Ingame news for your players, usage stats for you!
You get a web-interface to manage and create news-items, a unity package to retrieve and display news in your game and a stats webpage that tracks the totoal number of unique devices, the number of playsessions and how many new devices your game is played on each day.
I have been using a less polished version of this system for about 2 years now. A few advantages I noticed are:
I know exactly when a new version of an iOS or Mac App Store goes into review (the first unique device with the new version that’s not one of mine).
I know the ratio of paying customers vs pirates. (compare your sales data to the usage data - some % for people installing on multiple devices)
I know how often my games are played per device.
And of course: I can inform players about updates, promotions, contests right inside the game.
I was just looking at that on the Store, looks good… Now, this is an honest question, how should I differentiate this from the other stats/news packages (besides being one package ?)
@iisjreg: Well, depends on what kind of packages your thinking about… In short I’d say: it’s simple and it’s yours. What News and Stats does is to give you an easy way to display and manage in-game-news for multiple games and collect basic data about when those news are requested. All the data goes into your own database, so you have full control and can expand and mod as you like. You know how often your games are played and how many new players you get each day.
Not a problem, we’re not collecting any private data and the package has a built-in way to opt out (online/offline-switch)
If you’re in the Developer’s Program you can have a look at the Review Guidelines - Section 17 is about Privacy. In short: Don’t collect data about a user without his prior permission and don’t require personal data from the user in order for the app to function - we’re not collecting any data about the user at all, just a unique id, platform and version of the game - all anonymous.
Also have a look at Apple’s docs on uniqueIdentifier - they even describe what approach to use to identify a user when storing stuff on your server - what you’re not allowed to do is to publicly link a udid to a user, but since we’re not storing any data about the user…
And finally: I’ve been using an early version of this package in Age of Curling for over 2 years and it’s never been a problem.
Ah, so as long as you asked permission and the data you track is not identifiable back to a user’s personal data, its ok? How about game-specific data, like which weapons do people like to use the most, what time of day do they usually play, etc. I assume that’s ok too?
That should definitely be okay, especially if it’s all anonymous. The problem is personal data which is even protected by law in most countries (or at least to some degree).
@Seon: The package includes a php script that generates unique ids on the server - and this is already used for all platforms except iOS. If Apple really does remove/forbid access to the UDID, I’ll simply change a line of code to make iOS devices use it as well.
@grfxman: Thanks a lot - Glad you like it!
If you want to display stats to the players you should write the results to a file though - looking them up in the database can get somewhat heavy on the server once you have a lot of results in there. Not a problem if you’re the only one looking it up a few times a day, but you might not want 10000 people doing it at the same time…
?)
