marketing as you take the marketing budget, you take the game sales budget, you divide one by the other, and you…
broadly have your efficiency. We spent this amount of money and to make the game, we spent this much money marketing it. We divide it by how much revenue we got in. Hopefully everyone’s excited or we lost a ton of money, let’s not do that again. It doesn’t work that way anymore. And so figuring out how to calculate and make decisions is a whole lot different than it used to be.
David Vogelpohl (08:14)
You know, it’s interesting to hear you talk about the core set of KPI and hear you put so much importance into the narrative that it tells within your organization, I’m guessing to your investors and others and do they understand it? And I’m guessing also, is it also a meaningful reflection of success? I think it’s such an important way to think about KPI is like, what is the story it’s telling?
And it also sounded a little bit like you felt your core set of KPI probably isn’t where you’re doing your deep analysis. Maybe it’s more like a scorecard or like a health type view that tells a story. Is that a fair interpretation, Adam?
Adam Lieb (08:52)
Yeah, there’s definitely different, you know, there, I don’t think I’ve ever seen like one number to rule them all where you can just look at that and it tells you everything you need to know. but for sure, there are some KPIs that are, I think, good health checks of whatever you’re checking, you know, the, the business, the marketing growth, whatever you’re specifically trying to, to, to, to judge where there’s, there’s a number and it’s usually
it’s consistent, I would say those numbers need to be easy to calculate. And then you start getting into the more sort of like diagnostic numbers where you say, okay, well, this number maybe isn’t so good. Well, now let’s do go one layer deeper and then you can have a sort of another set of numbers that you’re analyzing. So I don’t think either works. I don’t think you can have, okay, we have 37 KPIs, let’s monitor them all every day and see how we’re doing. Also don’t think you can have one that says, okay, well, this is it.
And companies have tried that for a long time. And I say, that’s probably what you see the most on the internet. It’s like, just focus on your, your ARPU or ARPU or, you know, your, it’s all about CPI. And it’s like, sure. These are all important numbers. Not to say that like, you shouldn’t care about them, but that number alone doesn’t tell you everything you need to know. It’s probably a good health check. If you, if you’re tracking your CPI every day for a year and all of a sudden it starts dipping day over day, week over week. You’re, “Okay, now let’s drill in and figure out, you know, what, what are the numbers underneath that
helps us really figure out what’s going on?” But I’m always leery when people try to tell me that there’s one number and that that’s, you know, everything’s built around that number. I think they’re usually wrong.
David Vogelpohl (10:22)
Yeah, absolutely. So you alluded to this earlier around game marketing being so complex. We talked a little bit about cross -platform, cross -channel, so on and so forth. What’s your view? Why is it so difficult for game companies to effectively measure and monitor their KPI?
Adam Lieb (10:43)
it’s probably a bunch of different reasons. I think probably at its, at its core, it’s the more things equals more complexity, right? If you’re only selling in one channel, it’s not that complex. If you’re selling into channels, it’s more, you’re selling in 10. It’s, you know, it’s 10 X the complexity. So I think there’s just the, the sheer numbers of it all that make it more, more number of things, more complexity. then I think beyond that, you also get into the details and nuances of platforms and the data they share, when they share it, some
Some platforms, you know, thinking about games distribution platforms specifically, they will report numbers in real time dashboards. Some of them don’t report numbers except for on, you know, kind of 30 day audit style reports. Well, that’s if you’re trying to compare A to B, it’s really difficult to do. Some platforms give you different data in some countries than others. Okay. Well then how do I compare my, my North American sales to my European sales? If my North American sales get reported on, you know,
David Vogelpohl (11:28)
Thank you.
