Free-to-Play: a Shiny Case Study from Game Analytics

Wixot is specialised in making word search and word puzzle games for mobile devices and it has more than ten million players from all over the world. Wixot makes free-to-play games and uses freemium business model to scale and optimize monetization from the most engaged players.
With the help of R and Shiny, I will present an analytics tool for our last game which is called “Word Farm – Anagram Word Search”. The talk briefly presents our decisions regard data collection (namely, what metrics were stored to estimate retention, engagement, monetization and virality and why we decided to store our data in PostreSQL databases) and how R and Shiny was used to build our own, customized analytics dashboard used for exploratory analysis. This way, our system allowed filtering and searching in our data more easily, with an elegant UI.
Our main goal is to understand user behaviour within the context of our games and maximize profit. For this, it is essential to estimate lifetime value of certain players, how much revenue a player is likely to bring in the future.

Hazel Kavılı
Data Analyst, Wixot

Hazel Kavılı studied Statistics (B.Sc. and M.Sc.) and she currently works at Wixot as Data Analyst. Besides work she also does her PhD in Earth System Sciences. She is also the founder of R-Ladies Istanbul chapter and she’s been organising and having R sessions since September 2016.