Game IQ – the best game analytics platform just got better

Last November, App Annie launched Game IQ, a games classification and analytics platform that was created to solve a problem caused by the explosion in mobile game development. As new games and new types of games are continually released, each game category, such as Casual, houses an ever-increasing number of game types, such as Puzzle, Runner, Word etc., which the app stores struggle to classify with any sort of granularity. To solve the problem, App Annie analysed and tagged over 30,000 games, which between them account for 97 per cent of global games revenues. The games were categorised by three criteria: Class; Genre; and Subgenre.

Using Game IQ, developers can inform their product roadmap based on game play trends, granular market sizing, and competitor strategies. They can discover new regions for user acquisition or global expansion, by understanding regional gameplay trends and market potential. Find new markets by noting the other types of games that their users are playing. And understand how specific features, IPs, and monetization mechanics lead to game success.

A developer may have a game, for example, that monetizes the same way in all countries, but the Game IQ data tells them that if they switch things around in APAC, they could be onto a winner.

At launch, Game IQ was a pretty impressive tool. But now, it has been enhanced with the addition of Feature Tags, Genre Summaries and Tag Trends, to make it even more powerful and useful to game developers.

Gameplay features, monetization mechanics, and payment types are evolving rapidly across genres and geographies. Game IQ’s Compare Report feature offers side-by-side comparison of in-app features so developers can deconstruct a game without playing it. This report helps developers understand the features that competitors have implemented and how those features have impacted game performance. They can quickly deconstruct any genre with a few clicks, easily identify new opportunities and apply competitive product insights to their roadmap.

Genres are also evolving with new features faster than ever. Manually monitoring genres for trends and new competitive threats is difficult because the data is scattered across various sources and reports. With App Annie Game IQ and the Genre Summary report, developers can track and compare the top-performing games within each genre, so they can see which features are growing in popularity and engagement, and how they track to their downloads and revenue channels.

Another new addition, the Feature Tag Trends Report, allows developers to deconstruct an entire genre from the tag perspective without volumes of manual research. Having this level of granularity means they can confidently benchmark against competitors in order to prioritize feature development and find strategic opportunities for growth. Developers can view the tags that are becoming more and more prevalent across their competitors in a specific genre so they can understand which tags are most impactful for the top performers.

“With the latest iteration of Game IQ, we’ve moved from the what to the why” says Junde Yu, General Manager, Gaming at App Annie. “You might have a game that tops the charts for 30-day retention, but lags behind in terms of revenues per download. Game IQ can tell the developer why the game does so well in one respect, and so poorly in the other. Developers can see what kind of engagement and monetisation features their more successful competitor games employ, so they can consider adding them to their own game. With these new enhancements to Game IQ, we are completing the other side of the equation. Where previously our data told a developer what the situation was, we can now help them work out why things are the way they are, and do something about it.”

To book a demo of Game IQ, click here.