Adam Lieb (11:41)
One basis and you know, maybe with not net of refunds where my European sales get reported to me net of refunds Okay. Well now I can’t compare those two easily. It doesn’t mean you can’t do anything It doesn’t mean you can’t then built either build a model or change kind of your You know your analysis to account for okay. These guys don’t do it net of refunds You can do all that but every time you do that you’re adding a layer of complexity on top of a number on which you know Keep stacking up. So now all of a sudden that one number which maybe was your
daily revenue. Maybe that sounds like a great number, right? How much money do we make today? Perfectly commonsensical question to ask. But what happens when one platform reports your numbers not net of refunds and the other reports it net of refunds? Well, it becomes really difficult to just look at that number and say that it’s the right answer because maybe you screwed something up in some country and your refund rate is extremely high. Well, now you’re actually massively misjudging how successful you were that day. Again, it’s all doable. You can always make those changes to
either how the number is calculated or your analysis of it, but each time you do, you add complexity.
David Vogelpohl (12:45)
Yeah, it almost like it exponentially expands, right, by platform and then by marketing strategy, trying to drive value in those platforms. So sounds like you have plenty to do there at Gamesight.
Adam Lieb (12:58)
Well, luckily I don’t do most of that. It’s like those are engineering problems by and large, at least from our perspective. But I think that’s probably why I spend a lot of time thinking about the, like, what do the numbers mean more than, you know, there’s the how you calculate them, which is sort of a core engineering question that we have to answer for our customers. We give them dashboards and they have to have numbers in them and what those say and why they say them is important. But sort of leaning on my first point of like getting to that understanding of how do we make sure that
we’re all thinking about this the same way, we’re all able to communicate the same way, becomes the pivotal question.
David Vogelpohl (13:32)
You mentioned earlier, I think this is fair, that each company will kind of have to settle on what their core set is. And I’m sure you’ve seen this many, many times over and over again with your customers. But is there a common theme? Like, I mean, revenue maybe? I mean, you talked about the complexities and tracking it, but just like as a KPI, what are the common ones you think are the most important across the board?
Adam Lieb (13:54)
Yeah, I think there’s probably three common ones. There’s one that’s going to be on the cost side and that’ll be calculated differently, but broadly think about that as like a CPI. How much does it cost to bring me new players? There are different numbers that people will use if it’s a free to play game. How much does it cost me to bring any random person into my game? Is that useful? Probably not. How much does it cost me to bring in a player who plays my game for an hour or completes the tutorial or buys the, you know,
first upgrade or whatever, I think that’ll be a little bit different for everyone in terms of what you care about when you’re thinking about cost. But that’s certainly one which we spending to bring to bring players into our ecosystem. I think there’s like, what are they worth, which is really the revenue calculation. You know, if you use my, my childhood analogy, Final Fantasy 3 was a simple one. It was like, whatever 40 bucks or whatever it was, you know, sort of net of, you know, the, the sort of wholesaling piece of it. Fine. Maybe it was $20 every time, you know, they sent a
package of Final Fantasy 3. The best buy was $20 per cartridge they shipped. Easy to calculate, not very complicated. So yeah, what is that kind of a player worth to me? That becomes a very complicated calculation for some games because you might not, the answer might be impossible to calculate on day one, right? The simple, the common -sensical free -to -play example is someone downloads your game, they play it, they don’t spend any money for a month.
Well, in month two, they upgrade, they buy the $100 premium package and season pass and all this and that. Well, for 30 days, you thought this player was worth $0 to you, but instead they actually were worth $100 to you. And that was only in month two. Well, are they going to make that same $100 purchase next month? Are they going to make it once a year? It becomes this really challenging question to answer. The more historical data you have, the better you can estimate that. But even then, you’re still sort of a…
you know, all those investment commercials you see where they always give you the caveat, you know, past performance is no indication of future returns or something. It’s like, I always have that thought in my head of like, great. Well, last year, our average player spent this amount of money. Really doesn’t say a lot about what’s going to happen a year from now. We can kind of hope that that’s the same, the same player profiles and spin profiles, but we don’t know. We haven’t made the content or shipped the content that people are going to be spending their money on. So you can do estimates.
but at the end of the day, that’s what they are, their estimates. So yeah, that becomes a massively complicated number to calculate for many companies where it used to be a fairly trivial number to calculate, because it was like units times dollars equals revenue, period.
