It’s no secret that turning a profit in F2P mobile games isn’t easy these days, and not only due to fierce competition. The modern mobile game service is an intimidating construct with many moving parts – branched code, staged builds, content production, backend, 3rd-party integrations (and updates), device fragmentation, marketing and distribution, just to name a few. When managing such a product, it’s easy to be swept into the hurricane of inputs and lose sight of the big picture: where we are, where we’re going, and what most deserves our focus right now.

At Turbine Games Consulting, we very frequently hear variants of the same basic question: “How should we (better) use our data to make 80/20 decisions?” For example:

- “What should we be focusing on?”
- “We’re collecting a lot of data.  Now what?”
- “How can we develop in-house capability around analytics and data-driven decisionmaking?
- “How can we find small adjustments to our game that yield large returns?” * _(our favorite question!_)

These questions implicitly reflect the challenge of making analytics, statistics and F2P game business models straightforward, easy to understand and actionable, in a competitive industry that often incentivizes doing the opposite.

One of the most important lessons that I’ve learned (and relearned) over the years is the miraculous power of **_keeping things as simple as possible_**. This principle has countless applications, but has become fundamental to how I approach **mobile game design, analytics, live operations** and ARPU-hacking.

After working as a Product Manager on over 130 games, and making _plenty_ of mistakes, I’ve found that a common-sense, no-frills approach to game telemetry yields the greatest returns in 80-90% of situations. As enticing as it sounds to track everything that users do within a game, I’ve found that, for a variety of reasons, the real world inevitably punishes us for our attempts to do so:

- **Bugs**: All other things equal, tracking more actions leaves less time to implement each. This tends to increase bug counts.
- **Loss of trust in data:** After encountering a few bugs, you won’t have 100% confidence in the data, which in turn means you can’t fully trust your results and conclusions. You’ll find yourself cross-checking with other data, only to find another data point that seems off, and down the rabbit hole you go…
- **Visual and mental clutter:** You may find yourself routinely wading through long lists of superfluous metrics to reach the truly important ones that you use 95% of the time.
- **Not a substitute for careful planning**: Measuring everything is a tempting but poor substitute for the careful design that your events taxonomy requires.
- **Adds noise**: Superfluous metrics produce a fog of ‘interesting observations’ that distract from your team’s focus on the most important and actionable metrics.
- **Makes you a bottleneck**: Overly-complex telemetry makes it harder for others on your team to self-serve and do independent analysis.

For these reasons and others, I prefer to start by establishing a rock-solid foundation that relies on only tracking six critical user behaviors. The next post explores this topic in further detail.

The articles that follow will explore – in more depth – how to apply a simple, common-sense approach to **mobile game telemetry and data-driven decisionmaking**. Of course, there’s no one right approach. Every mobile business has a unique perspective and toolkit, and my favorite part of consulting is the learning and knowledge-sharing that comes from these experiences.

The next article, ‘Just Track These 6 Behaviors,’ dives into tactical analytics design, and will be most relevant to **mobile product managers** **already familiar with the basics** of mobile game telemetry.

But – no matter who you are – **I’d love to hear your thoughts and perspective.** Don’t hesitate to contact me at [matt@turbine.games](about:blank)

## About the Author

### at2018