It always amazes me when people tell me that they don’t care about having crash analytics services in their mobile games. However, they really care about the reviews or revenue of their games and of course they do, that’s why they are doing the business. Regardless, it's a contradiction to care about one and not the other. I decided to spare some time to talk about why you want to have a live crash analytics service in your mobile game business.
First of all, let’s look at the basic user funnel in our business. If you want your game to be visible in the enormous sea of mobile apps that is the app store, generally, you have to pay for user acquisition to get users to download your game. Your user launches your game, plays it and, hopefully, they are engaged to a point that they are willing to make an IAP. Hopefully your users are excited enough with your game that they are willing to leave you a positive review.
We all know that a good rating is very important in our business. Look at the simple model again. Once your average user LTV is larger than its eCPI, you make profit. A good rating on the app store is very effective in lowering your eCPI, a bad rating can absolutely hurt your business. However, there are elements missing in this model. According to our internal research team, 62% of users have experienced crashes. 21% of them will uninstall your game right after they experience their first crash. The worst thing is that you don’t know what happened. You don’t know how many of your users quit because of a crash because less than 1% of users will contact the developer when they encountered an issue.
What make the situation worse is that most of those users will leave you a negative review. Let’s look at some of them. Crashes are causing 1 star reviews everywhere, no matter if it’s a good game or not.
The good news is that 58% of users will give you a 2nd chance, which is your last chance. This is why you need a crash analytics service. With a crash analytics service integrated, you can test launch your game to find out most of the potential crash issues before you launch your user acquisition campaign.
No matter how many test launches or how much QA you’ve paid for, crash issues will still be there. So, it’s very important for you to know what’s going on in your game, to be alerted fast when there are crash issues, to find out the root causes fast, and to fix it fast in order to retain that 58% of users.
With the right crash analytics service implemented, you will be alerted when there is an exception situation in your game, such as an abnormal crash rate burst. By looking at the dashboard, you should be able to see how severe the crash issue is, and how many users are affected by a particular issue. Of course, it should capture all the required information of the crash so that your engineer can fix the issues and release an update ASAP. My next article will talk about how to choose the right crash analytics service so stay tuned.
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