Business Intelligence Challenges for Independent Game Publishing

Table 2

Main challenges for indie game publishing.

Main challenges	Feedback from indie game developers
Publishing challenge 1: marketing	(i) Marketing is tricky because it’s hard to get people to know about your game.; (ii) Marketing can be a very generic term. It can be very hard to know exactly what activities should be included in marketing.; (iii) Few of the games can be featured by IOS and Android channels.; (iv) Effective marketing promotion for user acquisition should be based on ROI data analysis.; (v) In order to save on marketing costs, most indie game developers rely on social media to attract players. It’s hard to instantly evaluate social media performance.
Publishing challenge 2: data collection	(i) Focus on the basic game metrics collection, which includes retention, revenue, daily users and lack the experiences in the selection of monitoring data; (ii) Only use basic metrics and current data collection is relatively fragmented.; (iii) Not very clear about the kind of data that should be collected.
Publishing challenge 3: data analytics	(i) Difficult to clearly understand the meaning behind the data and improve the game.; (ii) None of the studios in our research have a dedicated analyst.; (iii) Indie game developers lack the experience to conduct in-depth analysis and rely on third-party tools.