Analytics - Kongregate Newsroom

Marketing Aug 16, 2023
Shaping Content, Fostering Community: A New Chapter on YouTube

Filling the Void: The Start of Our YouTube Journey When we began our efforts early this year, our YouTube channel hadn’t been updated in years. Where once was a thriving community of gamers and promotional vids, now the channel was collecting dust. It was clear that we needed to expand our efforts there. Our focus became about engaging our audience and throwing everything at the wall to see what stuck. Our initial livestreams focused on the beta testing of a new online community storytelling g

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Brand Aug 09, 2023
What’s New on Kongregate: YouTube Year in Review

Last year, we embarked on the exciting journey of rebranding Kongregate from the ground up. After over 15 years as a leader in web gaming and mobile publishing, we felt it was time to take a look at what makes Kongregate different - what makes us unique - and update our look to meet our ideals and our culture. Kongregate has always been a place that is open and welcoming to gamers from all walks of life, where gamers who love games come together to have fun, together! Our new look and vibe had

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Talks Jan 18, 2018
Clicker Cadences: Limited-Time Event Design in Idle Games

In this Casual Connect USA 2018 talk, Lead Product Manager Drew Levin discusses how three of Kongregate's idle games have designed different styles of limited-time events to satisfy a range of player motivations. The talk touches on the major business outcomes that each game's live operations strategy has driven and outlines how their business strategies for limited-time events align with their core game's design. Slides Video

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Analytics Aug 17, 2017
Don’t Rush Your A/B Test!

If you have been working in game development for a while I have no doubt that you’ve used A/B testing at least once. It’s a powerful tool, allowing you to check various hypotheses with data before introducing any changes to the entire game’s user base. There is no space for gut-feeling here; we should rely only on pure numbers. Sounds pretty straightforward -- could anything go wrong? Apparently, it could. In the world of A/B testing there are a lot of pitfalls. Here is a list of the most commo

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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 sa

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Community Mar 14, 2017
1 out of 5, Worst Blog Post Ever! Ratings Fraud on Kongregate

One of the many cultural shifts to come out of becoming a connected, always-online world is that consumers have a loud voice that has a substantial impact on sales. For example, when you buy an Anker product on Amazon, you’ll get a little friendly card asking you to leave a review: You similarly see requests in mobile games to give them a 5-star rating (and if not, they cleverly direct you to their support page instead of the app store rating page): User ratings matter and we, as customers

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Analytics Sep 20, 2016
Quest for Progress: Numbers Behind Idle Games

A more in-depth version of this short post is available at The Math of Idle Games, Part I [https://blog.kongregate.com/the-math-of-idle-games-part-i]. At GDC Europe this year I gave a talk that took a deeper look at some of the numbers, formulas, and patterns underlying idle games. The slides for the talk are on Slideshare [http://www.slideshare.net/AnthonyPecorella/quest-for-progress-gdc-europe-2016] and the GDC Vault, if you have access there. In the slides you’ll find information about gro

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Monetization Sep 08, 2016
eCPM Decay in Rewarded Video Ads

Some of you have heard the term "eCPM decay." Let's first understand what it means. If you are a publisher, CPM is the revenue you are getting for 1,000 impressions. If an advertiser is paying you a CPM of $5 and you show your users 1,000 impressions of that ad, you will receive $5. The advertising world is slightly more complex, however; most of the advertisers are actually paying CPI -- in other words, they are paying for installs. This means that unless the user clicks on an ad and installs t

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Analytics Jun 02, 2016
Better than Average: The Strengths and Weaknesses of the Arithmetic Mean

The average, or arithmetic mean, enjoys a prominent position in most analysis toolkits, and for good reason. It’s a simple and elegant way to compress a large data set into a single, descriptive number. It’s ever-present in the alphabet soup of “key performance indicators” that highlight most gaming dashboards: ARPU (average revenue per user), ARPPU (average revenue per paying user), and average session length, to name a few. But the average is not without its limitations. If your data set is no

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