The Power of Data for Product Teams
And how Mighty Kingdom’s Backend Team Offers Support
Behind the more visible departments in a game studio – production, programming, animation, audio, QA, and more! – Mighty Kingdom has a team steadily working in the background to keep everything ticking: the Backend.
Described as the lynchpin of our data pipeline, the Backend team creates a whole suite of tools that help run the company. Their work seamlessly slots into every department in diverse ways; for the Product team, this means providing product managers with key data.
The Backend platform collects, processes, and stores all the player data from our games. Our data scientists create live dashboards from the data, providing the Product team with a wealth of information that’s easily digestible and answers important questions we might have.
We had a chat with Tyler Roach, Product Manager, about how he and the rest of the Product team use our Backend for maximum results. Tyler has worked on a bunch of Mighty Kingdom projects, including Peter Rabbit Run and our exciting upcoming games.
What is the Product team?
The team’s focus is finding that balance between the creativity of our studio while also serving the commercial needs of the business – we want to make fun, entertaining games, but we can’t do that if there’s no market for them!
“We ensure that we’re pursuing the right opportunities, and that we build our games to suit what the market is telling us,” says Tyler. “It’s also important that we’re aligning with the studio’s overall goals.”
Once the game is live, the team uses data to make decisions around further iterations and investment. That way we’re continuously improving and adapting to what our players want.
From an Idea to a Game
“Before we even enter production, we’ll use data to assess the type of product we should make,” Tyler explains.
The team gathers data from various sources to help model how much we should invest and what kind of return to expect. The Backend feeds into this, granting us access to a wealth of historical data to help plan out the project. From how long it should take, to the resources we’d need – the Backend helps us model all of it!
Market research also tells us lots about the types of games that have been successful recently. We can delve deep into games on the market to see what people are playing, and where they’re playing. This helps us decide whether a potential game is worth throwing into the production pipeline.
Review, Reiterate and Reengage
Once a game has gone live, our work within the Product team hasn’t ended. We're constantly monitoring data to see what’s working, what the players love, how they’re engaging with our content– and where we can improve.
With our Backend platform’s integration, we can use data to see how players behave. In a way, it’s how they talk to us! Even with a healthy mix of community feedback and internal design vision, data gathered helps us see exactly what players are doing within the game. Do they enjoy a specific type of event or element? Let’s do more of that! Are they using a strange pathway to get to the same result? Let’s streamline that! Data arms us with information players themselves can’t tell us.
The more we understand about our players, the more sustainable we can make the game; it becomes a cycle that lets us invest even more to make it bigger and better! Using the data gathered by the Backend, we can immediately assess the performance of a feature or the stickiness of our gameplay. We can therefore make more informed decisions when building our games and reduce some of those unknown factors in the risk-laden, high-cost games industry.
“Data doesn’t sugar coat things for us,” says Tyler, “It will give us the hard truths and feedback about the effectiveness of the decisions we’ve made.”
We’re an industry of value creation; it’s really important to gain a deeper understanding of our players’ behaviour. Some of the things we look for when examining the data include:
Daily active users, to see how many unique users play our game each day
Day-1, Day-7, Day-14, Day-30, Day-365 Retention percentages, which tell us what percentage of players return to play our game on various days after they first opened the game.
Conversion rate and repeat conversion rate
Session length and how many sessions per day
Prior to launch, market analysis and design vision will dictate our decisions, but once a game is in market, we need to respond to what our players are telling us through data. We’ve seen this with Peter Rabbit Run: when we soft launched, we found some pretty specific behaviours. Players didn’t seem to interact with the character unlock system in a way we anticipated. To address this, we revamped the progression system, allowing players to unlock more powerups to use in runs as they unlocked more characters. This variation ultimately made the game more engaging and fun. A win for everyone!
The Power of Building it Yourself
A lot of our work examining data is only possible thanks to our Backend team, and the work they’ve put in to develop our suite of tools. There’s plenty of third-party applications out in the market that could help us answer general analytics questions we might have for our products; but none of those can compete with the value of having access to the Backend team internally. With their knowledge and skills, they can custom make a data dashboard that addresses exactly the questions we need answered, and the parts of the game we want visibility over.