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http://www.swfstats.com/

by benologist • 16 years ago

17 11 16 years ago

benologist5• 16 years ago

So following my post the other day about how exactly people go about launching a beta we just leapt in and opened up. We scored a nice blog post from a prominent blogger in the Flash game space which has doubled our userbase already, and we're working hard on even more features to better-align us with the requirements for social games, and to go even deeper into casual game tracking.

It's going to be a very interesting February seeing how we cope with all the new games being added. :)

oman121• 16 years ago

It's somewhat difficult to read the numbers in the middle of the page.

benologist5• 16 years ago

Thanks I made the text darker so it stands out more clearly.

mitchellh• 16 years ago

I've made a few "bigger" flash applications (for fortune 500s and the like) and in general I don't see the benefit of this versus Google Analytics[1], which provides a Flash tracking API[2]. All your points you note on the left side I've done in one way or another via Google Analytics.

I admit that the google analytics flash API only allows you to track "events" and sometimes pass a numeric value with an event which analytics will mean for you, but in practice, I've found that that is often all that was requested by my employers. e.g. "We want to know when people go from A => C => B, vs. A => B => C." Easily done! "We want to know the average time a user spends on this panel" Done!

So could you explain to me some features you have that google analytics doesn't have? And justify their benefit enough such that a company would sacrifice a single analytics account to view all their web analytics for two sites to view their page and SWF analytics separately?

[1] http://www.google.com/analytics/

[2] http://code.google.com/apis/analytics/docs/tracking/flashTra...

benologist5• 16 years ago

An excellent question and one I should have prepared an answer for earlier, sorry it took me so long to reply!

We're really targeting two different markets with the common thread being Flash but two very different uses of it. In some cases you could force the relevant data streams into GA but you're working against the system and yourself from the very start - gaforflash is not the same as ga for flash games, which doesn't really exist and has no community of developers to help you figure it out.

Google Analytics is fantastic at what it's designed to do, which is track a site and with gaforflash pieces of Flash on a site. There are a few key reasons why that's not a good match for casual games:

1) GA is from the ground up designed to presume the people are coming to you, and it's the opposite with the casual game business, our games go to 100s or 1000s of different websites. Straight away you lose a lot of the functionality that makes GA great because it just isn't applicable / usable.

2) Events don't transfer directly to the structure of games, in general as a concept they do and especially compared to our custom events, but when you start digging into per-level and tracking multiple streams of data and multiple values on those streams it becomes complicated and difficult to interpret the results and even to figure out just how you're actually able to track these things.

To put it in perspective, if I quit on level 1 is the category quit and the action level 1, or vice versa, or both? If I collected 30% of the coins then the problem gets bigger - category level 1, action collected, value 30%? Or category collected, action level 1, value 30%, or category collected 30%, action level, value 1? These are all the right answer, together, but now you're tripling the requests you're sending back to Google and creating so many events that you start jeopardizing the ability to interpret what's going on.

The other issue with the complexity of GA is most of the time you only get one chance at getting this stuff right - and there's a lot you need to get right otherwise the data's useless - because after your game's being distributed you can't easily push changes out to all the sites your game will be on.

3) The gaforflash api is heavy - 160 kilobytes - which is an expensive addition in terms of filesize and especially performance, both of which are critical in casual games where we might already be cramming a ton of work into a 30-times-a-second loop that already doesn't run well on whatever office/college/school computer the player's using.

faramarz• 16 years ago

I would put an action call at the bottom of your price chart. while the user is there, get them to test the system or sign up. present an opportunity to make a decision.

benologist5• 16 years ago

Just this comment alone has made it worth posting here, I didn't even think of that heh.

espadagroup2• 16 years ago

I would work on some landing page optimization. For example the Join our Beta, which I am assuming is your call to action right now should be on the left side of the page and above your stats bar. Also, the first big text the user sees should be you main value point, at this point the first big text doesn't even include the word Flash or Game.

espadagroup2• 16 years ago

benologist5• 16 years ago

Thanks, I fixed that up most of that after you posted earlier, the join button I'm in the process of relocating.

paraschopra• 16 years ago

I think a demo will really help in showing what your app does.

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