Infinario: Viewing charts won't make your game better

A couple of months ago, the Infinario startup was launched, developing an analytical service of the same name, focused on application in mobile and social games. App2Top.ru I asked the co-founder of the new company about what the product can offer to game developers.

Hi! First, tell us a little about yourself and your company.

Hi! My name is Ivan Trancik, I have a master’s degree in computer science. I started my business while still studying at University, developing user loyalty applications for large companies and at the same time creating mobile games.

Ivan Tranchik
Then I met Jozo Kovac, an expert in user analytics and data mining, and Peter Irikovsky, at that time already a director at one of the e-commerce companies.

Together with very talented friends from the university, we have created an analytical platform for mobile games — Infinario. We officially launched it this year at GDC in San Francisco and we have already registered more than 600 game studios from all over the world.

Why did you take up the creation of an analytical platform focused specifically on mobile games?

Thanks to our first game studio, PixelFederation, we realized that the gaming industry is the place where magic happens. There is an abundance of data that can be collected and analyzed, there are many interesting tasks that still remain unresolved.

We understood by that time that the existing solutions were so-so. The fact is that usually mobile and web analytics tools lack game-oriented features. Plus, simple tools for measuring game performance evaluate all games equally, and more advanced ones are suitable only for a data processing specialist.

We went the other way. Infinario specializes in game analytics and optimization. We want game designers, level designers and producers to be able to see how users interact with the game. We understand that every game is unique, so we created Infinario flexible: the tool adapts to different projects, to their game cycles and mechanics. It can be used to carry out complex analytical work, but it can also be used by non-experts.

We have invested a lot in the user interface and graphic design of Infinario so that our users can enjoy working with data.

Could you name the main features of the service and describe how they work and in what situations they can be used?

Viewing charts will not make your game better — it all depends on the actions you take.

Let’s start by segmenting your users. In Infinario, for example, you can segment them based on their gaming skills. You set segmentation rules based on in-game user parameters (points, time spent on each level, win/loss ratio, and so on) that are unique to your game.

You can make it so that some metrics are immediately calculated for each of the segments (income, number of sessions, average length of sessions, and so on, depends on your game).

After that, Infinario takes a snapshot of the segmentation in real time — if you refresh, the service will recalculate the segmentation, so you will always work with fresh data.

Using Infinario, you can also create a script in the Scenario Designer, based on segmentation, even very complex scenarios can be created within the script by simply moving points and triggers.

Just below is an example of a more complex scenario. In fact, you can send in-game events, push-ups, a/b testing campaigns through it, everything can be automated or scripted as part of the event.

Another feature includes forecasting (Infinario within this feature will tell you whether a particular session is the last for the player in the game, or which users are most likely to buy a certain thing, and so on), game streams (visualization of the progress of all users in the game) and channels (from it, for example, you can find a problematic moment in the tutorial or on one of the levels).

We have also implemented a very flexible tool (a pivot table) that allows you to calculate literally everything you want to know about your game or players (the dynamics of increasing difficulty, the most popular items by user segments, and so on).

Infinario has a great tutorial. Do you have plans to translate it into other languages (for example, into Russian)?

Thanks! My colleague Jakub Marek is now working hard to make the tutorial as accessible as possible even for beginners. We would like to make Infinario more accessible to Russian developers and game designers. We already have a community of game studios in Belarus, Russia and Moldova — some of them have already offered us their help in translation, so we just have to do it

And the last question: what features do you plan to add to your service in the near future?

We are going to release a Meta-Game controller – the evolution of our Scenario Designer, which allows you to adjust the game mechanics in the game in real time.

We also go into multiplayer, competitions and game sports. We are working on balancing and retention capabilities in games. I’m planning to tell you about this at the E-Sport Conference in Berlin this October.

Thanks for the interview!