The Nintendo Switch has been on the market for more than two and half years now, but one of its available functions hasn’t had any use (officially, at least) in all that time. Now, though, the time has finally come for that little function to shine.

On your right-hand Joy-Con and your Pro Controller, you’ll notice that the HOME button has a ring around the edge. As you may or may not already be aware, that ring is actually an LED light; we’ve seen it light up before but only when a Pro Controller connects to Steam.

Starting from today, thanks to a Switch system update which takes the console’s firmware to Version 9.0, the light will finally be used for “alarm notifications”. You can see how that works below:

Alarm Notifications have been added to System Settings > Notifications.
– You can check or delete pre-set alarms.
– Alarms can be set up only within supported software (to be added at a later time).
– A controller firmware update may be required to use this feature.

Ironically, we’ve been trying all sorts of tricks to get our controllers to light up in the office – online game invites, friend requests, and anything that might be considered a “notification” – but haven’t managed to get it to work. Of course, the text above refers to the alarm function being added in the future, but we’d hoped other notifications might work, too – as hinted at by this Switch Lite feature image. Switch Lite exclusive?

Having any luck? Noticed your controllers flashing at you for the first time today? Tell us below.

Hey everyone,

As the first section grew in length, I figured this section would be the last one. But at some point Avengers wasn’t going to be split into Infinity War and Endgame, either. So there will be another part. I love you 3000.

Looking Ahead (to Shadowkeep)

This fall is a necessary first step in turning Destiny 2 into the game we want it to be.

It’s been a busy year, so let’s recap:

Here’s where we’re going this fall.

The Care and Feeding of the RPG: Add Depth, Improve Customization

We want to give people who love the RPG aspect of Destiny (like many of us) more stats and depth on the character sheet to sink their teeth into. We want to give players more agency over how they look. We also want armor to have that deep pursuit players love about Destiny—which brings the victory of finding their perfect roll.

Let’s Talk About Armor, Part I: Mods, Stats, and Tradeoffs

In order to allow players to independently pursue gameplay mods and further customize their Guardian fashion, a lot of work has been done to update armor for this fall. We’ve refactored a number of the stats in the game, we’ve overhauled the UI, and we’ve begun to separate capabilities from aesthetics.

We started out by looking at what period in Destiny’s history was a good starting place for evolving the stat game (we felt like it was The Taken King/Rise of Iron) and what principles were guiding our new designs (we want to separate gameplay and aesthetics to grant more agency over both).

There was a deep dive stream about this topic on August 14, but let’s recap some of the high-level points.

Here are the elements of armor that can roll randomly:

Like in The Taken King, the stats will have break points that decrease their cooldowns (yes, your Sparrow now shows up on the character sheet).

Begin Math Time:

Today in Destiny 2, the base recharge rates convert to a stat value of 30 in the new system. Getting to 30 isn’t too difficult, though of course some people (but certainly not you!) will ride the RNG roller coaster to get the stat they really want to 30. By chasing a good stat roll, you can achieve the fast recharge rates available in the game today without needing to use mods. It is totally possible to put together a +100 intellect build (100 is the cap) without socketing a single mod. Some of the new mods will provide +10 to a given stat to help you shore up stats you care about.

But, that specialization may come with a price. Because you’ve specialized in intellect, you may be making tradeoffs for other stats (e.g., grenades come back slower or something—it really depends on your stat rolls). But if your grenades came back slower, then maybe that Demolitionist perk that you’ve been dismantling (I know, I know, Demolitionist is actually pretty good on non-Primary weapons!) would start to look appealing.

End Math Time.

We’ve made a bunch of armor in Destiny, and we didn’t want to leave behind any of the armor that players can currently pursue. So, we’ve also updated every new drop in the game to integrate and leverage the new system. This means if you want to go back and get the small Titan shoulder pads from Sloane on Titan, you can go chase a roll of them that uses the new system.

A number of the current mods will not work in the new armor that’s dropping this fall. But those mods aren’t being deprecated at this time. For example, your Super mods on your current armor will still work, but Super mods cannot be socketed into the new armor (you could socket your armor with intellect mods instead, though).

We did this because, while we think the evolutions we’re making to armor are a great step for Destiny over the long haul, we want you to decide when you migrate to them.

Part II: The Armor Migration

Amplifying depth and choice via the new stats system ushers in some changes to armor. We’ve converted all current Destiny armor to use the stats, so cooldown durations will change as we migrate to the new system. You’ll be able to see the cooldown timers of your legacy armor when Shadowkeep’s patch goes live.

