‘Raw Data’ Devs Share Player Metrics & Insights Ahead of October’s v1.0 Launch
Speaking at VRDC Fall 2017 this week, Survios CTO Alex Silkin and Design Director Mike McTyre stressed to VR developers in the crowd that collecting proper player analytics should be a major priority. The pair said that it was a mistake to wait as long as they did before they began collecting and analyzing player data from Raw Data, but once they did they found a number of major surprises that disrupted their understanding of how players were playing, and prompted them to make changes.
About 80% of players played only the single-player mode, and while cooperative play was billed as a major selling point to the game, only 17% of players have played that mode.
When it came to the launch of one of one of the game’s new heroes, the developers thought players would be excited to play as ‘Boss’, the shotgun wielding street merc. But the data showed a palty 7.5% of players were choosing him. The team discovered that some of his abilities were overly complex and players weren’t using them, making the hero feel weaker than the others. The devs ended up altering the way the hero played to make him easier to understand and a more attractive choice.
Survios credited video game analytics firm Exostatic for helping to implement and analyze Raw Data metrics.