PlayGen has just launched an interesting new game – FloodSim – which is quick to try and quite fun, but that’s not what this post is about.
This post is about detailed metrics on who’s playing, what they’re doing in game, and *what they think about it*.
In a time where most games companies are still struggling with the very concept of recording and analysing metrics for their own games beyond capturing half a dozen basic numbers (how many players today, how many in total, how much spent in total, how much spent on average per month per person, etc), PlayGen has gone and stuck their stats up on their own site, in real time.
And it doesn’t even need Flash – you get pretty, clear graphs based on your own interactive queries of the data delivered direct in your browser via AJAX / Javascript. Nice.
The interaction with the data provided is actually quite basic – nothing more than you could provide via an ordinary deployment of a standard OLAP application, without any effort. However, even on this basic scale, it’s an interesting mix of straightforward numerical data (how many people of each range playing, and in each geographical location), gameplay data (how many people used each of the different in-game strategies), and opinion data (what did people think of various aspects of the game).
And … it’s all being given away FREE on their site. Go check it out. For some people, the data might be even more fun than the game. It’s nice that you can also go play the game a couple of times yourself, for free, in under ten minutes, so you can understand the points people are getting at.