7 Unity Engine Games With Impressive Sales From Game Analytics

Games are virtual worlds where we chase joyous quests using avatars. Most tech-savvy fun lovers have roamed a couple of these worlds, and their lives are usually more exciting for that.

These fun games don’t just metamorphose from thin air though. Game developers and a couple of other professionals put in great time and effort to create and assemble rich stories, quests, avatars, and mechanics together into a complete game.

This is no easy task to build from scratch. Hence, a couple of sophisticated software known as game engines have been put together by seasoned engineers to simplify the herculean task of game development. A few popular ones are the Unity game engine and the Unreal game engine.

Game engines include some already-made game components (i.e., avatars, mechanics, etc.) which developers can incorporate and manipulate to create their desired game.

Unity game engine is widely used as it facilitates the creation of 3D graphics with a relatively small amount of work without extensive programming knowledge needed. Popular games like Beat Saber and Pokémon Go were created with Unity.

Game Analytics

Game development is often a tedious process. However, a developer, after making all this effort, will only hope that players will like the game. Hence, it is quite risky to create a game since users may end up not liking the game after a lot of resources have been put in to create it.

This is where game analytics come in.

Game analytics allow developers to keep track of player behavior with games, which allows them to discover player preferences and leverage this knowledge to improve their games.

It’s a technology that has proven to be quite useful as a number of companies have managed to achieve great financial success with their games using game analytics.

Below are 7 games developed with Unity that have recorded massive sales with the use of game analytics:

7 Games Developed With Unity

1. Superhot (Superhot Team):

Superhot is a unique first-person shooter developed and released in 2016 by the Superhot Team. The game gained attention for its innovative time manipulation mechanics and minimalist art style.

The Superhot Team released a prototype of their game on Steam and used SteamSpy game analytics to optimize gameplay mechanics, identify player preferences, refine the level design, and correctly predict how successful their game would be before releasing the full game.

This analysis from SteamSpy even helped the company avoid using publishers to release their game. Instead, they self-published the game based on the insight they gained from game analytics and minimized publishing costs yet still produced a very successful game.

Tomasz Kaczmarczyk, a business developer for the Superhot team had this to say;

If there was no SteamSpy at that point, it would have been a lot harder for us to make good decisions. We were able to look at the terms from a publisher and say: 'Well, if we actually are as successful as we think we are going to be - and if we don't need the publishing money to finish the game - that means that we can be a lot more successful, independent and have control so we can grow the studio to just another level.

The use of game analytics helped the Superhot Team create a compelling and innovative game, which garnered critical acclaim and sold millions of copies across platforms such as Steam, PlayStation 4, and Xbox One.

2. Hollow Knight (Team Cherry):

   
   

Hollow Knight is a critically acclaimed Metroidvania game developed by Team Cherry, a game development company based in Australia. Released in 2017, "Hollow Knight" gained popularity for its atmospheric world, challenging gameplay, and intricate level design.

Team Cherry developers, who were mostly long-term gamers, analyzed many games they had played over the years to isolate critical components that helped Hollow Knight become very successful.

Ari Gibson, Hollow Knight’s art supervisor had this to say about their game;

The game is built upon our love of classic Nintendo games, so this is the peak of a 30-year cycle: growing up playing them, gaining enough skills to create our own homage to those games, and releasing it on the same platform that inspired us in the first place.

The use of game analytics helped Team Cherry refine the game's difficulty curve, ensuring a challenging but fair experience.

The improvements made based on game analytics resulted in positive reviews, increased visibility, and word-of-mouth recommendations, contributing to improved sales for "Hollow Knight" on platforms such as Steam, Nintendo Switch, and PlayStation 4.

This helped the game sell about a million copies in just over a year.

3. Cuphead (Studio MDHR):

Cuphead is a highly acclaimed run-and-gun indie game developed by Canadian company Studio MDHR. Released in 2017, the game combined challenging gameplay, hand-drawn visuals, and a unique 1930s animation style to achieve great success.

This was inspired by the mechanics of successful classic games like Super Mario and Contra which the developers grew up playing.

Despite their initial success, the developers also asked players for feedback to understand what they loved and hated about the game. By analyzing this data, Studio MDHR gained insights into how players were progressing through the game and where they were encountering difficulties.

This allowed them to make adjustments to the game's difficulty curve, refine level layouts, and ensure a smoother learning curve in later releases. Through this analysis, Studio MDHR was able to fine-tune the game's design to strike the right balance between challenge and enjoyment.

