We started working with GameRefinery in 2020 after following and reading its blog posts and snapshot reports.

Identifying Game Features to Make a Profitable and Successful Game

We know that the key to creating outstanding games is understanding both market trends and your competitors. Thanks to GameRefinery’s easy-to-use platform, we’ve gained valuable insight into what makes a successful mobile game. From there, we’ve been able to create a benchmark for what makes good games even better. The range of available features and data is impressive, and we appreciate how easy it is to use.  We also really like the frequent news and market trends updates. 

When we began working with them, the GameRefinery team thoroughly analysed two of our games, Spades and Dominoes. Their input helped us decide what additional features were needed to make these titles even more entertaining for our players.

Final words

GameRefinery has helped us identify suggested features to implement into our games, making the platform an integral part of our design workflow process. The product managers and game designers now use the platform to analyse and improve our current portfolio of live titles and upcoming ones.

The post How GameRefinery Helped Gazeus Games Identify Profitable Features for its Games appeared first on GameRefinery.

Our game My Fantasy: Choose Your Story, has been the 2nd most downloaded interactive story game in the US and Australia since November 2021. With over 2 million users to date, My Fantasy allows users to explore and fulfil their fantasies through interactive storytelling.

Thanks to GameRefinery, we have significantly reduced the time to create GDDs and ensured our game would appeal as much to new players as it does to our established player base.

Identifying our main competitors and player archetypes

We began by looking at My Fantasy competitors on GameRefinery and selecting games such as Tabou Stories, Lovelink and Covet Fashion with similar game mechanics. We looked into the competitions’ player archetypes and found that one of the most significant archetypes was ‘thrill seeker’.

With this information, we looked at our player base and noticed how our own ‘thrill seeker’ audience share was far behind. We found this surprising as My Fantasy has some of the same game mechanics that our competitors do.

Through GameRefinery data, we were also able to identify one of the primary motivations of our users is expression through customisation and decoration.

Developing new game mechanics and meta-game for our players

Thanks to the information we gathered through GameRefinery, we found valid references and implementation examples of different game mechanics in key competitors’ games. 

Armed with these valuable insights, we decided to develop new interactive stories to make sure we satisfied the expressionists’ needs. So now, after each level,  players can customise characters and spaces with new clothes, makeup and room decoration. And for our thrill-seekers, we went ahead and developed a whole new meta.

Not only did we improve our game with the insights we gathered from player archetype analysis, but we also created a theme across all of our creative material and ads that integrated our players’ motivations.

The post How GameRefinery Helped Genesis Backed Holy Water Develop a Metagame to Grow Their Audience appeared first on GameRefinery.

Our initial business model involves building lookalike audiences that game UA teams use to expand their spender targeting on major advertising platforms. We build lookalikes derived from Lootcakes members that spend in games that are competitive with or share key elements with our client’s game. With GameRefinery’s slick tools and insanely deep features analysis, we’re able to build lists of games based on gameplay mechanics, meta-game features, IP usage, monetization approach, user demographics, and a host of other elements. We then create our lookalikes based on the Lootcakes members who are spenders in those games.

GameRefinery helps us with complex analysis, but also makes life very simple by providing features like “Competitors” which crunches all of their data and quickly spits out a smart list of a games’ top competitors. Also, internally we’ve adopted GameRefinery’s game classification system which is more precise and market-relevant than the genre classifications of the app stores.

When we first realized what GameRefinery was doing we were both relieved and excited. Relieved because gone was the need for Lootcakes to build out its own team to deep dive into the features of top-grossing games. Excited, because we saw that we could combine our unique spender data with their unique game features data to accelerate the growth of our business. With GameRefinery’s help, Lootcakes is now providing its UA lookalike audiences for eight of the US Top 100 Grossing games. In 2020, game publishers are spending tens of millions of dollars targeting these smartly-built audiences. Lootcakes + GameRefinery is a match made in game data heaven!

Find out how the data could work for you, speak to our experts

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That’s why we wanted to enhance the social aspects of our mid-core live games in our line-up with a bunch of updates. But developing those features can be really costly and time consuming if not scoped properly, and we wanted to keep an agile mindset and a high velocity.

Our goal was not to develop a long list of social features, but to identify which ones had value in similar games to develop ours efficiently.