Here’s what we don’t want to happen: you feeling like “the game deprecated my old armor and perks; that time I spent playing Forsaken and its Annual Pass content was a waste, since all of the perks on the armor got turned off while Bungie forcibly migrated to this new system.”

Here’s how we hope this works:

If you’re a pretty hardcore player (or really lucky!) and have a set of armor today with perfect-for-you perks (like a fully loaded Enhanced Gun You Like set of perks), I think you’re going to keep using them for a while. I certainly expect the World First raid teams are going to go in with Forsaken-era gear that they’ve infused up throughout their Shadowkeep Power progression.

As the weeks go by and players approach the Shadowkeep Power cap and start finding mods with enhanced perks, we think that’s when our most invested, progression-chasing players will start to move over. Players can totally mix and match between new armor and the armor they have today as well.

For players without perfectly rolled gear, we think the transition to the new armor system is one they’ll make pretty quickly. In our long-form playtesting, our internal teams (not Velveeta—these are other internal players and playtesters. Sidebar: I’m real disappointed I missed out on the “kraftiest” opportunity in Part I. Good catch, Reddit!) have found that they’ve used their current armor on their “main” Guardian but rapidly switched to Armor 2.0 on their less-played alts.

Remember LiveJournal? Let’s do it.

With how I play, it’s a crude mix of fashion, function, and economic efficiency. I rarely invest resources in an item until it’s an item I know I want to use. I don’t infuse very often unless I need a specific piece/roll for an activity. I do not have a favorite class, I play all three. I tend to rotate them based on what is most effective or needed for group play in a given moment. I personally love it when the game gets hard, and I feel as if we would benefit from more challenge (I really liked how Contest mode enforced an action game skill component on World First attempts!). I totally have my favorite weapon archetypes (which I’ll spare you), and I get really frustrated as a player when there is an archetype I feel like I absolutely have to use all the time because it is far and away the most efficient thing. This is because I do—when playing content that matters—have to be using the most efficient thing. This creates some interesting discussions with the team at work when they create something that is super fun but isn’t actually efficient to use. I will totally mess around and get a triple double in patrol with a weird weapon, but the weird stuff isn’t getting used in a Crown of Sorrows group early in the season. Even then, I want to get through that content as quickly as I can.

My characters generally look HIDEOUS on the climb, and then I start to make them look good again once I get to the end game (and since I’m color-blind, my friends think my characters look pretty hideous in the end game, too). I think for me, I’ll shelve my nicely rolled items, delete everything that I wouldn’t wear raiding, and start using new equipment while I power up and find some looks I like—and then, when it’s time to go on JacketQuest, I’ll infuse up my well-rolled raiding equipment.

End of LiveJournal post.

Back to what I started this with—we want the transition to ultimately be your choice, one that you decide to make when you want to make it. Maybe you’re ready to start tinkering with stats. Maybe you really want to start combining universal ornaments and currently dropping armor to up your fashion game. Or maybe, like me, you’ll do both at the same time (but hopefully with less mocking from your so-called friends).

The Pursuit of Power: Increasing Player Agency 

We’d like the act of chasing Power and stats for your build to be something you have a bit more agency over. Not a full-blown “play whatever you want all the time”—because that means people just find the most efficient thing, rather than dipping their toes into a bunch of different activities—but certainly less restrictive than it’s been in the past.

We’ve also had a long-standing challenge in Destiny of making XP matter, and that feels like a real growth opportunity for us to dig into something we’ve wanted to look at for a while.

This section discusses Power and the changes coming to it this Fall.

Part I: Powerful Sources, Primes, and the World

Over the years, we’ve come to discuss several parts of Destiny in terms of short-, medium-, and long-term goals.

In the simplest terms: Short-term goals can be completed in a night or a week, medium-term goals can take several weeks, and long-term goals can take anywhere from a Season to several Seasons. For some folks (like me), getting good at a part of the game may take a lifetime (that’s a personal-mastery goal).

We think reaching max Power can be a medium-term goal for Power-progression-focused players. For those players, we hope pursuit of stats and someday trying out new builds is their long-term goal. I say “someday,” because while we’re taking our first steps in buildcrafting with a new armor/mod framework this Fall, I think we’re going to learn a bunch about what making a viable build in Destiny requires. You’re going to surprise us with crazy, creative things we’ve never seen once this is live—we’re all looking forward to it.