David Vogelpohl (16:31)
Yeah, there’s so many factors at play as well because the new content that’s released will influence the amount of revenue you make. So you could have the best marketing in the world and the average revenue goes down because people didn’t like the new season or whatever it was.
Adam Lieb (16:45)
Totally. Well, I think, you know, the one that’s probably most top of mind for me right now is Elden Ring, right? The game came out two years ago, February two years ago. It had, I think they just announced 25 million units sold to date. New DLC, which is $40, just came out. So for the last two years, you know, 25 million people bought the game that were worth roughly $60 to Bandai. That’s what probably the average purchase price was. I think there were a couple of different tiers.
Maybe it’s higher than that, but something like that. Somewhere there had to be a calculation of, well, an Elden Ring player is actually worth more to Bandai because we have future content. We’re going to make this expansion and it’s going to be $40. A bunch of people are going to buy it. But where and how do you build that in when you’re spending marketing dollars on launch? And how are you calculating what I think today I saw maybe 5 million units sold so far. So, you know, $40 times 5 million. That’s 20 % of the players basically that have.
the attach rate on the DLC. That also has boosted the initial game sales. And, you know, I don’t know that that was probably forecasted quite the same way. You knew that people who bought Elden Ring two years ago, some of them are going to buy this expansion. But what about players who’ve been hearing about the Elden Ring for two years who are now like, well, this is the time to get in. And now they’re buying the base game and the DLC. Again, we can make guesses on these things, but actually…
David Vogelpohl (17:46)
Yes.
Adam Lieb (18:08)
you know, coming up with a realistic calc on that becomes really hard because it’s sort of never been done before. As far as I, I’ve heard, this might be the highest attach rate of a DLC ever. And it’s like first week, right? Like, you know, 20, 20 % of players buying a DLC in week one is like, just like never happened before. it’s early. I don’t know. The data will bear out a little bit more, but that’s crazy, right? Like it’s, like, how do you, how do you build these? How do you build the KPI and try to make an estimate when something’s never happened before?
David Vogelpohl (18:37)
You know, one of my favorite quotes of finance forecast is the only thing you can guarantee about your forecast is it will be inaccurate. And it sounds like there’s a lot of variables at play. And so this idea of take grade and lifetime value of a player, you can take an informed prediction. But you’re really looking in the rear view mirror a lot to see like, did that informed prediction actually play out? And then I’m guessing using that information to inform the next set.
But to your point, it’s maybe a bit of tea leaves as you’re doing the forecasting sometimes.
Adam Lieb (19:12)
Yeah, absolutely. It’s got to be. I think that one of the things I’ll often encourage my team to do when you can get lost in data is step back and say, what do you think is going to happen? If you’re not going to look at any numbers, what does your gut tell you? And then go and look at the data and see, are you directionally accurate or the numbers tell you something really, really different than what makes sense to you? And I think that sometimes can help.
train you on like, because the difference between being off by 10 or 20 % on some of these things like isn’t ever going to matter. Like you said, you know that you know that it’s going to be wrong. And so how can you figure out if you’re in the right realm, right? If you know, you built a calculation that said, we think 1 % of players are going to buy this DLC. I think a reasonable expert in the system, like, well, it’s going to be hard. That seems too low. Like, there’s going to be a lot more people than they’re going to do that. And maybe if you looked at average DLC attach rates across all games, you would end up with kind of a low number.
but this is a different kind of game with a really loyal audience and, you know, but ravenous for new content. The attach rate is going to probably be on that upper tier of anything we’ve ever seen before. The fact that maybe it broke the top tier, maybe you wouldn’t have forecasted that, but you could have looked at, you know, being in that upper bounds.
David Vogelpohl (20:24)
We’ve talked a lot about selling games like paper or CPI. We’ve talked about in -game purchases. We haven’t really talked about games monetized through advertising. What do you think the core set of KPIs are for those games? Like what stands out as a common choice?
