I just finished reading an article about the story of how Wizards Productions was established in Jordan Business, i have to say that the editor did a great job with the article!

The full article can be read here, I leave you with a few snippets from it below.

“Hardcore games require some serious skill and are, therefore, targeting a niche of people who are considered hardcore gamers,” Thiab told Jordan Business. Typically, this is not much of an issue when it comes to stand-alone games, but it becomes more difficult on social networks like Facebook. Hardcore games are also usually in 3D so the technology is still considered in its development phase, as it is not Flash-dependent, which is typically tested extensively and generally less risky.”
“The key lesson Thiab gleans from this process is that a gaming company must continue enhancing its product in
order to keep its numbers up. For Wizards Productions, the biggest numbers come from Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Jordan and Kuwait, a market that the company hopes to expand in throughout the coming years.”

In my previous blog post I generally went through how analytics can be used in social games, in this blog post i would like to dig deeper in different analytical segments that should be tracked in most social games no matter its genre and the benefits that come from tracking these stats, and as I mentioned in the 1st post, if your not going to act upon the data your gathering, there is no point of tracking it unless you like to waste your time, money and look at nice charts ! in most cases there should be a dedicated person in the organization that studies this data and recommends changes in the game design, pricing of items and marketing spend.

Engagement Segment

1. MAU/DAU (the obvious, target should be 10-15%
2. Level progress, find out if users are getting stuck on a certain level, a tutorial step might not be clear or the level requirements are out of reach or hard to achieve for players.
3. When do users stop coming back to the game?
4. Achievements, gifts, wall posts, invites, if they are low and dont make sense with your DAU’s, look into it!
5. Avg. Months of play, naturally you will need to run the game for a quite a while before this number starts to mean anything, but its a good idea to know it, avg. months of play for casual games is around 2 months, for hard core games it should be 4-5 months at least.

Monetization segment

1. ARPU
2. ARPPU (Avg. revenue per paying user)
3. % of paying users, in Zynga’s case for example this is equal to 1.9% of their total MAU size, the rest (close to 200 million MAU’s play for free!)
4. Avg. purchase size. Its useful to know what are the popular packages that users tend to buy as well and work on enhancing these packages.
5. Purchases by user level, this is extremely important to figure out when does most of your users convert into paying users and work on enhancing this if its happening at high levels only for the majority of your users.
6. Purchases by user gender, this might be useful for certain types of games than others, for a hardcore game such as Operation Arabia its a no brainer to know that most if not all its purchases are going to come from male users.
7. Purchases by any other metric such as country, age group and language can all be very useful.
8. Avg. number of purchases per user.
9. Avg. basket size, is the application encouraging users to spend more per transaction, if this number if growing, chances are the game is a winner!
10. Find out who are your whales (all games have them) talk to them directly, find out what they would like to see added, some might ask for new packages, new items or special discounts, make it happen for them!

By knowing the above numbers you can get a very good estimate on how viral your game is and knowing exactly how many members are joining your application purely from viral actions in the game.

We all know how analytics are crucial to the success of an online website, when it comes to online games, analytics play even a bigger role in understanding user and gamer behaviors, good game design is important when building the game as well having a good test team, however proper implementation of game analytics can lead to important decisions when it comes to enhancing your game design or overly changing it upside down!

In my discussions with others, many have the mistaken idea that analytics inside a game will magically fix all problems and instantly (or almost instantly) lead to generating loads of $$$$, tracking the right data, analyzing it and deriving conclusions from it and then actually implementing changes based on these conclusions play a big role in the end result of a profitable game.

When it comes to games, analytics can differ greatly between each game type and the other, unlike websites where most if not all share the same data metrics such as page views, unique visitors, traffic sources and avg. page views per user etc. However most social games tend to focus on the below main metrics:

• DAU/MAU ratio, depending on the nature of the game, the healthy ratio is usually more than 10% and up to 25%
• ARPU (avg. revenue per user) and ARPDAU (avg. revenue per daily active user)
• Virality, this is usually the sum of users that join the game from all viral channels (invites, wall posts etc) in a given time period. K is the amount of users you got from these channels plus the users that they invited as well (if they joined)
• Retention, this is simply calculated from knowing the number of users that visited on a certain day and then the number of these users that visited the next day, 60% is a good retention rate to aim for, might be lower for casual games.
• Churn rate, the opposite of retention is is the percentage of customers who will stop using the product in a given month.

Digging deeper in each of these metrics is important, each of them can be broken down by country, gender and age group, others can also be broken down by category, a social game usually has multiple viral channels in which users can invite their friends, knowing which of these channels are performing well with good acceptance ratios is also important and can lead to finding technical, design or even messaging issues. A/B testing plays a big role in knowing which messages, designs and even colors deliver the best results.

As mentioned above you’ll find other metrics tracked as well depending on the game, things like best selling virtual items, most plaid areas in a game, peek activity hours and number of games plaid per day.