Prime Engrams

We’re doing some minor housekeeping on Prime Engrams. They’ll begin dropping once you hit 900, and you’ll accumulate charges for them as you make your way from 750 to 900. We’ve increased the number of Prime Engrams you can earn in a given week and rebalanced the value of each one to account for the increase in volume.

World Drops

As far as contributing to your Power level, world drops often feel like a waste. To get away from that, we’ve made some changes that allow these drops to help players progress beyond the soft cap. World drops in Shadowkeep will have a chance to drop at a player’s current Power level.

Here’s an example: A player has an overall Power level of 912. Gloves are their lowest slot at 906. A player might open a Legendary engram and receive 912 gloves (an increase of 6 Power).

We’re making this change because we feel like the world Legendaries are a little undervalued at the moment. This isn’t some grand accelerant for Power progression, but rather a little quality-of-life experiment to reward your free-roaming adventures or random Legendary-activity drops.

Part II: Preparing for New Light

One of the essential parts of New Light is crushing the barriers between friends. Today, one of those barriers is the Power level.

To players, Power level can mean “we have different goals, so we don’t play together.” A new character starting at 10 Power would naturally feel that they had to go play all this other content—and in many, many hours you can play with the friend who recommended the game to you.

That does not sound very sweet. It’s like telling someone to play a MOBA and then saying “we’ll play with you in 100 hours when you’ve learned to last hit.” (This is what my friends said to me. Do I have bad friends? As I’m writing this, I’m starting to wonder.)

That’s not what we want in New Light.

We want to get new players and veterans colliding quickly. After Black Armory, we made a deliberate choice to try to do this with each Season. Both Season of the Drifter and Season of Opulence had bounties to boost up players’ Power levels. With New Light and Shadowkeep being bigger moments of collision, we’re continuing that philosophy, but optimizing the mechanics to fit the moment.

We’re setting the Power this Fall to 750 for both returning and new players. We want you to all be together when Shadowkeep opens. Here’s what this means:

Which means that right now, you could (should!) stop spending currency to infuse your gear sets or that C-tier of weapons that you’re keeping around until the patch notes just in case they are going to be good after the changes (there are many buffs coming and it is very tempting to spoil a bunch of them, but I said this wasn’t gonna be the patch notes!).

Part III: More Power, More Problems 

(We originally had this as Mo’ instead of More, but I changed it upon the sad realization that there is an entire generation of players who missed out on Biggie, Puffy, and Mase in the Bad Boy era. Yes, it’s kind of weird that I changed this and left the Highlander reference in. Especially when neither is T for Teen.)

I’m the first to say it: Raising the Power of all players globally is indicative of a greater problem. It’s real weird that someone will boot up New Light for the first time and immediately be 750.

The capital P Power level in Destiny (or Light as it was called in D1) has been asked to do a lot over the years. For a time in Destiny 1, it was one of the only things players had to pursue. In D1, Power/Light meant something in terms of achievement—but that badge of honor had its problems (forever 29 via raid boots, etc).

Destiny 1 put the Light/Power level over the player’s head and drove players to raid and raise it. Over time, we gave players other paths to raising their Light/Power (Nightfall, Iron Banner). We took Light off the nameplate and made it three digits in The Taken King, trying to turn Light into something more like a three-digit item level, but without the stat budgeting assigned to it where the stats dictate true character power.

At D2 launch, we shortened the Power climb, over-simplified the game, made it too easy to get items, focused on bringing new players in, and hoped that players would pursue looks alone as their endgame (we were wrong!) while we continued to build features like what would become Forsaken Triumphs.

During that period, we also democratized Power so that players didn’t need to raid or play Nightfall to reach max Power. They could kind of just do any weekly. Forsaken introduced gold sources onto the map, and over the course of the year, the number of powerful sources continued to increase.

See, Power has a lot to do with the amount of damage players can both deal and receive. In fact, it’s the biggest factor in it. It’s also been the thing to pursue. Our gameplay specialists—the roles where dedicated Destiny players come in and participate in long-form playtesting with their imported-from-home character—frequently point out that they can’t engage with a number of parts of the game ’til they’ve “completed the Power climb.” Over the years, we’ve made the Power climb shorter and shorter. We’ve made it easier and easier to reach max Power.

We’ve also introduced things like Triumphs, titles, and Collections to provide additional stuff to do as the prestige of Power waned.

In Shadowkeep, we’re trying something a little different.

First, we’re introducing a Seasonal Artifact, unique and thematic to each Season.

