Dynamite Jack: The Settings stats post-mortem
Hey, a few months ago I read a post by Andy Moore about the value of music in games where he did some stats recording on games to discover how often audio was muted, etc. I decided to do something similar for Dynamite Jack.
The following are the results I got from the paid iOS version:
95% of players don’t change ANY settings.
2% of players quieted or silenced the audio.
2% of players change the controls to Virtual Stick only.
0.5% of players change the controls to Line Drawing only.
2% of players change the Touch Button Location / Virtual Joystick options.
1% of players change the HUD options.
1.7% of the users completed the campaign, which means they probably played the game for over 3 hours.
Of the users who completed the campaign:
34% of users changed options.
19% of users quieted or silenced the audio.
17% of users changed the controls to Virtual Stick only.
5% of users changed the controls to Line Drawing only.
10% of users changed the HUD options.
12% of users changed the Touch Button Location / Virtual Joystick options.
The piracy rate could be as high as 74%. Here are factors that make that number questionable:
– Each purchase can represent several devices
– Each purchase can represent several GameCenter accounts
– Each purchase can represent multiple IP addresses
Concluding interesting facts:
– Long term players are over 10x more likely to change options.
– I used royalty free music from shockwave-sound.com and only had 2% of users turn off the audio.
– I spent probably over 20 hours scouring through the tracks on that site to find the exact ones I wanted for my game.
Cheers!
-Phil
October 10th, 2012 at 2:33 pm
Do these figures including muting or volume reduction via the hardware switches?
October 10th, 2012 at 2:36 pm
@AndyMoore No idea if those were used. Wish I did though!
October 10th, 2012 at 2:39 pm
It’s a bit easier on PC, because people are more likely to use in-game muting functions; on mobile devices, people are more likely to use hardware muting. It’s rough. One day we’ll get solid metrics on everything!
October 10th, 2012 at 2:44 pm
Not to mention: on mobile many games (including mine) are set to auto-mute the game music if the user already has their own music playing.