Tammy Levy - Kongregate Developers Blog

Analytics Jun 29, 2017
Retention Primer

Retention is an important metric to look at when predicting the success of a game. The general definition of retention is how many players have stayed in a game on a given day relative to when they first started playing, but as you'll see below, there are several ways to calculate this. When evaluating games, retention is one of the key pieces of information that we're looking at. Strong retention coupled with strong monetization is the real winning combo, but strong retention won't mean the same thing for every game. The baseline of good metrics for a CCG will be very different from the baseline of metrics for an idle game, but before comparing across different genres or games, you have to understand what's being measured. It is important to understand that different analytics platforms calculate this differently. A true comparison can only happen when the calculation is the same; due to this it is important to know the source of your data. It is also worth noting that different platforms will label these differently. Hard Retention (Kong Preferred) How

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Monetization May 25, 2017
GDC Talk: Lifetime Value and the Long Tail of Mid-Core Games

Our own Tamara Levy spoke at this year's GDC about maximizing lifetime player value in mid-core games. Using genre-specific predictive models developed from the Kongregate portfolio, we demonstrate how and why post-D30 retention can be key to increase your revenue. Through case studies, you'll learn strategies to boost both early and late revenue, as well as game core loop modifications to drive better player investment in the long run. GDC Talk: Lifetime Value: The long tail of Mid-Core games from Tamara Levy

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Monetization Aug 04, 2016
5 Tips to Improve Game-as-a-Service Monetization

Written by Moonlit Wang, Partner Development Manager at Google Play Games, & Tammy Levy, Director of Product for Mobile at Kongregate Free-to-play games are essentially games-as-a-service. The lifetime value of these players is much more complex to calculate than it was when a game’s player LTV was simply the purchase price of a game. We understand that the LTV is directly related to how much time players spend in the game, since long-term players spend more money, but how do we design a game to retain players and monetize effectively? Google Play and Kongregate teamed up to answer this question with 5 tips to improve monetization in F2P games. To learn more, please visit this post on Google’s Developer Blog.

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Monetization Mar 01, 2016
Best Practices: In-Game Ads

Advertising in games has proven to be a great source of revenue for game developers. In many cases, ads increase the revenue baseline and provide the ability to monetize genres that historically hadn’t monetize before, such as endless runners and roguelikes. In preparation for Kongregate’s presentation at Casual Connect, we did a deep dive into the performance of ads in most of our titles. With only 20 minutes to present, we were only able to cover the highlights, which left out a lot of additional information and data worth sharing. Rewarded Video These are “opt-in” video ads that a player chooses to watch. Unlike interstitial videos that automatically appear at predetermined locations and cadences, the decision to watch a rewarded video is in the player’s hands. In exchange for watching the video, players will get a reward in the game. This can be any type of reward. Today, rewarded videos are the most popular ad types, providing both high payouts (CPMs), a lot of inventory and high player engagement, all resulting in higher revenue potential. Player Engagement

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