As the artifact levels up, it can do a few things: First, it becomes a source of seasonal artifact mods—unique mods that can be equipped only during that Artifact’s season. These mods may be brand new experimental mods or powerful mods with reduced energy cost enabling players (and us!) to experiment further in the buildcrafting space.

Second, the seasonal artifact can award players a Power bonus, but that bonus is not applied to gear (nor does it increase the Power of future drops), but instead to all of your characters. This is meant to give players who can’t or don’t want to play pinnacle activities a seasonal path to Power. This way, even if a player doesn’t play the raid, Iron Banner, or the [REDACTED], they can still have a high Power value for the Season. Leveling the artifact to raise your Power is meant to be Seasonal character growth. Each Season, we’ll have a new artifact with new mods that change how you play—and the Power bonus will reset.

In addition to curating the list of powerful sources, Shadowkeep will also introduce pinnacle powerful sources. These sources are the only way to earn gear drops above power 950 in Season 8.

Here’s the thinking: Pinnacle reward sites can award players Power above 950. This is a way of reclaiming a little bit of the character Power prestige that the initial D1 Power climb created. If you inspect a player and see their gear is 960, you know they’ve done a bunch of pinnacle activities. It’s worth mentioning that as you raise your Power via pinnacle activities, other powerful reward sites will continue to drop powerful sidegrades.

All of this said, Power in Destiny 2 is still imperfect. We’re making some adjustments to it this year for Shadowkeep: things like Seasonal Power bonuses and pinnacle activities awarding pinnacle Power. But when we look to the future, we feel like the Power system may benefit from a rework further down the road. There’s real potential in creating more agency for players, figuring out if Power should be prestigious or not, and taking on the challenge of how to keep players relatively close together Season after Season, while still allowing them to make progress.

Here’s something I miss from Destiny 1: filling bars on my items and using materials to level items. Even though I ended up with more ascendant and radiant materials than I ever could’ve needed, the existence of these materials meant the hunt for powerful rolls could go on longer. I think wanting and needing materials is a good thing—as long as you know what you can do to go pursue that material. I’m glad we’re getting a little more of that back into Destiny with Shadowkeep.

Need Masterwork Cores? Well, we didn’t have a very good answer for that much of the year. Lesson learned.

Stay tuned to bungie.net for the third installment of Director’s Cut. It focuses on the action part of MMO-action game (think: combat and PvP, with a bonus section on the evolving world) coming to Destiny this Fall.

See you soon,

Luke Smith

Mojang has released 1.14.3. This release includes many bug fixes and some feature changes to make your lives easier… or harder depending on what they are.

A full summary of the content available in this snapshot can be found in the changelog on Minecraft.net.

• Items can now be repaired by crafting them together again

• Reverted the enchanting system to how it was before 1.14

• Torches, lanterns and pressure plates can now be placed on glass panes and iron bars

• Lanterns can now be attached below iron bars and glass panes

• Saturation is no longer required for the “How did we get here?” advancement

• You can now turn off raids with ‘/gamerule disableRaids true’

• Patrol changes:

  • Vindicators are no longer part of patrols

  • Doubled the minimum time to spawn from 5 + (up to 1) minutes to 10 + (up to 1) minutes

  • Patrols no longer spawns if the block light level disallows monster spawning

  • Patrols are now allowed to spawn in any biome except mushroom biomes

• Villagers that are panicking now have a bigger chance of spawning Iron Golems, assuming they can occasionally work and sleep

• “Last slept” and “last worked” is now saved properly for Villagers

• Farmers now spend more time farming when they are working

• Farmers can now always give away food even if other villagers don’t need it

• Improved performance

• Fixed bugs

• MC-47699 – Blazes are able to see a player through blocks

• MC-72390 – Rcon is not thread-safe

• MC-74407 – Villager inventories can get into a state where villagers cannot do anything useful

• MC-93892 – Fire/Flame arrows and fireballs set player on fire even when blocking with shield

• MC-110004 – Enderman/blaze don’t drop experience when hit with splash/lingering potion

• MC-123836 – Double blocks aren’t loaded in structures

• MC-124170 – Performance issue with particles causing lag

• MC-129491 – Advancement location trigger works inconsistently for structures added in 1.9 or later

• MC-138053 – Gamerule spectatorsGenerateChunks being false prevents chunks from being loaded

• MC-139257 – Server crash on reload when worldborder is modified.

• MC-141301 – Illager patrols spawning on blocks mobs shouldn’t spawn on, such as slabs, carpets, stairs, etc.

