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D.Dream Games grew their ARPU and Purchase Rate on Hoosegow: Prison Survival by over 250% using ByteBrew!
D.Dream Games is a fully-remote indie game studio focused on building narrative driven adventure games. Rapidly growing, their first title, Hoosegow: Prison Survival, has accumulated over 7.5 million installs with new projects set to release in 2025. D.Dream Games utilizes the ByteBrew platform to understand how their players monetize and implement new methods to increase game revenue. With their new hit game, Sergei, the Co-founder of D.Dream Games walks through how they used ByteBrew to locate breakthroughs in profitability.
During the initial measurement of the game’s performance, we analyzed that while players retained at a rate of 45% on Day 1, only 2% retained on Day 30; with less than 1% of players converting to IAPs. The steep decline in long tail engagement after the initially strong Day 1 indicated that players were able to consume the game’s content too quickly.
In Hoosegow: Prison Survival, players progress through the gameplay by playing out narrative simulated stages with their character. Each simulation is designed to become increasingly difficult. To investigate how players were maneuvering through the stages of the game, we built a report using ByteBrew’s Cohorts plotting when players reach the 2nd prison series of narrative levels.
About Cohorts: Cohorts is an incredibly useful tool to visually see the transition of users starting from one event and moving to another.
At the designed pacing, reaching the 2nd prison series should take a player between five to seven days to complete, however, the report showed a staggering 27% of players finished playing through the content on the first day they installed.
Uncovering when players were competing the levels led us to ask the next natural question, which was “how” were they accomplishing this speed. To find the “how”, we broke apart the game’s levels using ByteBrew’s Journeys dashboard to analyze the highest percentile of user paths taken from level start to level complete.
About Journeys: Journeys is used to understand how your players transition through every path in your game by examining your game's custom event progression. This tools is often used when examining why players are dropping off between key points in your game.
Putting a series of levels under the microscope with Journeys, we found a majority of players were opting to view rewarded video ads in the level sequence. Reward video prompts are shown to players at several positions in the narrative level such as: on level fail, and complete. These rewards are a method for players to unlock soft currency that can be spent to purchase in-game upgrades and level boosts to assist the player through levels. Visualizing the paths players opted to follow within levels highlighted that there could be an excess of ad rewards being offered to potentially monetizing players.
About Mechanics: Mechanics is a developer's data playground where you can design queries on your game's data, build segments to examine how different user groups interact, and visualize your data exactly how you request.
Diagnosing this finding across our player base, we used ByteBrew’s Mechanics to build a customized query that analyzed the source of the volume of in-game currency collected by players. Reviewing the data revealed that Reward Videos accounted for over 50% of the accumulated soft currency in player’s accounts and only 0.1% of soft currency was received through in-app purchases. Players were heavily reliant on using reward videos as a means to purchase in-game upgrades that would enable them to pass through levels much quicker than designed. Seeing how motivated players were to reach new levels, we rebalanced the amount of currency received with reward videos and increased the cost required to unlock upgrades in the game. These updates made in-app purchases a much more attractive method to receive the level resources needed to bypass difficult levels and more than tripled the rate of purchases in-game from 0.9% to 3.2%
In addition to the rebalancing rewards, we introduced several new opportunities for players to monetize with in-app purchases including a brand new “No Ads” purchase. Created as an incentive to convert the majority of players monetizing through ads to in-app purchases, this new $9.99 “No Ads” in-app purchase would allow players to unlock the rewards given by watching ads without having to watch the ad. This proved to be one of the most successful in-app purchase strategies, making up a significant portion of all purchase revenue.
Utilizing the insights we discovered from ByteBrew, we were able to isolate how to balance our game’s economy and uncover the in-game opportunities to convert non-purchasing users into paying players. These game optimizations grew our ARPDAU by 330% in Hoosegow: Prison Survival.
“Our partners at ByteBrew not only provide the versatile analytics tools that drives our game’s growth, but their team is happy to work closely with our team to better our product and reach our business’s goals.”
Sergei Konstantinov, Co-Founder and CEO of D.Dream Games LLC
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