Vertigo Games in a snapshot
Rooted in Istanbul and Tallinn, Vertigo Games is a small game development company that aims BIG. Their goal is to develop and self-publish first-person shooter (FPS) games with the best gaming experience and high quality production values.
Currently, they work on Critical Strike – an FPS game with fast-paced battles that entertain:
- 250k daily active users (DAU),
- 3M monthly active users (MAU).
They want to provide their users with the best gaming experience possible, polished graphics, and bug-free gameplay.
Vertigo Games wants to improve their game development process
These days, gamers want a smooth mobile gaming experience. Errors, bugs, or crashes take players away from their devices and leave a bad impression on the game. Also, the chance a player will reach for the game again is rather low.
Vertigo Games know all this and the fact that game players are very demanding customers. But at the beginning of the development of Critical Strike, the product and development team didn’t know:
- How many gamers will complete the full onboarding guide
- If players complete the game’s missions according to the initial design
- What are the exact paths that lead to a bug and how to reproduce the issue?
Vertigo didn’t have any mobile analytics tool in place, so in case of bug detection they were driven by guesswork and assumptions. A less-than-ideal situation.
As a result, the development process was time-consuming and didn’t lead to any valuable discoveries.
Soon, Sinem and Hazal from the Quality Assurance team, realized they needed to invest in a mobile analytics tool that could help them dissect gamers’ behavior.
With user behavior analytics, they would know how many gamers complete the onboarding guides, what are the bug sources, and at what point players encounter those problems.
Also, Vertigo Games believed that a behavior analytics tool would help them improve their KPIs – gamers’ engagement, retention, and in-app monetization.
Smartlook adds an analytics layer to the Critical Strike mobile game
After doing some thorough research, Vertigo Games decided to invest in Smartlook. The analytics tool lets them analyze Critical Strike and all in-app user behaviors. Setting up Smartlook was fast, so the Product and QA teams started gathering insights in no time at all.
Vertigo Games reduced the number of bugs and provided their users with a swift mobile gaming experience
Smartlook works in the background, so it doesn’t affect the gameplay or cause FPS issues.
Vertigo Games uses screen recordings, event-based funnels, and heatmaps to get to know the full gamer journey and gamers’ experience. They literally can analyze their product through the end users’ eyes, with amazing results.
How do screen recordings help Vertigo Games?
Screen recordings serve the QA team to monitor Critical Strike for any bugs.
Also, when there is a complaint from a certain player, the team can easily check the recorded screens of that player. It lets them detect the problem, and it’s easy to reproduce the issue step-by-step and apply fixes.
The Product team also watches players’ screen recordings. They are most interested in the recordings of new players – they check whether a gamer completes the onboarding guides.
Also, they verify if gamers get a great first impression of the game. It’s important, as the better the gamer experience, the higher the number of daily and monthly active users will be.
But Vertigo uses other Smartlook features too.
How do heatmaps help Vertigo Games?
Heatmaps help the Product team view the gaming experience through the gamers’ eyes and understand where gamers click the most often. This knowledge helps develop a game that’s fully optimized for its users.
How do funnel analytics help Vertigo Games?
The most prominent feature for Vertigo Games is the 30- and 60-step funnel based on different events – tutorial, game start, game end, show offer, buy funnel, upgrade popups, etc. Both the QA team and Product team use them to verify the functionality and gamer experience throughout the game.
As there is no limit in the number of steps in each funnel, the teams can adjust the funnel length when they add new missions to the game.
Whenever the QA team sees a high drop-off in one step of the funnel, they can immediately scrutinize the problem.
With Smartlook, Vertigo Games saves 10-12 hours of their development time
Thanks to helpful insights from Smartlook, Vertigo Games can analyze game players’ behaviors and spot any problems that cause drop-offs in the Critical Strike funnels.
These insights help them design the whole game according to their game players’ needs and expectations.
But the best success indicator comes with numerical values. And here, Vertigo Games can be proud of their accomplishments. In general, with Smartlook insights, they found an average of 10 bugs and saved 10 to 12 hours of their development time for each release.