• MC-142360 – Pillagers patrols can spawn pillagers on top of trees inside a leaf block

• MC-143369 – Wandering trader text implies trades refresh

• MC-144107 – Miscalculation of camera position in windowed mode on Linux

• MC-144507 – The legs on cats clip through to the top of the model

• MC-144929 – When there is water above a water source, other water sources adjacent to the water source flow outwards

• MC-145863 – Villagers breed even if there are not enough beds

• MC-146433 – Double Chest does not display custom name

• MC-146835 – Illager captain spawned from raids will still give the bad omen effect to its killer, causing raids to never end

• MC-147619 – Foxes that trust a player will still avoid wolves and other players they’re angry towards instead pursuing them

• MC-147851 – Villagers frequently run right into mobs they’re “trying” to avoid

• MC-148600 – Zombie pigmen will spread their anger forever if they can continously respawn

• MC-148610 – Hostile mobs spawning on top Trapdoors, Glowstone and Sea Lanterns

• MC-148986 – Low-tier enchants from lv.30 standard enchanting setups

• MC-149372 – Game crashes when opening a 1.13.2 world

• MC-149443 – Iron golems spawn too often

• MC-149518 – Skylight appearing under blocks

• MC-149877 – Baby foxes suffocate when jumping under blocks

• MC-150319 – I can’t load up my minecraft world after doing /kill

• MC-150401 – Chickens suffocate if jumping while under a solid block

• MC-150954 – Pillager Patrol spawn is way off. Spawning too close to each other, in odd biomes, and too frequent.

• MC-151079 – An employed villager quickly becomes unemployed and employed when he works, even if his workstation has not been deleted.

• MC-151084 – Chunk rendering is slow and random in 1.14.1 (pre 1)

• MC-151144 – Hostile mobs in lazy chunks no longer count towards mob cap, breaking mob switches

• MC-151185 – Game crash after breaking villager point of interest

• MC-151337 – Mob spawn rate too high

• MC-151346 – Crash while F3 menu tries to access tags while /reload-ing

• MC-151395 – Farmers create Bread ONLY when they pick up at least 3 wheat AT ONCE

• MC-151566 – Pillagers patrols can spawn outside world border

• MC-151710 – Enties not functioning in forceloaded chunks

• MC-151753 – More than one raid can happen in a village

• MC-151771 – Villagers don’t try to run away from zombie villagers

• MC-151772 – Mob cap in the hundreds to over 1000 per player.

• MC-151802 – Spawning causes massive TPS CPU load on a flat world.

• MC-151989 – Players in Survival do not get Dolphins Grace effect if Dolphin cannot path to Player

• MC-151995 – Patrol Leaders spawning without banner

• MC-152044 – Baby trader llamas disappear immediately

• MC-152053 – High client-side lag when pistons activate

• MC-152228 – Can not /summon trader llama

• MC-152542 – Resource Warning “Codepoint ‘1ed0’ declared multiple times in minecraft:textures/font/accented.png”

• MC-152638 – Villager trade GUI does not close when a major change happens to the Villager, leading to free trades and quick stock refreshing

• MC-152810 – Cat’s natural spawning causes Null Pointer Exception

• MC-153221 – dragon fireball causes FPS to crash

• MC-153222 – Broken/Incorrect recipe files cause a data pack not to load with nothing in log

• MC-153470 – Language map does not close internal ‘en_us.json’ file after reading

• MC-154000 – When dispenser places shulkerbox it decreases its stack twice.

• MC-154080 – Wandering Trader trade GUI does not close when the Wandering Trader changes dimensions allowing you to trade infinitely

• MC-154081 – Opening survival inventory when opening world crashes game

• MC-154092 – Zombie Pigmen lose aggro even when they’re in range and have a line of sight

• MC-154239 – NPE server crash when painting entities spawned with mob spawn eggs are saved

• MC-154328 – The Village Siege (Zombie Siege) never happens

To install the release, open up the Minecraft Launcher and click play.

Cross-platform server jar:

Report bugs here:

Today’s Deal: Save 40% on The Caligula Effect: Overdose and its DLCs!*

Look for the deals each day on the front page of Steam. Or follow us on twitter or Facebook for instant notifications wherever you are!

*Offer ends Tuesday 9/3 at 10AM Pacific Time

We know you’re busy and might miss out on all the exciting things we’re talking about on Xbox Wire every week. If you’ve got a few minutes, we can help remedy that. We’ve pared down the past week’s news into one easy-to-digest article for all things Xbox! Or, if you’d rather watch than read, you can feast your eyes on our weekly video show above. Be sure to come back every Friday to find out what’s happening This Week on Xbox!

