Services Spotlight: DeltaDNA

Analytics firm DeltaDNA aims to help developers make their free-to-play games more engaging. That’s no easy feat, as anybody who’s dabbled in the F2P market will know.

The DeltaDNA platform has been built to perform real-time analysis on hundreds of millions of game events
as they happen.

“The fundamental difference is that we go much deeper into the data to really understand player behaviours,” CEO Mark Robinson tells Develop.

“It’s taking the data to this granular level and in real-time which is unique.”

The Edinburgh-based company was founded in 2010 as GamesAnalytics. Earlier this year it rebranded, taking that same name as its renewed analytics service.

DeltaDNA’s analytics platform is a suite of advanced data mining, A/B testing and 3D segmentation tools.
Publishers and developers including Sony, Sega, Ubisoft and 505 Games have all used the service.

On a typical project for a new developer, the DeltaDNA platform is designed to collect rich data from the game. Then insight is generated to help them understand the different player behaviours active. Finally, DeltaDNA measures the uplift in engagement and starts refining.

Social casino operator PlaySpace uses the DeltaDNA service to help optimise its player experience and drive engagement for its popular cross-platform social game Parchis – based on the family board game Ludo.

“After an assessment of the game design, we worked with PlaySpace to understand key player segments and understand where there were retention issues and opportunities for further spend,” Robinson explains. “This has helped increase the number of very engaged users – playing more than ten days in a row – by 350 per cent while improving the number of returning players by 26 per cent.”

Next on DeltaDNA’s agenda is to build out support for predictive modelling so it can widen its net and pinpoint precise elements of persistent grinding and game imbalance problems in projects.

“With soaring acquisition costs now outstripping Player Lifetime Value in many cases, focusing on player engagement is the only viable option for creating and sustaining successful F2P games,” concludes Robinson.

“Developers need to listen to what their players are telling them.”