Decent overview stats but very poor home recommendations?

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1

Hi there,

My team and I recently released a small game and its had decent reviews and feedback but seems to perform horribly under the algorithm. The game has been out for about 3 weeks now.

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You can see here that we get barely any players from home recommendations (this is last 7 days).

Our overview stats seem strong.

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Our home recommendation signals all seem to be struggling, however what is confusing is that the players coming from other sources, like ads, seem to stay way better.

I am still unsure of what counts as a qualified play, I’ve seen people say that its when a user spends more than 5 minutes in game. Our engagement stats show that the average playtime is above 5 minutes so it seems weird that it is so low.

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I also did an in-game feedback system where players click 5 quick buttons and get a reward, and that feedback showed overall 70% like/dislike, room for improvement but surely shouldn’t be performing as poor as it is.

These stats were given to players who played for at least 90 seconds, and had some kills/deaths but not an insane amount (new players).
Laggy
:green_square: GAME IS NOT TOO LAGGY — 223 (66.8%)
:red_square: GAME IS TOO LAGGY — 111 (33.2%)

Buggy
:green_square: GAME IS NOT TOO BUGGY — 232 (69.4%)
:red_square: GAME IS TOO BUGGY — 102 (30.6%)

Combat
:green_square: COMBAT IS GOOD — 226 (67.7%)
:red_square: COMBAT IS BAD — 108 (32.3%)

Difficulty
:green_square: GAME IS EASY TO UNDERSTAND AND PLAY — 228 (68.3%)
:red_square: GAME IS TOO HARD/CONFUSING — 106 (31.7%)

Fun vs Boring
:green_square: GAME IS FUN — 231 (69.2%)
:red_square: GAME IS KINDA BORING — 103 (30.8%)

Are the overview stats just worthless?

Am I misunderstanding what a qualified play is? Is it more than just 5 minutes of engaging in game?

Is the game just not really that good? It was a quick project so I don’t expect amazing results but these results have been pretty terrible.

1 Like
2

Hello there!

I also have a game with similar stats like yours, but it’s getting very low home recommendation signal and I wan’t to find the solution to this. Would you mind showing your Home Recommendation Daily Impression and your game daily active users? how much ad credit did you spend on ads?

3

Hi there,

I ended up running in-game feedback w/ some ads going and got around 500 responses.

Overall it would seem that there isn’t really 1 key issue but lots of smaller issues.

The polls I did found that ~30% of players found the game too buggy, too hard/confusing, too laggy and too confusing. 70% found it fine, but I think that is one of the main issues, just the quality of the game (it was a very quick project using a very old combat system but yeah).

The other main issue seems to be the game name + detail page (description) + thumbnails, their stats seemed to be under performing.

4

Oh I see I see,
However the benchmark looks good though. How much ads credit did you spend? If you don’t mind me asking

5

I did around 30-50 for a few days, we got good numbers but poor retention.

1 Like
8

Your QPTR is not good at all. Switch icons, thumbnails, use multiple different thumbnails and ensure it accurately reflects your game. Once done, run through sponsored ads for weeks and check which thumbnail performs well and remove the ones that do bad. Trust me when I say this, your QPTR matters a lot more than you think.

I had a game with 96th percentile QPTR and it got players fast on home recommendations. Your other stats like retention are important for maintaining those players.