Adam Lieb (20:42)
Yeah, I think it’s still the same thing. You calculate the numbers differently, but it’s still the cost. It’s still what does it cost me to bring in a player? It’s still how much is a player worth to me? And if that’s like because they watch ads, then it’s like how many ads does each player watch? How long do they watch them for? What does that do to retention rates when you show them more ads or fewer ads? So I think the core things you look at are the same. How you calculate them is going to be really different. But getting kind of in that habit of thinking about the two sides of
what does this cost me and what does it make me? And looking at those two things separately, of course you eventually want to tie them together. But yeah, the calculations are always going to be different based on your business model.
David Vogelpohl (21:24)
I often think of ad frequency and upsells as the balance between suffering and joy, right? You’re introducing a little suffering to get a little joy of revenue for yourself or deliver a little joy of content to your player, if you will. You mentioned how the frequency of ads, of course, could affect take rate and how long people play the game and not just play time, but like periods of time.
Is your core KPI you’ve seen helpful there?
Adam Lieb (21:55)
I think those ones become really tough because you end up with these problems of averages where like cohorts are so different. And I think the most successful sort of ad monetizing games have a cohort of players for whom watching ads is like really a core part of the game loop, you know, whatever you run out of lives, watch an ad, get a new life. And there are some players that I think to your point are like, bummer, I have to watch an ad to get to get the life and I don’t really want to do it. And I think you have others that that is just part of how they play the game and it’s not a
I don’t think they perceive it the same way that you probably do. And if you were to just average out all players, you’d end up with this kind of weird answer of like, you know, on average players watch this number of ads, but really you get this 1 % of players that watch 30 ads a day and are sort of happy with that. You get the, you know, the, maybe the other tier of like, I never want to see an ad and I’ll do anything I can to avoid an ad. And then, you know, the, the more median player.
that maybe sees three to five ads and they’re sort of like intolerant of that way. So I think really what you want to do is look at each of those cohorts and figure out what is the mean from each of those cohorts rather than trying to like mean out and do the arithmetic mean of those three cohorts. Cause I think you end up with getting these weird answers. And just another one of the many complexities that games have is that gamers are sort of like, even in the same game, not all created equal and don’t enjoy the game the same way. They’re not looking to play it the same way.
They’re not like you can engage with it the same way. And so looking at the sort of average player, like kind of doesn’t oftentimes gives you a really weird answer or definitely not the answer you’re looking for. It’s another thing we talk a lot about internally, this sort of like, you know, think back to sixth grader and everybody you learn about averages. And it’s like, well, you know, there’s the mean, the median and the mode, they all mean average. Which one are we talking about here? And what’s the most useful way to think about average? I think the people often will look at average as, as mean. And like, that’s really not, I think.
useful in games as often as we’d like it to be considering that’s our default average.
David Vogelpohl (23:53)
One of my favorite mobile games is a game called White Tiles. I have a crisis right now with the game. It jams ads like crazy and the alternative to pay to turn it off is 10 bucks a month. So I’m kind of stuck in between. Like I don’t really want to play that much, but I love the game and I have the ads. Have you seen publishers you’ve worked with manage through KPI balancing? Like, you know, are you trying to push people to the subscription or just not make them annoyed enough that they stopped playing the game because of the ads?
Adam Lieb (23:59)
Okay.
Hmm.
David Vogelpohl (24:23)
I don’t mean to use my own personal experience for this question, but have you seen similar situations where people optimize between the balance between the paid and the ad side and leverage a specific KPI that stood out?
Adam Lieb (24:25)
You —I would say on the ad -specific side, that’s not a huge focus of our business. We don’t work with a ton of games that are ad -supported as their main model. But I do think there’s similar things to look at in other types of games we work with where there is maybe there’s a free -to -play tier, and then there’s a premium tier, or maybe there’s a season’s pass that… There’s some games that we work with where I would say the season’s pass is built to be more like a premium tier.