The use of game analytics resulted in increased player satisfaction, positive word-of-mouth, and improved reviews. As a result, "Cuphead" gained significant popularity and commercial success, leading to increased sales on various platforms, including Steam, Xbox One, and Nintendo Switch.

4. Ori and the Blind Forest (Moon Studios):

Ori and the Blind Forest is a visually stunning platformer developed by Moon Studios. Released in 2015, the game captivated players with its beautiful art style, emotional storytelling, and engaging gameplay mechanics.

It took about five years to build such a top-performing game, which was adopted by Microsoft, and this effort paid off after the game made back its development cost in just a week after it was released.

Moon Studios leveraged game analytics to refine the game's mechanics. Haven previously worked as an ex-cinematics director at Blizzard, Moon founder, Thomas Mahler, who was a big fan of retro platformers, analyzed the impressive mechanics of Super Mario Bros 3 and Super Meat Boy.

He then set out to improve upon these impressive mechanics and made it one of the pillars of “Ori and the Blind Forest.” In the end, it became a very successful game that felt better than it looked.

Through the use of game analytics, Moon Studios could provide a more polished and engaging gameplay experience. This contributed to positive reviews and increased word-of-mouth recommendations, ultimately leading to improved sales for "Ori and the Blind Forest" across platforms such as Steam, Xbox One, etc.

5. Inside (Playdead):

Inside is a haunting puzzle platformer developed by Play Dead, a Danish game company based in Copenhagen. Released in 2016, "Inside" impressed players with its atmospheric world, thought-provoking puzzles, and immersive storytelling.

During the development of Inside, Play Dead incorporated analytics to understand player engagement, identify pacing issues, and optimize puzzle design.

They used a haphazard development process as they kept changing components of the game due to analysis of feedback from testers.

By analyzing player data and feedback, Playdead gained insights into how players progressed through the game and where they experienced pacing issues.

This allowed them to make adjustments to the game's pacing, ensuring that players remained engaged throughout the experience.

In the end, they produced a very successful game that was able to sell about 5 million copies between 2016 and 2020.

6. Firewatch (Campo Santo):

Firewatch is a narrative-driven adventure game developed by Campo Santo, a company based in San Francisco, and released in 2016. Firewatch captivated players with its rich storytelling, beautiful visuals, and immersive atmosphere.

Firewatch developers created a prototype and analyzed feedback from this prototype to make design decisions when building the main game. This use of game analytics played a significant role in its sales success.

Concerning the design technique they used, Chris Remo, who served as the game’s story designer and audio director, responded many years later that looking back, the only issue he had with the approach is that he thinks it might have worked a little bit too well.

By analyzing player data and feedback, Campo Santo gained insights into how players made decisions and interacted with the game's characters and environment.

This allowed Campo Santo to deliver a compelling and emotionally resonant narrative, leading to positive reviews, increased visibility, and impressive sales figures of up to a million copies sold within a year of the game’s release.

7. Oxenfree (Night School Studio):

Oxenfree is a supernatural thriller developed by Night School Studio and released in 2016. The game gained attention for its branching narrative, dynamic dialogue, and atmospheric setting. Night School Studio leveraged analytics to understand player choices, particularly during the sales period.

Initially, Night School Studio was promoting the game from more of a story perspective which made it mysterious and left the players to discover the game for themselves.

However, analysis of feedback data showed that this seriously hindered the adoption of the game, and the company changed its sales ideology to a more explicit one that clearly highlighted what players had to gain from the game. This helped to seriously improve sales.

By analyzing player data and feedback, Night School Studio gained insights into the choices players made and the impact those choices had on the narrative and marketing.

This peculiar example proves that game analytics is not only important to engineers and developers but it is also important to salespeople and marketers.

To Conclude:

Game analytics has become very important in the success of a game as it allows developers to gain insights, make data-driven improvements, and ultimately enhance the player experience, leading to improved sales and success. Hence, it is critical to integrate game analytics in any modern game to be released.

Asides from inbuilt game analytics tools like unity analytics, external game analytics tools like Google Analytics, App Analytics (Apple), Mikros, etc., also exist that can be integrated through code to monitor game usage and provide user data for analysis.

Mikros is an exceptional game analytics tool as it is easy to implement, works with all major game engines, gives detailed user-specific analytics for all products in an ecosystem, and allows user targeting based on demographic information.