Become a Game Data Analyst, play a key role in Voodoo’s success

Over the past couple of years, Voodoo has shifted its efforts from developing hyper-casual to hybrid-casual games, the kind people will play for years. This has required not only major changes in our organisation and processes, but also in the way we analyze and improve our games. In this article, we present to you how our Game Data Analysts work to continuously improve games like Mob Control, Collect Em All, Block Jam 3D, Paper.io 2 and many others…

Working with game studios

We have all kinds of Data Analysts at Voodoo, some focus on Marketing, others on tooling… but what we’ll focus on here are Game Data Analysts. Fully embedded within game studios, their mission is to contribute to the analysis of how players interact with a studio’s game and how to harness this knowledge to improve the user experience and game performance. 

Leading such an initiative means being active on multiple fronts:

Tracking

In order to make the best data-driven decisions, our analysts need to ensure they have the proper data to work with, and that this data has been generated correctly. To this end, they always need to plan ahead what data they need to collect in order to be able to properly understand how their players are interacting with a new feature, and ultimately make the best decision on how to improve this feature further down the track.

AB testing

AB testing is a key operational tool in all our games. Each new version of our games is packed with new features, all of whose impact needs to be tested. Our Game Data Analysts need to carefully set up these tests in order to ensure the team will be able to detect significant results, taking into account the size of their user base or the expected types of impact.

To analyse the results, they can rely on a suite of standard tools that not only provide easy ways to explore and break down the results, but also to test the statistical significance of the tests. In some cases, they might still need to complement these analyses by more advanced ones, for example, to understand how the test impacts the behaviour of a specific subset of players.

Example of automated AB testing analyses for one of our games.

Content Analytics

Our players love to be offered new and fresh content regularly, be it new levels, new game mechanics or new ad hoc events. Players will not always react positively to all the content we release and this is why we need to constantly monitor its quality. Blending signals such as level difficulty, levels of engagement or monetisation we can determine the intrinsic quality of a unit of content (e.g. a level in a puzzle game), identify the ones players enjoy the least and take appropriate action.

 Here again, we have developed standard tools that address part of this line of work automatically for all games, relying on our cross-game standardised tracking and data collection platforms. For the yet unaddressed or game-specific analyses, our Game Data Analyst appreciate the intellectual challenge they entail.

Example of automated analysis to analyse churn per level for one of our games.

Economy Analytics

Another key component determining the performance of a game is the state of its economy. The amount of resources a player has (or does not have) will have a strong impact on their engagement and potential for monetisation. Giving a player access to too much of one currency will discourage them from purchasing it from the game’s shop, undermining our monetisation efforts. On the contrary, being too stingy with other resources may provide the player with a frustrating experience, which might lead them to leave the game.

Again, our teams can rely on standard tools to monitor how balanced their economy is. This speeds up the work of our Game Data Analysts who can very quickly identify the game’s main issues and run the required complementary analyses to fix potential imbalances.

Example of one of our automated game economy analyses for one of our games.

Team-spirit as a core value

Our Game Data Analysts are usually the only members of their game studios with their specific skill set, but this does not mean they are left all alone. We have set up rituals to foster a solid community and maximise knowledge transfer between games. For example:

• We hold a weekly knowledge sharing meeting where anyone can present a recent piece of work they did or ask for feedback or help on a current project.

• They are invited to key processes in other teams, including meetings held by the executives of our gaming business unit.

• They participate in offsite events, gathering members from other games and engineering teams.

As a result, we have had multiple cases of tools being developed within one studio and adopted by another shortly after, or even becoming a centralised tool that can be used by any of our games. Thanks to our standardised analytics platform, this can be done extremely quickly, as all our games collect data in the same way.

Does this sound like an exciting challenge?

We hope you’ve got a clear overview of what being a data professional - and a Game Data Analyst in particular - at Voodoo means.

If that sounds like an exciting approach and challenge, check out our Careers page. We are regularly on the look-out for Data Analysts with an interest in gaming, as the number of our studios continues to grow. Come join the adventure!