Successful Metrics for Hyper Casual Games

With development of your hyper casual game taken care of (see here and here if you still need help with this), the next step is to launch and watch it become very successful! But wait… how do you know if your game is successful, anyway? What does it mean?

Of course it all depends on a wide variety of factors. Are you a single indie developer, making games as a hobby in your spare time? Or do you work in a bigger company with lots of people working together to create these new games to be launched quickly? To measure ROI (return of investment) you would also need to know what that initial investment is, and obviously that depends on the considerations above. After all, if you have a big team and need to pay their salaries, this can quickly become a problem and it needs careful planning.

Regardless of your situation, there are a few specific metrics that you will want to hit with your project in order to determine if it is going well. This will help you decide if you want to keep working on it, maybe improve a few aspects or create new features; or instead maybe it is time to move to a new project, and you can always decide to remove the previous game from the stores if it is not performing very well.

Here is what you should be looking for in a new game, to decide how to move next:

Retention

Retention measures the number of players returning to your game after a certain number of days after originally installing it. Day of installation is commonly referred to as day 0 (D0); D1 then means 1 day after installing, D2 means 2 days, and so on.

As we have covered in the past, hyper casual games are short-lived and so huge retention numbers are not to be expected anyway, mostly on longer periods of time.

In any case, you should expect it to reach about 20-30% at least for D1 retention, in order to consider further development on it.

Combined ARPDAU

You might know by now that ARPDAU (average revenue per daily active user) is one of the most important values to keep track of. In short, it reflects the average gains you are getting for each of the players in your game, in a daily basis.

The "combined" part in this context refers to the sum of revenue coming from In-App Purchases and Advertising, ie. sum all daily revenue coming from both sources, then divide by the number of players in that same day; this results in the daily ARPDAU value, which can then be averaged for a longer period of time in order to reach a stable value (after all you might see in some days this value skyrocket, while in plummets in others).

In this case, once more due to the nature of hyper casual games, strong monetisation is not to be widely expected. As such, aim for at least a couple of cents for this, something like $0.02 or $0.03.

Session Number and Length

Because hyper casual games will mostly depend on showing advertising to engaged players, you need a way to measure and improve that engagement.

Session metrics will do just that: the number of sessions and their length will be very useful to adjust when to start showing ads, and how often.

At a bare minimum, you should try to get people to play 2 to 3 sessions, and over 2 minutes each.

Turning most of your attention to these metrics should be very helpful to drive your project and decisions around it.

Of course, anything that goes above the bare minimum values is a great victory! Also they will greatly synergise with each other (for instance, consider that improving sessions will likely increase retention as well, which in turn represents more players in your game and with that, higher revenue as well).