Uhm, i see... reading about indexing, unless it actually is about a lack of link to itch in their site, all the rest seems to be regular. Also in the first days of their releases, if i was typing in the search bar of games the name of their released game then they would appear, after some time they stopped to appear. I let the publisher know, they asked to Itch about that one, we'll see if they can elaborate further on what happened.
I'd not call a separation, as a matter of fact they own the IP, i'm under contract and it will extend further after making the mobile version (not anytime soon), i also get royalties on it. Aside this current stagnant scenario, not that much has changed along the process.
So you mean like uploading the link to web version of itch game on your profile and possibly to other profile's platforms? Maybe this week end i'm gonna do a random test to know more about those data settings.
Ok maybe it could be the wrong growth engine i designated, need to make a double check but after all the point of what i'm doing with analytics is about learning and learning, figuring out the proper engine and the connented KPIs are among the information i have to learn, after all i'm just starting with that so there's a lot i have to understand.
Sales i think it's a vanity metric, despite clearly an high value vs low refund surely means there's some earnings. Anyway it's necessary to track also if they become stagnant over time; I guess play time and retention might be considered pretty much the same thing unless i'm missing an intrinsic difference; For the completion rate i think for the demo it could match with the Funnel i mentioned, for the full version instead, while for Steam probably achievements/Statistics are enough, i wonder how i can track that outside Steam; i guess i'm gonna keep an eye on that number of sessions as well.
Anyway, despite it's required that to be new users in order to be genuine datas, actually for A/B testing about 10 people is enough. While it's called A/B testing, it's not implying that the target of such experiments will be actual testers, they are just players. Unity for example had a A/B testing function which basically would target a designed % of random players among the total, and you could collect the differences among analytics... without such help unfortunately what i can do instead is simply swapping with an updated build and grasping the data differences among new users... obviously this workaround is much worse, that's why it's a shame that restriction on third parties. (it's a drammatically slower process, compared to that)
It's not like i'm trying to replace testers or actual people feedback: what i'm saying is that both should be integrated in the learning process. Also, any source of information serves a different purpose and allows to learn different information among them: for example meeting people on a fair event allows to listen both their feedbacks but also their unexpressed reactions (you need to notice them); analytics datas are more generic and KPI driven but i can grasp those datas from distance and potentially as a stable flow over time, without spending more time/resources than the required one to analyze such datas; maybe it's a tad late for me to talk about testers, but i think what i should search for is for the so called early adopters (players which stick with the game at an early stage of developement, despite being WIP and with flaws), i should have started several time ago, but perhaps what i'm missing is something like a dedicated Discord server for my game, in order to start making grow a community around it.
Once i finally manage to setup and planning for the analytics i'm gonna release an update and start to add more presence of my game here and there, i noticed that thread... anyway i'll seize any other opportunity, at the proper time.
Roguelite to be more precise, in my case. That scripted early death doesn't exist anymore, you lose only when you lose now. I think as i mentioned before that the problem was that such run end was called too much early: it takes more time to show extra interesting content of the game, but i must also consider to make that happen sooner, i'll evaluate that, and this is where analytics can help me in knowing if i'm doing it right. Said that, it 50% resembles a classic RPG, so i cannot exclude the chance there's a miscommunication of the genre, if there's a way to figure that out, i'll try to track that info as well