If you’re a core player of this game, you’re sort of expected to in— your experience will be what you want it to be as long as you’re on that monthly subscription, which is similar to what you’re talking about. Sometimes 10 bucks a month, sometimes it’s 20 bucks for three months. They kind of all calculate a little bit differently. And I do think that the best companies that we work with, I would say often don’t think about it the way you just described it. They would think about the reverse, which is they’re thinking about value and they’re thinking about what can we provide someone
for $10 a month that they’re like, cool, I’m happy to jam this button and buy the thing, not how much pain can I deliver to you such that you will click this button to avoid the pain. Not to say that no one ever does that, but I don’t think those are often parts of conversations we are involved in. I think they tend to be much more in the, yeah, what can we deliver for 10 bucks a month that feels valuable enough that a million people are gonna buy it, which I think is probably the way you.
David Vogelpohl (26:03)
Yeah, you want to buy it, not that you’re forced to buy it, if you will.
Adam Lieb (26:06)
Well, and I think that, you know, on the ad side, I think there’s a, there’s a, you know, it’s just sort of a similar thing where it’s like, you know, we need to make money. This is a, we’re not in the charity business. And so like showing ads is how we make, make money for our game. This is what you’re worth, you know, to us in terms of your ad dollars. So if we want to exchange that, if you’d rather just not see ads, you know, this is the value of our game is basically you’re already paying for it in terms of eyeballs and watching ads. And I think that’s tough to sometimes, communicate to.
The average person playing a free mobile game is not thinking about the developers’ P &L and what it cost them to run the game and what their ad dollars are worth or whatever.
David Vogelpohl (26:43)
Yeah, that’s a really good point, especially from the player’s perspective. I mean, I’m a marketer. I get it. But yeah, totally. And it makes sense, especially when you’re dealing with like player communities and sentiment and whatnot. Earlier, you mentioned that obviously not just focusing on CPI and peacing out is the strategy that you should be looking at. Like, are they, you know, maybe how long they’re playing the game after you’ve driven a player there.
Adam Lieb (26:47)
Yeah
David Vogelpohl (27:08)
Are there any other feature use or gameplay metrics you really like to clue in on that aren’t like revenue based?
Adam Lieb (27:14)
Yeah, definitely. I think that’s probably the hardest one to have a general rule for because every game is so different. So saying like, you know, I think in, you know, in sort of mobile free to play, the retention numbers tend to be the most, the ones that people draw on the most, you know, D1, D3, D7, D30, which I think is a great indicator of how much someone makes this game. Are they open it every day? Are they open it once a month? Like, you know, how much do they come back to play? For a lot of games we work with where they’re, they’re premium, you know, someone’s spending 60 bucks to play the game, maybe upfront, whether they played it on day two, three or seven is not the most meaningful metric. So I think it’ll be different for each game. I think that the things that I like to look at, I think tend to correlate the best with like how much people like your game. Cause at the end of the day, that kind of is what you’re trying to figure out. Like how much does someone like this thing? Cause that’s going to be the best driver of future spending, whether that’s I have a DLC or a season’s pass or it’s a free to play game is how much does someone like, like my game. I think time is a great one. Time played is, I think, maybe underused where retention numbers get looked at more. But someone downloads my game, plays it four hours today. And whether they play it any minutes tomorrow or not, I probably would think that’s a pretty engaged player versus someone who played it for five minutes today and five minutes tomorrow. Sure, they’ve retained on day two, but they didn’t put as much time in. So I love looking at time as an indicator of engagement. Certainly, there’s tutorial completion and think you know a progress in game every games gonna look a little different as to like What does it look like to get to a certain point? I think for many competitive games or games with any type of sort of PvP you kind of look at you know How does someone graduate from whatever the single -player mode or the the tutorial mode to yeah? They’ve now joined matchmaking for the first time I think that’s a great one to you know Are you graduating players through learning how to play the game to to sort of the full game experience so looking at what percent of players are reaching that full game experience, the value you’re really trying to deliver. I like that one a lot. Social is another one, depending on the game, that can be really valuable. Do players join clans? Do they make a friend in game? Whatever the social elements exist in the game. Once you’re tethering people into a social experience, they are way more likely to stick around and have fun and enjoy your game. So that’s another one I think we like.
