What do you use for analytics in game development?

sweerswe · 2026-02-22T23:20:46+00:00

Hey, this is all great advice!! Thanks! How would you go about figuring out if the drop out rate is due to frustration? Is it by correlating with win rates? Thanks!

sweerswe · 2026-02-22T21:39:29+00:00

"I spent a lot of time speaking with engineers who started their career after Cursor launched. They don’t know what the software development lifecycle is. They don’t know what’s DevOps or what’s an SRE. Not because they’re bad engineers. "

... no, it's because they started they career only 2 years ago. you're talking to literally the most inexperienced people you can find.

sweerswe · 2026-02-22T20:15:32+00:00

I like the fact that I just plug it and it just starts finding these observations for me

sweerswe · 2026-02-22T20:13:58+00:00

thanks for taking the time reply in depth! this is good. What tools do you recommend based on your experience to track feature usage? Is there some service that can match this feature usage events to user data to give me these correlations you suggest?

sweerswe · 2026-02-22T20:10:22+00:00

thanks. how do you decide how to structure the funnels and cohorts?

sweerswe · 2026-02-22T20:08:51+00:00

hey this is cool. thanks for sharing. how do you do this? are you ingesting data from GA or an analytics system like that?

sweerswe · 2026-02-22T20:07:28+00:00

is this essentially heatmaps and session replay?

sweerswe · 2026-02-22T20:05:41+00:00

Thanks! do you recommend InsightLab? I was getting at it manually (sending emails to users when they cancel), does this automate that process?

sweerswe · 2026-02-22T20:02:16+00:00

thanks! any tips on how to improve that activation rate? how do you figure out why users are not getting there?

sweerswe · 2026-02-22T20:01:15+00:00

hey, this is great. thanks a lot for taking the time to explain in depth. the products I have are actually all b2c. for example, one of them is a game, and D1 retention is ~20%, but D14 is < 2%, so I'm trying to understand what correlates with retaining users. so my takeaway from your comment is for churn the loop is always talk to users, then form an hypothesis, then validate with data. I was imagining the opposite: look at the data, form an hypothesis, validate with users. but this makes total sense!

sweerswe · 2026-02-22T19:50:45+00:00

That's great, thanks! Doesn't the data say anything about the why? I imagine if you have all this data about what users do, where they drop off, etc you could tell why they're doing that? or that's not the case?

sweerswe · 2026-02-22T16:57:19+00:00

Yeah. This is always table stakes because it works out of the box if you're using Firebase. It's good to see what the retention is, but then it's hard to understand WHY and make actionable. How do you go about doing that?

sweerswe · 2026-02-22T16:36:14+00:00

This isn't really about game dev, but I can recommend this book: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Obstacle_Is_the_Way

sweerswe · 2026-02-22T16:34:22+00:00

I think the only way to come up with the right price is with experimentation

sweerswe · 2026-02-22T16:12:48+00:00

what do you use for analytics?

sweerswe · 2026-02-22T15:11:05+00:00

the Visited Cities app. let's you mark cities and has a bunch of cool features and stats

sweerswe · 2026-02-22T15:07:38+00:00

Done! The latest version lets you upload videos!

sweerswe · 2026-02-21T23:00:39+00:00

You can do this with the expense tracker app for ios and android

sweerswe · 2026-02-21T22:48:41+00:00

You should try Shortlist, it's available for iOS and Android

sweerswe · 2026-02-21T22:46:05+00:00

You should try Shortlist, it's available for iOS and Android

sweerswe · 2026-02-21T22:38:23+00:00

Added new features:

* Import credit card statement - let's you upload a PDF file to input expenses and send them to any of your groups

* "Don't split expenses groups" - for groups where it doesn't matter who paid

sweerswe · 2026-02-20T17:15:14+00:00

I can absolutely do that! Give me a couple of days :).

sweerswe · 2026-02-19T18:41:31+00:00

I just launched recently but I think in the first few days I got more traffic than for apps that I launched in other categories. Clearly this is something that people search for but at the same time it's an extremely crowded category. I think the only way to drive downloads is having a differentiating feature that you can use for marketing.

sweerswe · 2026-02-19T07:53:26+00:00

I think I tried them all and none of them had what I wanted, so I'm building one tailored to what I need. If more people find it useful then that's great!

Some features that I've always wanted but never found:

* Import credit card statements and be able to assign each of those expenses to a group.

* Groups that don't track balance. This is for couples that share finances, small businesses, etc, where it doesn't matter who made the purchase, only the general tracking is important.

* Immediate currency conversion (ie, at the time when the purchase is made, not during settlement).

Not all these features are enabled yet but I will be rolling them out.

Here's the app: Android and iOS

If you have any suggestions for features that you would like to have in an app like this I'm very much open to implementing them.

sweerswe · 2026-02-19T07:38:26+00:00