Thanks to GameRefinery, we managed to identify key social features that have a high impact with a reasonable implementation cost.

Identifying our market and main competitors

We started by shaping our market, selecting games of a similar genre to the ones we wanted to update with social features.

That view allowed us to also look at the global trends in terms of social features regarding this segment, in order for us to shape the needs and crucial features; again to answer our production constraints.

Breaking down social features per game

Once we had identified games that share the same market and players types as ours, we add them to our followed list to study in detail their social features, the game mode links and their effect on their Powerscore.

Looking at feature implementations

With the Game Analysis of followed games, GameRefinery allows us to have access to in-game screenshots of integrated features in a matter of seconds.

It’s particularly useful to have a glimpse of the rules, UI integrations, and overall implementation of those elements in other games.

First Time User Experience videos is another tool we used in order to see what other developers were doing with social features, by showcasing it to the players quite early in the game experience.

It also gave us ideas on how teach those elements to our players.

Final Words

Thanks to GameRefinery, we managed to identify key social features that have a high impact with a reasonable implementation cost.

We also did a study about their implementation in the UI but also in the FTUE and tutorial, which helped us find the best way to present those social features in terms of User Experience.

Once pushed live, those social features had a huge impact on player engagement in our games without the need to iterate through many updates to find the right way to add social in our experiences.

Find out how the data could work for you, speak to our experts

The post How GameRefinery Helped Ubisoft Find The Right Social Features appeared first on GameRefinery.

A part of making any mobile game a lasting success is to understand how to use LiveOps to nurture your game. We sat down with Corey Klein, Studio Strategy Manager at FoxNext, to discuss a little about how GameRefinery’s Update Impacts helps him track what the competition is doing and plan how their roadmap can deliver the most impact.

The Benefits of GameRefinery’s Update Impacts

One of the challenges of analyzing games as a service is that you’re tracking games over time. Where I see the value in GameRefinery’s Update Impacts is that with GameRefinery, we can quickly isolate when different features are updated over time, the implementations of the feature changes, the calendar date when they were updated, and the normalized days since the game’s release.

Update Impacts even takes this a step further. You can quickly see what impact an update had to help you pinpoint and prioritize which features to add and when. This gives you the tools to map a development timeline and business model for when you can expect to add these features to your product. Using the included tags, you can also do the same to support planning the frequency of events and content updates for your LiveOps.

For example, let’s say you’re considering planning on implementing a Guild Wars feature in your game. With Update Impacts, you can quickly see how many days post-release each of your competitors added the feature. Then if you believe that Guild Wars, or another feature, is critical for your service plans, you can see: What is a competitive timeline for its implementation, how many games had it at launch, how many games added it post-launch, which games saw the greatest lift in their Powerscore and RPI’s upon adding the feature, and how the implementations by more successful games compare to the implementations by less successful games.

The Result

Although the information on version updates and even descriptions is readily available elsewhere, they don’t directly identify and isolate the different feature changes. And it’s not always apparent from an update description whether a feature has changed, or even if several features have changed. This creates a lot of manual follow up work. With Update Impacts, not only does this feature save me a lot of time but I can be confident that we have a comprehensive understanding of each game’s roadmap in the market.

Find out how the data could work for you, speak to our experts!

The post How GameRefinery helps FoxNext Games plan their LiveOps roadmap appeared first on GameRefinery.

Let’s start with your daily workflow, how does GameRefinery fit in?

I use GameRefinery daily to stay up to speed on the mobile gaming market.  I check my emails every morning to see if any new games have entered the top 200. So that I’m able to see what other games are doing in the genre I’m working on – usually mid-core games, e.g., 4X and RPGs.

One of the tools I use the most is Market Share because it helps us find the right categories for new projects. We can look at Market Share for really valuable insights, to see if there are new games in the West or if there are changes in the top competitors of each category.

Is there something unique that only GameRefinery’s market data can help you with?

GameRefinery helped us understand what type of game art style is the perfect fit for our game. When we were working on a 4x game, we checked whether competitors are using realistic or cartoony art styles more, or whether they are making fantasy games or modern games. So it was handy to see what other top grossing games are doing in terms of art style – it’s how we found our art style direction.

