Game data infrastructure a small studio can actually use.
Event pipelines, retention dashboards and live-ops data plumbing for indie mobile games. Lightweight enough that a one-or-two-person team can read it, ship a change, and watch what happens.
Why most indie game analytics fails
Most indie studios end up in one of two places. Either there's no data — they ship, hope for the best, and find out from the App Store dashboard a month later. Or there's too much data — every event is tracked, nothing is named consistently, and no one looks at the dashboards because they don't answer real questions.
The fix isn't a bigger stack. It's a smaller, opinionated one — wired into a few questions the studio actually asks every week.
What we ship in a typical engagement
- An event taxonomy. A small, named set of events: install, first session, level start, level complete, level fail, day-1/7/30 return, purchase. No 200-event spreadsheets.
- A pipeline. Events → analytics tool of choice (PostHog, GameAnalytics, or a custom Snowflake/BigQuery warehouse if scale demands it).
- Live dashboards. Three to five dashboards that map directly to weekly studio decisions — onboarding funnel, retention curves, monetization (if relevant), level difficulty, store-source performance.
- A live-ops + remote-config layer. Optional — wire up A/B testing and remote config so design changes can be shipped without a new app version.
- A weekly summary. A short auto-generated digest the studio actually reads, not a wall of charts.
Tools we like
Defaults: PostHog for product analytics, GameAnalytics for game-specific KPIs, Firebase Remote Config for live-ops, BigQuery or DuckDB for ad-hoc analysis. We'll happily use whatever you already pay for if it works.
Who this is for
- An indie studio that's about to ship and wants to not ship blind.
- A studio with a live game and no clear answer to "is the new feature actually working?"
- A solo dev who wants the minimum analytics that lets them iterate confidently.
Game analytics — common questions
What does an indie game analytics stack actually need?
Do you bring tooling, or use what we already have?
Can you run live-ops experiments on our game?
Is this useful before launch?
Want clean game data without building a data team?
Send a paragraph about the game and what you're trying to learn from it.