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The following blog post, unless otherwise noted, was written by a member of Gamasutra’s community.
The thoughts and opinions expressed are those of the writer and not Gamasutra or its parent company.

I’ve been developing mobile games as a hobby for more than 5 years. My latest game (Tents and Trees) became quite successful and I decided to found my own company a few months ago. Tents and Trees has today about 800k downloads on Google Play and 100k on iOS (oh, and 112 downloads on Amazon App Store…).

I didn’t do any marketing beyond posting on social networks (and I don’t have many followers). I’ve been lucky to have as many organic downloads as I’ve had, but I wanted to try user acquisition, as the big guys do.
It is a whole new topic for me, as I’ve been mainly focusing on development, and usually, when I release a game, I move on to the next one rapidly. Also, when this was all a hobby for me, I was a bit reluctant to inject “family money” into it. Now that it’s a company, I can invest more of my personal money and be at ease.
My experience was very interesting, as I learned a lot, discovered many acronyms (UA, LTV, CPI, CPE, KPI…), and got many contacts from companies specialized in user acquisition or publishing.
I’m sharing here my results, my process and some numbers obtained along the way. I hope you’ll find some use for the information presented here, and maybe apply some of these same strategies to your own experience.

With about 8 times more downloads on Google Play compared to iOS, I am heavily dependent on Google as my source of revenue. That’s a risk I want to lower, as I’ve already had games removed from the Play Store overnight and I can’t afford this risk. I also think the game has a potential to get more players on iOS. My main goal was to learn UA, but with a stronger focus on getting iOS players.

Until now, my downloads came from word of mouth or the Play Store algorithm. I had an initial spike on iOS on release because it was featured in some countries, but once the feature ended, downloads on iOS were terrible.

Obviously, organic downloads are free, but you don’t have much control over it. I’m just glad it happened. When you start to spend money in UA, you need information from your player base. Basically, you “purchase” players, and you want to measure their quality depending on the source (acquisition campaign). The quality of a user is basically its lifetime value (LTV), that is the money it brings back in the game. My revenue comes mostly from ads, and also from in-app purchases of virtual currency.

There are a few SDKs allowing you to perform user attribution. Attribution is being able to tell where the players found out about your game. It’s a complex topic, because you need to find the connection between the click on an ad, the download and the execution (possibly a few days later) of the game. Nearly all SDKs have a cost (usually a few cents per attributed player). I decided to go with FreeAppAnalytics, the light and free version of Kochava’s solution. I found the setup of the partners and campaigns quite complex, but their support was very good. I can then track installs, tutorial completion, level completion but more importantly, ad views and in-app purchases.
And then, I was ready to track my UA campaigns!

One of the most frightening things in UA and, more generally, in analytics, is that depending on the source, you often get different results. I spent a lot of time trying to compute the LTV of my players. My most precise approach was to use data gathered from Game Analytics. However, the features of the dashboard were a bit light and couldn’t perform it directly on the website. I downloaded hundreds of gigabytes of raw data and wrote multiple computation scripts to gather interesting data. It’s a complex problem and there is a lot of things to consider, such as:

• Some players play my game for more than a year, and it’s sometimes difficult to get all the data. For example, Game Analytics let me download only 6 months worth of data. I decided that instead of a lifetime value, I’m computing a “30 days value”.
• Every country has a different eCPM (average revenue for 1000 impressions of ads).
• When numbers are low, a single player purchasing the biggest pack of coins (worth $20) can really increase the average LTV by a lot. When dividing players by country or another category, how big should the sets be for it to be relevant?

I used FreeAppAnalytics to have my own analytics. However, I was approached by some partners who wanted me to include other SDKs so that they can track the metrics directly on their end. The partner (I don’t know if they want to be named, therefore I’ll call them partner A) asked me to setup Appsflyer and Facebook SDKs in my game. They wanted to measure the retention and session length. If everything was good, they could push for more paid installs..

Numbers

They got me 206 installs for iOS, and concluded the retention was not good enough and didn’t want to continue. I didn’t get statistics about revenue, so I removed the SDKs in the next app udpate and moved on.

Conclusion

Failure. 0/1 (but I learned a lot about attribution SDKs)

Another partner that I had never heard of before offered to try to acquire users on iOS, too. I could then track data using FreeAppAnalytics.