David Vogelpohl (29:37)
So if I’m using this as a signal and I’m marketing in various marketing channels and I get a hit where the social element is really hot, you’re kind of implying I would consider that channel more valuable even if the other channel had the same number of players but didn’t have the social element to it. You might value that more because of the social aspect of people referring each other. Is that fair?
Adam Lieb (30:04)
It’s a number of things. It’s definitely that referral piece. I think a lot of it is if you have an older game, you’ll be able to calculate this yourself. I think I’m imagining for a new game where you don’t have this sort of longitudinal data and you’re trying to look at these early numbers and figure out what’s working and where I should be investing and what channels and stuff are valuable. Then I think you really care about social because I think those will over time will prove out to be players that retain, players that stick around in your game.
once they’re sort of engaged with other people, it’s difficult to turn out. The number of people I know who will still say they sort of play World of Warcraft because of the friends they have in the game, not so much because of the game itself. World of Warcraft doesn’t make them come back, their clan does. So I think those are pretty well proven engagement and kind of retention tactics that games employ. So yeah, early social engagement would be, I think, a great sign of the quality of, of a channel or the likelihood that that player is engaged and with you for the ride.
David Vogelpohl (31:07)
All right, cool. Second to last question here, do you have any advice for folks listening or watching that are looking at a sea of data and wondering what matters most? Like anything to like sage advice to help them cut through the mess?
Adam Lieb (31:21)
geez. Let’s see, we’ve talked about a couple of them, but I think that the other things that I think about or talk about the most would be making sure that people can understand it. So that’s if it needs nine caveats and you need to read the SQL query to know what it actually means, it’s probably not a good number. Even if it’s right, I think that’s the thing I always stress is like, I’m not telling you you’re wrong that that’s not like that is not the most useful number, but it is not going to be if other people can’t understand it, understand it every time and consistently.
then it’s probably not the number you want to use. So I think that would be a huge piece of the puzzle is what can I kind of explain and have people understand consistently and frequently over time. So that would definitely be probably my number one piece of advice. And I think that’s, there are some of us where that’s like the hardest thing to hear, because we just want the, we want to engineer our way to the perfect answer. And sometimes that’s not how our small human brains can work.
David Vogelpohl (32:17)
I love that. I had a boss once tell me, David, if you have to explain your spreadsheet, you built it wrong.
Adam Lieb (32:24)
That’s a yeah, I love that. That’s a simpler way of saying what I just said. But yeah, that’s fair. No, let me tell you all the great all of the great functions I built in this bridge. It’s like, no thanks. I’m all good.
David Vogelpohl (32:29)
awesome.
You can’t figure it out and it’s not good Well, this was awesome. Adam could talk to you forever about this, but I thought you shared some really cool insights I really appreciate you joining today. how can folks connect with you online or wherever?
Adam Lieb (32:50)
Sure, certainly more about my company, go to the website, Gamesight.io. I think personally I’m on LinkedIn and Twitter. You can just search my name and find me by my government name on both places.
David Vogelpohl (33:05)
I like it. I like it. All right. Well, thanks again. Really enjoyed it. Thank you all for listening and watching GrowthStage, again, this has been your host, David Vogelpohl. I support the digital product community as part of my role here at FastSpring. And I love to bring the best of the community to you here on GrowthStage. Thank you.
David Vogelpohl
David is the CMO of FastSpring. For 25+ years, David Vogelpohl has led teams building elite engines of growth and software for leading brands like WP Engine, Genesis, AWS, Cloudflare, and more.