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General FAQ

Akeem Street
  • Updated

What are the features/benefits of Analytics?

Dashboards

  • Out of the box dashboards to support indies
  • 360 view of key metrics across activity, retention and revenue
  • Easy multi-dimensional filtering
  • Data recency of 2 hours max

Audiences

  • Stateful Audience segmentation considering player’s previous activity
  • Predefined list of Audiences
  • Custom Audience builder

Improved Data Recency

  • Data is refreshed at least every one hour when upgrading to the Analytics SDK

Improved Usability

  • Improved user interface
  • Better data visualization
  • Transparency around metric definitions

Player Engagement

  • Changing of game settings and configurations in your game in real-time, without having to update the code via Remote Config Campaigns
  • Audience targeting for game settings and config changes based on their player’s previous activity
  • The ability to understand the impact of your Campaigns through Analytics reporting data

 

What is Analytics?

Unity Gaming Services is an end-to-end platform designed to help you build, operate, and scale your game. As part of Unity Gaming Services, Analytics gives studios the tools to understand performance and player behaviors through predefined Dashboards, Data Explorer, and more.

 

How can I get started with Analytics?

  1. Sign in to the Unity Services Dashboard as an Organization Owner or Manager
  2. Navigate to the Analytics page on one of your projects
  3. Refer to the Analytics documentation here

How much does it cost?

Click here to see the pricing.

What are the differences between Analytics (Legacy) and Analytics?

Please note Legacy Analytics is no longer available, it has been sunset. 

  • Data refresh time in Analytics is approximately one hour (versus eight hours on legacy)
  • Built with player engagement in mind:
    • Audiences cover both stateful and stateless segmentation so you can segment by platform, location, and other basic dimensions, and also by the player’s activity, retention and monetization profile.
    • Audiences look back on historical data captured prior to audience creation while legacy analytics considers data captured after the audience is created.
  • Exploring your data in Analytics is simpler with:
    • Improved data visualization and overall usability when querying metrics and events (both standard and custom).
    • Enhanced event schema validation to prevent hacked events from polluting the data set.
    • Multi-dimensional filtering tailored to the project so you no longer need to create segments to cover basic use cases such as: how is my game performing in a specific country? Which is my best performing platform?
  • Analytics offers Event Browser to debug your game’s event feed as they come in.

Are there any differences between the way the data is structured in Analytics (Legacy) vs Analytics?

If you’ve previously used Analytics (Legacy) on your project and it’s still enabled, you’ll find that your standard events have been partially backfilled using your existing Analytics integration. This allows you to get a sneak peek of how the new analytics product will look and feel on your real data. While this can give you good insight into how your game is performing, it's only scratching the surface in terms of what our new analytics platform can offer.

 

Analytics uses the following events to calculate the dashboard KPIs & metrics:

  • newPlayer (previously appInstall)
    Dispatched when a new player installs the app on their device.
  • gameStarted (previously appStart)
    Dispatched at the start of a new session. A new session starts when the user first launches an app or reengages as a new session after more than 30 minutes of inactivity.
  • gameEnded (previously appStop)
    Dispatched when a player takes an action to exit the game or no session activity is detected.
  • gameRunning (previously appRunning)
    Dispatched periodically when the app is running to detect session activity.
  • clientDevice (previously deviceinfo)
    Dispatched the first time a user launches an app and whenever device information changes.
  • transaction (no change)
    Dispatched when a player makes an in-app purchase and tracks the purchase amount.

While we have made our best efforts to keep data consistent between Analytics (Legacy) and Analytics, we’ve taken the opportunity to address customer feedback so there may be some slight inconsistencies when directly comparing the two. There are a number of reasons for this:

  1. Analytics processes event data every one/two hours compared to the current general audience offering which processes event data every eight hours.
  2. Stricter event structure has been introduced to ensure your data is consistent and flows in gameplay order.
  3. Event data is processed in raw form to give you the flexibility to query, filter, and group your game data in Data Explorer.
  4. Event data from Analytics (Legacy) is available from July onwards. Players who installed your game prior to that date will be treated as new players and result in a peak in retention metrics.
  5. Metrics are calculated differently. For example, session length is determined by calculating the time difference between events in a session compared to tracking the session length on the client’s device. Check out the KPI and metric explanations available in the dashboards and metric dropdown in data explorer.

Note: Custom events are only supported once the SDK is installed in your game.

 

Do Analytics and Player Engagement tools need to be used together?

Our products within Unity Gaming Services were built to be modular, so they can be used independently, but are generally more powerful when used together. For example, you can build Audiences within Analytics, then target them or run A/B tests within Player Engagement for your Remote Config campaigns.

 

Can I continue to use legacy Analytics?

Legacy Analytics as a product has been discontinued, and it's recommended to use Analytics. If you had a Legacy Analytics integration prior to his discontinuation in June 2023, it will continue to be active, however, no changes can be made and Legacy Analytics is not accepting any new users.

 

Snowflake is deprecating specific Client Drivers for GCP customers on November 1st, 2023. Is Unity Analytics using any of these drivers?

Without providing specific driver versions, we can assure you that Unity Analytics will not be using any of the versions that Snowflake will be deprecating on Nov 1, 2023.

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