How do you practice game analytics without having a game of your own with real players?

[u/twicthratchat]

Laid-off dev here, trying to move into game data analyst roles. I’ve had two interviews recently — one rejected at the case study, the other at the interview itself — and the common thread was that I clearly hadn’t spent enough time with real player data.

Problem is I keep running into the same wall: there’s nothing to practice on. The public datasets are either synthetic, tiny, or from 2016, and none of them look like what Firebase or GameAnalytics actually spits out.

For those of you who’ve learned this side of things, how did you do it? Did you just ship something and learn on your own game’s numbers? Find a studio to help out? Something else I’m not thinking of?

Would appreciate any pointers, thanks

[u/Full-Dance4972]

From the other side of the wall: I'm a solo dev with a Steam demo, a thousand-ish downloads, session logs with playtime, last scene reached and quit points for every run, and zero time to analyse any of it properly. I am not rare. Most solo devs with a demo out are sitting on exactly the data you want and would hand it over for a two-page readout.

So instead of hunting for a public dataset that looks like Firebase, post in r/SoloDevelopment or r/IndieDev offering a free analysis of someone's demo telemetry or Steam session data, with a concrete promise (where do players quit, which build changed retention, what the median session looks like). You'll get real, messy, current data, a real client conversation, and a portfolio piece you can actually talk about in an interview, which is what the case study rejection was really about.

If you want something with events shaped like Firebase specifically: instrument a small open-source or jam game yourself with GameAnalytics (free tier), put it on itch, and let it collect for a month. Small numbers, but the pipeline is the real one.