I’m kind of running around now like a headless chicken looking for an analytics tool for consoles. We do not want to use Unity Analytics (we think it is overpriced and that we can do much better) however we are getting blindsided by this issue.
A lot of analytics tools have no out of the box integration for consoles (like Game Analytics). And that is fine, we are happy to implement it ourselves, however we can’t find a single starting point. Google Analytics plugin for Unity, which seemed a viable option for consoles, has since been discontinued and their implementation now seems to only focus on (web) apps.
We have our eyes on a few alternatives such as devtodev, plausible, and matomo, but there are no examples of this being used to collect analytics on consoles.
We would like to come into contact with anyone who could consult us on tracking analytics on consoles. We especially would like to know why it is (apparently) such an issue. The way we see it it’s just sending a value over a network connection: why is that so different for apps and consoles then?
we didn’t yet implement analytics for console games, but did work on console games in the past, and are currently integrating analytics in one of our games. We’re going to use Matomo with a self hosted instance for this.
I didn’t yet check if Matomo would work on consoles as well, however you should generally be able to contact your own servers on consoles. However what I didn’t look into in particular is whether console holders (Nintendo, Sony, Microsoft) would like games on their platforms to track analytics, maybe you want to check their documentations about this (if you didn’t do so already)?
In short, I don’t think that the implementation of the Analytics-Integration should be to much of an issue, but at most maybe the configuration around it, i. e. the “backends” your game is allowed to talk to. I could imagine that maybe the console holders would only allow the game to contact a single Backend, which would mean that this would need to deal with any ingame communication as well as the tracking data, but this could be dealt with using a reverse proxy like nginx.
Once we have our Matomo integration, I could see if analytics work on some of the consoles, however it could very well be that this dev-environment might not reflect the production environment (i. e. that these requests might then be blocked out, or that you might fail submission later on anyway).
Thanks for reaching out Richard! Didn’t remember this question, in the meantime I have learned that all console code is proprietary and cannot be shared online, so I got my answer there. We’re experienced game devs, but a little green to console development.
What you’re suggesting is our roadmap for it now! Interesting to use a reverse proxy though, I made a note of it as something we can try should it be needed.
Cheers for being a good citizen of the internet! I appreciate the detail of your answer.