Most companies often come to the decision of either building their own tracking tools or using 3rd party analytics software such as Google analytics, I find that the most useful method is using a hybrid of both, you can develop your own tracking tools to monitor things in your database for example and rely on 3rd party tools for others, when it comes to game analytics Kontagent and claritics are among the most popular ones used.

We started implementing Scrum at Wizards Productions around 3 weeks ago, I’ve been studying about Scrum for quite a while now and for those who dont know what Scrum is, its a project management method that works perfectly for IT related projects especially projects that are innovative in nature.

Scrum is another approach to Agile project management with a number of differences between each of them, when it comes to game development there a number of changes to Scrum or Agile that need to be implemented, a good book on the subject of using Scrum with game development is Agile Game development with scrum

Its a bit soon to comment on the effectiveness of Scrum since we’ve been implementing some concepts from it already, but from the looks of it were much more on the mark when it comes to releasing the features (or user stories) that we had planned to launch at the beginning of the sprint in a much more relaxed environment and good transparency with the whole team/company.

If your interested to learn more about Scrum you can check out www.scrumalliance.org

Below is an image of our KanBan wall which shows the user stories we have for this Sprint

Been a very long time since i posted any speed linking posts, please enjoy the below articles

• The Most Popular SEO Posts Of 2011 – Search Engine Land
• Social SEO – Facebook & Twitter Best Practices – Search Engine Watch
• Game Industry Predictions for 2012 – VentureBeat
• Basic SEO for Facebook Fan Pages – Search Engine Watch
• Be Honest, Be Nice: Marketing And PR For Indie Developers – Gamasutra

December 09, 2011 – Wizard Productions, a developer of browser based online games for the Arabic World, has officially launched their first 3D multiplayer game on the social network site, Face book. In addition to being the first multiplayer 3D social game on Facebook, Operation Arabia is the first Arabic 3D shooter games on Facebook to be included on the social networking site. Operation Arabia is a shooting game that can be played free of charge with other individuals who are also using Face book. With this important launch, Wizard Productions is the first developer in the MENA region to develop a 3D multiplayer social game completely in their studio. The world of 3D gaming on Facebook has a new face, Wizard Productions.

Wizards Productions hopes to deliver hard core gamers on Facebook with high quality games that meet their expectations and their appetite for real hard core gaming on social networks. Although specifically targeted to launch for the Arabic World, future plans include; an English version planned for 2012 and the development of another 3D browser game to be launched late in 2012.

Sohaib Thiab CTO at Wizards Productions stated the following;

?“We are extremely excited to launch Operation Arabia which effectively makes us the first company to develop and market a 3D multiplayer social game in the MENA region, which we hope is just the first of many productions within our company. Our goal is to develop high quality and exciting games that are not just dedicated to the Arabic World, but can be marketed to other countries, as well. We desire to take the lead in this market”.

Operation Arabia has attracted 20,000 monthly active users and more than 3000 daily active users since its beta launch mid Nov. 2011.

About Wizard Productions

Wizard Productions began early in January 2009 and thus will be celebrating its third year in business in January 2012. The company’s early focus has been solely on the production of browser based games for the Arabic World, however, the future calls for more games to be launched to the global markets, as well.

“Jo’preneurs is a real-life account of  young Jordanian entrepreneurs, who are on their way to being future leaders and economy changers; Who are still in their start up stage, but have achieved some level of stability and success”

As you can understand from the above Jopreneurs is an initiative to highlight entrepreneurs  in Jordan to inspire others and motivate them, my videos were recorded around 10 months ago and the website was laucnhed a couple of weeks ago, I highly recommend you watch the videos of all the entrepreneurs on the site as I am sure you’ll learn allot from them.

Below is one of my videos, you can watch them all here.

I am happy to inform you that I’ve been selected yesterday, along with my two partners, in Endeavor’s 40th International Selection Panel that took place in Amman Jordan as an Endavour entrepreneur which is a great privilege for me to join this great organization of hundreds of renounced high impact entrepreneurs.

For those who are not familiar with Endeavor, Endavour is a non profit organization that aims to support selected entrepreneurs in different industries through mentorship and other means to help them grow their business and have a high impact on their local and hopeful global economy.

You can learn more about Endeavor’s by reading their mission and model, the selection process goes through a local endeavor office that you must pass their panel to be nominated for the international panel, you also need 6 out of 6 votes in the international panel to be accepted.

The process that you and your business go through is in itself extremely rewarding and beneficial, the local Endeavor team goes through your business and defines areas where the business can be improved and even help determine points of weaknesses and threats, the networking in the interviews is also priceless!

Hello everyone! been a while since i posted any updates, thought i should share this interview that was aired last night on Ro’ya TV which is a local Jordanian TV channel, its a short interview discussing Wizards Productions and the release of our new game Operation Arabia, this is the 1st show of a new TV program covering the Jordanian Tech scene called Tech Tech!

We were interviewed a while back as Wizards Productions in part of a video being prepared about entrepreneurship in Jordan, it was great honor for me personally and us at Wizards to be selected to appear in this production, you can check out the video below.