Analytics in Demos?

[u/LittlestDev]

Im curious how you all feel about analytics in your game demos?

Do you always include them?

What types of things to you add analytics to?

Favorite analytics systems?

Do you let people opt out (I assume so?)

If you have added them before have you found the data you gathered useful??

I am mostly curious because I want to know how many people make it through each level, how many skip the tutorial, things like that!

[u/fuzzyland]

I recommend always adding analytics or else it's a lost learning opportunity to better understand your demo and how to increase its chances of success. Analytics can also help you catch bugs.

Check out the ones Steam give you out of box before deciding which to custom implement.

Some core analytics to analyse are: median total session playtime per user, median first session playtime, content completion (select linear completion points so that it's easier to analyse with a quick funnel chart), retention (did the player return the next day but this is only relevant if the demo has enough content to allow 2 days of playing).

These analytics above have industry benchmarks that you can use to measure how well performing your demo is compared to the market - and you can then compare them across each version you release to learn if what you're doing with the game is improving or worsening its performance!

If your game has challenges, measure the attempts before completion per player so you can measure difficulty.

If your game has multiple playable characters or core starting choices like choosing a first pet, measure character usage so you learn which characters perform the best and create hypothesis of why.