Mark Twain wrote, “To a man with a hammer, everything looks like a nail,” illustrating that the tools we have available often dictate how we approach problems.

His quote was the first thing that came to mind when I read Tadhg Kelly’s insightful comment to Bill’s post on All Facebook. I loved a couple of things about Tadhg’s comment.:

First, what he is worried about is focusing on metrics to the exception of coming up with creative, fun, and truly engaging gameplay features. He blames the rampant “copycatting” in the social games industry at least partially on the emergence of clickstream analysis as a viable business strategy.

I don’t disagree – The focus on empty metrics has certainly helped to maintain a “bubble” of social games that are simply stagnating. “What are your page views?” has quickly replaced “Do people love it?”

The nuance here is that I said *empty* metrics. Metrics have to matter, and they have to measure meaningful things. The metrics Siqi and David talked about were measures of virality and page views, which are much more about monetization in an ad-driven model. That’s where those metrics came from, that’s where they were refined, and that’s what they measure.

The real question is “How do we measure fun?”

Well, let’s think about a restaurant. How can you tell if patrons enjoy your establishment? You’re not going to find that out from foot traffic or the raw number of visitors…but you *can* look at the amount of money they spend over time, how often they come back, the number of times they refer a friend, what they order… those are metrics that DO have value. And in the same way a restaurant keeps its most popular dishes on the menu, app developers can use data about their customers’ buying patterns to create more engaging experiences that give them what they want and value.

Tadhg also cites an example of Zynga killing a project because it wasn’t performing against metrics. What Tadhg is highlighting isn’t a problem with metrics in general, but with using metrics as simply a measurement tool. The true value of data is to fine-tune and improve games. THAT’s the next-generation of data analysis that Bill is so excited about.

At the end of the day, great games need to be novel and interesting, and a large part of that comes from human imagination. But there’s also a place for data – to help you understand your users better, to help you tweak your game to make them love it even more, and ultimately, to replace that hammer with a swiss army knife.

Here at Twofish HQ we meet social game and application developers every day who are looking for better ways to manage their virtual currencies and goods. If you’re not getting enough transactional data and user engagement metrics, give us a call. We have the know-how to help you create a vibrant virtual economy.

• Easy API integration
• Cross-platform
• Post-purchase analytics
• More

Sign up for our beta program now!