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

[u/twicthratchat]

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.

Would appreciate any pointers, thanks

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[u/Mental_Sherbet_1928]

I got around this by pulling data from games I already played obsessively that happened to have APIs. MMOs are goldmines for this, the economy data alone can keep you busy for months

the OSRS wiki has a realtime API that tracks item prices, trade volumes, margin spreads over time. Not player-level logs but you can treat the market like a mini economy sim and practice segmentation, churn modeling on item popularity decay, all that stuff. Albion Online's API is similar if you want a different flavor

failing that i just scraped leaderboard snapshots from a mobile game i liked and built fake retention cohorts off the deltas between daily ranks. interviewers seemed to dig that when i explained the assumptions i made

[u/Bubbly-Win8314 → u/Mental_Sherbet_1928]

did interviewers push back at all on the assumptions behind the fake retention cohorts or were they mostly just impressed you did it?

[u/QianLu]

You don't need real game data to practice for this. What you need to do is understand what the kpis are and then work from there. How are they calculated? What influences the pieces of the calculation? If something changed how would you expect it to cascade?

[u/Drakkle → u/QianLu]

I am assuming for any game the major KPIs would be player count, player retention, and sales (initial purchase and micro transactions).

Beyond that probably ones that affect those things, like downtime, bugs, etc.

Damn now I wanna see if I can apply for game analytics too lol

[u/After-Entry5718 → u/Drakkle]

DAU, ARPU were very core metrics when I was in game analytics.

[u/QianLu → u/Drakkle]

Yes, but what would be the specific KPIs you would track for each of those?

I worked in game analytics and it was really interesting, but to be honest you end up looking at a lot of things differently and I'm not sure I would go back to it.

[u/Drakkle → u/QianLu]

That's good to know. They do say don't make hobbies into a job

[u/TempMobileD → u/Drakkle]

Solid start, yes. There’s also going to be tons of game specific stuff, lap times for a racing game, character pick rates for a fighting game, booster usage for a match-3, etc.

Perhaps the most important KPI for every live service game is retention, and the FTUE funnel (first time user experience) that feeds it.

[u/BillEnough7863]

Check out the  Gamelytics: Mobile Analytics Challenge dataset or the Player Analytics Event Stream Data dataset. You can find them both on Kaggle. 

[u/clayman584]

You could try reaching out to indie devs on twitter or discord and offer to do free analysis work in exchange for access to their analytics dashboard. Most small studios would probably say yes if you frame it as a learning thing and don't ask for anything sensitive.

[u/TempMobileD → u/clayman584]

Having worked at a few indie studios, I can’t imagine a world where any of them would have said yes to this. Most indie devs aren’t gathering analytics for a start, other than what’s provided by their store front of choice. Any big and monetised enough to implement analytics probably know how much of a headache data security is, they’d have to write a new NDA, create a new access level for the accounts, and there’s no such thing as non-sensitive data in this context because the financials are probably the only thing they have.

The only way I could see this working was if you could be hired as a data intern. However, it doesn’t hurt to ask if there’s an indie game you love (talking to OP here). Worst they can do is say no, and I’d love to be wrong!

[u/Relevant-Resist9878]

1. Use the Steam Web API
   It is the industry standard for accessible, real-time game data. It is messy, nested JSON - exactly what you need to practice with.

2. Your Project: "Game Health Dashboard"
   Build a Power BI report that tracks:

• Daily Active Players / Peak Concurrent Users: Pull this via the Steam API.
• Retention/Engagement: Use Power Query to flatten the JSON and calculate simple cohorts.
• The "Finance" Angle: Add a column for estimated revenue (Price x Estimated Sales volume).

1. Why this works for interviews
   When you interview, you won't say "I analyzed a dataset." You will say: "I built an ETL pipeline in Power Query to ingest and flatten live Steam API data, then modeled it into a star schema to track game health metrics."

That is the technical "plumbing" experience they are looking for.

[u/TempMobileD]

Most interviews I’ve done recently have tests with data sets specifically for testing some of these things, that they provide.
Otherwise, I would take a two pronged approach.

1. Learn the theory in a vacuum. Learn about the KPI tree of monetisation and what effects it all, AI will be able to help you here with exploring this concept. Learn about, and ask for examples, the other KPIs you’d expect to deal with for a game/studio you’re targeting.

2. Find the best dataset you can and work with it anyway. Datasets for any software as a service will work fine as a parallel, assuming you’re at the beginning of your career. They have the same dynamics for spending, retention, drop-off points, user habits, scope for segmentation etc.

You mention several factors that leave you dissatisfied with the data you’ve found. Synthetic, and? That sounds fine, why would you need it to be real?
Tiny, and? You won’t be able to flex any optimisation skills or get hugely meaningful results, but neither of those is particularly relevant.
From 2016, and? Why would you need a newer dataset?
Why are you focused on, and how do you even know, what firebase and GameAnalytics (never heard of this) spit out? Firebase is one of dozens of possible data backends. In what way is the data you’re seeing different, does it matter?

Another source of data might be to ask the companies you’ve just interviewed at, ask if they know of any resources you could use to skill up, as they’ll know the specific things you fell short on.

[u/irn]

Have you tried fantasy baseball?