Understanding your audience is a core element of managing live ops.
The tried and tested way to gain player insight is to organise it by traditional demographics, such as age, location, and gender. However, TENTUPLAY is allowing developers to track the habits of their audience in new ways, using Behavioural Segmentation.
We spoke with TENTUPLAY co-founder Hyeyon Kown to dig into Behavioural Segmentation, get a sense of what it is, and how it can help developers gain even more insight into how their players interact with their games.
PocketGamer.biz: To start off, can you introduce yourself briefly?
Hyeyon Kwon: I’m a data analyst and also the co-founder of TENTUPLAY. We’re based in Seoul and providing a solution that offers analytics and personalised CRM.
You spoke at PGC Helsinki last month about Behavioral Segmentation. Can you explain what it is?
Behavioral Segmentation is the most advanced approach to market segmentation that has been widely used in the last decade – ’outside’ the game industry. It is literally making segments of users based on their behaviors. Instead of assuming what users are like from extrinsic data like age, gender, location, and how much they spend, Behavioral Segmentation directly looks into what they’re doing inside the service to get an accurate understanding of users.
And this is why Behavioral Segmentation is essential to personalise your service. It enables you to understand the real motivations of individual users and give them personalised offers accordingly, which leads to better sales and revenues.
For example, let’s say one of your players is called Sam. She always plays one specific character, Foot Soldier. It must be her favourite, but it’s too weak. If you have this knowledge of her playing style, you can reason that she probably hasn’t leveled up much lately as she’s stuck with her precious but weak character.
Then, you can give her some instructions on how to enhance her favourite character, or introduce her to better characters to play so that she can get some wins and keep progressing.
Unfortunately, only very few games are adopting this segmentation approach and giving personalized services to their players. It’s because there is too much data you can get from a game that you get overwhelmed not knowing what to collect or how to process it. However, everyone can do it if you automate the process. And that’s exactly what we’re doing: automate personalization to make it easy and available for everyone.
Crafting personalised messages to each and every user sounds too sophisticated to automate. How do you do that?
In the example, I mentioned you can boost the player’s engagement by providing some advice she needs to win or progress. TENTUPLAY delivers such guidance to the player in the form of in-game messages. It automatically creates different messages containing personalised game guides and item offers for each player, which leaves developers nothing to do but to install the SDK and customize the UI of messages templates.
TENTUPLAY also provides analytics. What makes it different from others?
TENTUPLAY analytics is authentic in that it uncovers the genuine needs and motivations of your players. No survey nor reviews. No extrinsic data that can be biased or filtered.
We only look into real in-game behaviors of players. TENTUPLAY’s behavioural economists analyse player logs, discover each player’s real – sometimes hidden – motivations, and categorize them into multiple player personas based on their motivations and playing styles.
TENTUPLAY dashboard is highly insightful yet intuitive. Though it contains a great amount of information, it still manages to be highly organised and processed that anyone can understand it right away.
It explains in detail each Player Persona’s performance in retention, IAP, and ad viewing. For example, it tells you at what stage and at what level each Player Persona is leaving the game. It helps you predict when each Persona is going to leave and send CRM messages to engage them at the right time. It also lets you know what items each Player Persona purchases the most, which enables you to recommend the right item to the right player.
The whole process sounds simple enough, but isn’t data logging itself a lot of work?
Data logging can be exhausting if you have to log all the custom events yourself but you don’t have to do that with TENTUPLAY. Everything you need from metrics to parameters is all predefined in the SDK so there’s no need for the painstaking custom logging. Just install the SDK following the detailed guidelines.
What genres of games can use TENTUPLAY? Can hyper casuals use it as well?
Almost every genre from MMORPG to an idle game can use TENTUPLAY thanks to its standardized log data format, but your game should have at least some elements of in-game currency and level system to get it working.
Lastly, is there a trial that developers can try to get a feel for the service?
We’re providing a one month free trial for everyone. After 30 days, the service is still free of charge for small developers as our company’s ultimate goal is to make everyone enjoy the benefits of psychological analytics with the fully automated data analysis middleware at a reasonable price.