Numbers

They got me 1296 iOS installs, which is great !
The retention was terrible (2.5% for 1 day retention, where I should expect something between 30% and 40%).

Players bought items for about $32 (raw money spent by players, before any store cuts, taxes and such), which is also very low, but not as bad as the retention rate.
Players watched about 1400 ads, that’s an additional estimated raw revenue of $5 to $10.

Conclusion

Failure. 0/2 (but I learned a lot about using FreeAppAnalytics!)
We’re still working together, they’re trying to improve their player sources to get higher quality users, but our cooperation is quite slow and I’m not sure we’ll get somewhere interesting.

A third partner contacted me to help me market my game. They basically wanted to test my game retention with their ads. If it was successful, they would make an offer to “take” my game, market it and split the revenue. I didn’t want to lose my IP and give away my game so I refused to work with them.

Another partner has basically the same approach than Partner C. However, they offered me to do this only for the Chinese market, on iOS. I was hesitant, but they offered me to make a test, while keeping the IP and later, if the test is successful, they’d make me an offer that I still can refuse. I decided to give it a try. I had to include some SDKs. They also created marketing materials (game description and screenshots) to improve marketing value of the game.

Numbers

They approximately brought me 900 iOS users.
Retention was average and they considered it not good enough to continue our partnership. The process was very professional and interesting, however.
They used their own tracking process, and I didn’t get much more information about revenues. I estimate about $20 in ad revenue and no purchases.

Conclusion

Failure. 0/3 (but I learned to work with a moderately big company and they were very professional).

I already had Apple Search Ads campaign set up months ago when Apple offered $100 for free to try the service. It only got me one or two installs per week for my previous game Thermometers Puzzles due to the low CPI (cost per install) I setup.
I decided to setup a campaign for Tents and Trees and track it properly.

Numbers

In two months, I got beween 37 (FreeAppAnalytics source) and 39 (Search Ads source) iOS installs, which is very low. It cost me €31.07, which is 0.84 € per install. Even though numbers are probably too low to be relevant, the day 1 retention rate was very good (43.2%).
No in-app purchase were made, and players watched about 600 ads.

Conclusion

Failure. 0/4. I’m losing money with this campaign (except that I’m still using promotional money for now).

I often see ads for mobile games in Facebook and decided to try it. The Facebook Ads Manager and Ads Reporting are really impressive tools. There are a lot of possibilities to setup your ads. You can try a lot of different configuration and compare results (testing different headlines, different screenshots), with the targeting and reporting being very precise (country, age, sex, interests…). In my tests, I targeted players above 26 years old, who like sudoku or mobile puzzle games. I made an ad for English-speaking countries (USA, UK, Hong Kong, New Zealand, Canada) and an ad for French-speaking countries (France, Switzerland, Luxembourg, Belgium).
Also, I tried to create a campaign for Google Play, too. That’s the first time I tried to utilize UA on Google Play, and not only iOS.
The tools are so good it feels like a game to create, analyze and tweak campaigns!

Numbers

As you can see, numbers are really different depending on the campaigns. CPI goes from €0.30 (a bit expensive for me) to €2.74 (!!).

iOS

I got between 421 (Facebook source) and 439 (FreeAppAnalytics source) installs.
Day 1 retention rate was pretty good: 44.6%.
It cost me € 236.76, which is € 0.56 per install.
Players watched 7661 ads.
Players bought items for about $20 (yes, I know I’m mixing US Dollars and Euros, but that’s the way it is ;)).

Google Play

I got between 18 (FreeAppAnalytics source) and 29 (Facebook source) installs.
It cost me € 81.10, which is a huge cost to me.
Players watched 7 ads and there were no purchases.

Conclusion

iOS

Failure. 0/5 (but I had a lot of fun with the Facebook tools)

Google Play

Failure. 0/6 (but I learned that Google Play acquisition is not always cheaper than iOS).

I set up Google AdWords for Google Play before installing any attribution SDK, because Google Play has tracking integrated into the Google Play Developer Console. Setting up a campaign is not as complete as it was with Facebook. You don’t create precise ads, but just give some hints and resources to create the ad.
I setup multiple campaigns, one using CPI (cost per install), and another using CPA (cost per action, where it targets people that should purchase in the game). I have very low volumes for CPA. I tried multiple value for CPI, it’s actually 0.25 €.
Funny story: one day, I decided to tweak my ad and to add more countries to the ad list. The next day, I was happy to see I had a lot of downloads. I then realized that I had mistakenly added Russia, and after analyzing my stats, Russian players are worth 10 times less than American players. I should have created another ad with a lower CPI if I had wanted to target Russia.
I later tried also to create GoogleAds for iOS acquisition. As you will see with the numbers below, even with a CPI of €0.55, numbers are very low.