Visual Explorer was useful for identifying app icon trends as well, and Game Names helped us find the right keywords for a unique fresh title. It gave us the tools to look into the optimal length of titles in the 4x category. For example, we found that games with an average of three words (with a combined character length of 15-20 characters) had a higher top grossing rank and that there were some common keywords these games are using.

Have GameRefinery’s tools helped you find inspiration?

GameRefinery’s tools that cover implementations are great for ideas.

Implementation Examples is excellent for seeing how other games implement their features, which gave us ideas on how we can execute the same feature in different ways and make ours unique. 

Likewise, FTUE videos help me gain inspiration from Eastern markets. The industry is moving faster there, and western games often follow trends that were already pioneered a year earlier in the East. But I don’t have access to those games here (and I don’t speak Chinese). GameRefinery’s First Time User Experience videos let me see the first 10-15 minutes of gameplay and the included tags explain the progression of gameplay. Thanks to FTUE videos I know what’s happening, what players are doing, whether it’s core game or an in-game shop. All valuable insights.

How does GameRefinery help guide your decisions?

GameRefinery doesn’t just help us with research and major design choices. Having GameRefinery’s data even helps us with simple decisions. For example, some in the team were wondering whether we should or shouldn’t have gachas in this type of game. Based on the data, it was clear that gachas are a common mechanic in all top grossing games, and with a really high revenue impact as well. So after presenting the team with the data, it was a no brainer to convince everyone.

When we have opinions and ideas about something, it’s good to back those up with data. Especially when we have a couple of ideas coming from everyone, it’s essential to know what other games are doing to see if we’re on the right path. GameRefinery supports our decision-making process because we can use all of these things we can’t find on other platforms to drive our decisions.

Would you like to learn more and see the service in action? Book a demo here

The post How GameRefinery Helps Guide Decisions At Rovio appeared first on GameRefinery.

Could you tell us about your experience working with GameRefinery’s combination of feature demographics and feature data?

Feature demographics is a brilliant new tool from GameRefinery. With data available for any mobile game, there are strong synergies when combined with GameRefinery’s subgenres and feature data. The best part is that by using them together, we can break down the market and see which games appeal to which demographics. This way, we can look for features that attract specific demographics and deconstruct a game’s demographic on a feature level.

One of the key use-cases this provides us is that we can use these demographic insights to match games and concepts with our current audience to find marketing and cross-promotion synergies. And we’ll be able to take demographic appeal into account when making new games and see if they slot into our existing user base, or if they appeal to a new audience where we could expand.

What do you think are the key benefits of feature-based Demographics?

Feature-based demographics opens many doors in game development, game research, competitive research, UA, and even M&A – because now we’ll be able to look at both economic and demographic factors to see if a game fits our portfolio.

What is particularly useful is that this type of data makes it easier to communicate with game teams when working with player personas. Because we have data that says that this type of feature and this type of style is more appealing to this demographic, so that’s where our developers can use GameRefinery as a guide for what they should be doing.

GameRefinery’s feature demographics can, therefore, help guide the feature development of games in our portfolio by helping us find features that are attractive to our core target groups.

How have you benefited from GameRefinery in MAG’s feature development and prototyping?

GameRefinery has made our prototyping more accurate, and it’s sped up the process. We create prototype games in the Game Analyzer tool, and our development teams add live games into the analyzer to play around with how different features would impact the game’s potential market performance. Feature demographics make this even more powerful because we can see how adding certain features would impact the core audience of the game in terms of demographic appeal. 

What we really like about Game Analyzer is that it’s like opening a box of legos – you get a sense of all the pieces you have to play with, without having to start from scratch every time you start a new project.

Demographics is a component of the GameRefinery service. Would you like to learn more and see it in action? Book a demo here

The post How Feature Level Demographic Insights Help MAG Engage Their Audience appeared first on GameRefinery.

In this post, Futureplay’s Analyst Camilo Fitzgerald breaks down how GameRefinery’s market research tools are a crucial part of their strategy for delivering the right games at the right time.

Step 1. Map your Market

Goal: Get an overview of the space that fits your needs and capabilities.