Numbers

iOS

6 downloads (this time, I have the same value with FreeAppAnalytics and GoogleAds).
It cost me € 4.43 (€ 0.74 per install).
Players watched 5 ads.
No purchases.

Google Play

Between 2600 and 3009 (numbers from Google Play and Google Ads, I didn’t install FreeAppAnalytics immediately).
It cost me €782.
FreeAppAnalytics tracked 807 ad views. By interpolating, I estimate the total number of ad views to be about 8000.

I have weird numbers for purchases. I think some hackers can mess my numbers. Google Play tracked 0 purchases, which I think is the proper number. As you can see with the image below, FreeAppAnalytics tracks 56 purchases. Since these purchases occurred on a single day, it’s probably a hacker.

Conclusion

iOS

Failure. 0/7

Google Play

Failure. 0/8

Another important acronym is ROI: return on investment. It’s basically the percentage of revenue from any investment. At 0%, you don’t earn or lose money. In my case, my ROI is about -90%. Of course, I didn’t account for other factors, such as virality of the game. For example, an acquired player can talk about the game to some friends and bring more organic downloads (also called the k-factor). I recently made an update to my game to add a “share” button to help improve the virality of the game. I can even use FreeAppAnalytics to track installs coming from the share button.

Numbers

I had 8 installs and 9 ad views from this button.

I tried 8 different sources, and none of them was profitable. There can be multiple explanations for that:

• My game is not monetizing well enough, even though it’s the most profitable game I ever made. The trends being hyper-casual games, bloated with ads. In my game, I only have rewarded ads, that are run and shown only when the players asks for it.
• I’m not creating engaging ads. That’s highly probable, but when I let professionals do it, it still wasn’t good enough.
• My audience is made up of players who can be considered difficult to target. That’s possible, being in a specific puzzle game market.

I spent quite a lot of time and put quite a bit of money into this, and it’s really interesting. I’m pretty sure there is something I can do to successfully implement UA, but it’s scary to see how far off I still am to be profitable with it.
I’m currently rewriting entirely my previous game, Thermometers Puzzles, to improve its visual appeal, gameplay, monetization, and business model, and will try some more UA with this game in the following months, probably injecting at least € 5000 into the project.
I found it quite difficult to find information for beginners on this topic. This blog post will hopefully give you some precious information if you plan to try UA. Feel free to comment, share and tweet (@Frozax) this article if you liked it!
And if you have experience, ideas, useful tips, or if you are a user acquisition actor and want to work with me, I’d love to hear from you!

By Josh Brown 09 Sep 2019

Click Here!

MagicaVoxel, the cross platform completely free voxel editing application, just released a new version, 0.99.4 (and 0.99.4.1).  The release is focused heavily on adding new rendering functionality.

Details of the release(s):

• Renderer [0.99.4.1]
  
  • Sky->IBL: Image Based Lighting. use “.hdr” format panorama images to light the scene.
  • Fog: add Equi-angular sampling back to reduce noises. support fogs in othogonal views in a bounding volume.
  • Media: enable Sample->TR-Shadow to allow single direct lighting; enable Sample->MIS-Cloud to allow multiple direct lighting (very expensive).
  • Color all color options have their own color pickers which support HSV, RGB, H-Block and Hex values.
  • Palette Menu right click the palette view to show the pop-up menu.
• Renderer [0.99.4]
• Matter->Cloud: Media material which supports multiple scattering inside volume.
• Sample->MIS-GGX: Multiple Importance Sampling (MIS) for GGX surfaces (Metal/Plastic/Glass) for better reflection.
• Sample->TR-Shadow: Tranlsucent Shadow which allows light passing though glass and cloud voxels. Only Glass->Attenuation can affect the light color.
• can adjust Bounce->Diffuse/Specular/Scatter path depths separately.
• can assign glass/cloud materials to sphere/cylinder shape voxels (for experiments only).
• the renderer pipeline is refactored, which needs more time to improve, optimize and fix bugs.
• some features such as fog scattering requires more researches.
• frame drops and noises are expected.

MagicaVoxel is available here.  For the basics on getting started with MagicaVoxel check out our earlier video available here.  If you are looking for an alternative Voxel editing application check out our list available here.

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