A good approach is to start broad with all games and eliminate specific segments. For example, remove games that do not reach your revenue goals (IAP grossing charts or an estimate of ad revenue based on downloads and industry benchmarks). Further, you might want to eliminate categories, genres, sub-genres, and feature-sets that don’t fit your domain knowledge and capabilities. Examples might be Casino games if it’s not a focus, or synchronous PvP features if you’re a small team.

Top 200 grossing market excluding Casino games in Market Explorer

Step 2. Segment your Market

Goal: Explore and assess segments

Break the market down into relevant segments. GameRefinery does a great job of segmenting the market with a taxonomy of sub-genres that are much more informative than standard app store categories. You can segment the market by these and/or other verticles such as features or demographics. Explore each segment and assess the risks/potential within them by asking questions like: What’s the revenue potential in this space? Is the space open to newcomers or dominated by a few big players with publishing power/IP? How well do we know this space? Are there emerging trends? How do games compete in terms of high LTV vs. mass appeal and downloads?

Segment the market with Market Share

Step 3. Position Your Concepts

Goal: Ideate titles that fit the market

Concept or prototype new titles and map out how their themes and mechanics fit into their segment. Critically assess the risks and potential associated with the new elements that you’re bringing to a segment vs. where you’re following mainstream or emerging trends. In general, each move away from existing trends increases the risk, so be smart about what you’re changing and why.

Prototype and develop your feature roadmap with Game Analyzer

Step 4. Break Down Competitors

Goal: Augment your design toolkit

Once you’ve got a front-runner for a concept that you want to move into production, break down its market segment further by analyzing the full feature set and implementation of competitor games. Playing and truly understanding key competitor games in the segment is a must, but GameRefinery’s FTUE videos and feature breakdowns supplement this with an excellent overview of what’s working for all of your competitors.

Breakdown competitors from feature sets and demographic appeal to first time user experiences

Final Words

A market fit strategy like the one described above doesn’t make a good game all by itself but given a solid team and relevant skillset it should reduce the amount of luck required for your next game to fit your company needs, find its audience and compete in today’s mobile market.

The post How Futureplay Leverage GameRefinery To Make “The Right Games At The Right Time.” appeared first on GameRefinery.

Where did Pixonic start out?

We started in Moscow in 2009 with a team of less than 10 members. As a social game developer and publisher, we worked both in Russia and abroad. But of course, already from the start, our goal was to release our projects and other developers’ projects in a number of international markets.

In the first few years, we launched a couple of successful products: Adventure Island, Airport, Domovyata, and others. Two years in, we changed the direction of our development and decided to focus on developing and publishing mobile games. And by then we had grown to a team of 40 talented people.

In 2011 we released our first mobile game Robinson about living on a deserted island, which quickly became popular, hitting App Store and Google Play top charts. And in 2014 we launched War Robots, which has become our most profitable project so far with 100 million installs and 1,5 million DAU.

Now we’re a team of 200 people in four offices.

Where does GameRefinery fit in your development?

One of the main challenges for our company is to prioritize the development of features that are both in demand by players but also provide maximum revenue. Alongside expert reviews and internal analytics, we use GameRefinery to help us choose the right features.

We use GameRefinery to aid our decision-making in several ways. Apart from Powerscore, we consider the probability of whether a game with a specific feature will be in the top 50. Conversely, we also consider what that likelihood would be if it doesn’t have that feature. To calculate this probability, we divide the number of games with/without a feature within the top 50 by the number of games with/without this feature across all games. We also check if that feature is used in successful games with a similar genre. For example, we used this approach for plan development of social mechanics in War Robots.

Another important use case that GameRefinery helps us with is market research. This is where Market Explorer and its genre and market filters have proven particularly useful. We try to find new niches and get insights before the development of new products: We analyze dependencies between the position in top-grossing, number of downloads, and release date. And check for similarities among different games. For example, it was useful to find out that there are significantly more franchise games within battlers than within other genres.

Why GameRefinery?

GameRefinery helps us allocate resources properly and prioritize. This helps us avoid putting effort into things that won’t bring value to our players. So we can build the best experience for our players both in War Robots and new products. The secret to War Robots’ success has been our correct understanding of its unique selling proposition. That’s why choosing the right features is very important for us.

Ready to get started with your feature optimization? Sign up for the free layer of the service here!

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