Telemetry - Overview

Telemetry is a critical piece needed to write analytic data about your game. Beamable provides you with API's that allow you to write data about what is taking place in your game that can be queried and reported on.

If you wanted to know how many players use a specific weapon in your game in comparison to other weapons, how would you accomplish this? The answer is to write bits of data whenever each weapon is used in order to understand which weapon is used more. This is what we call Telemetry Data.

Telemetry Data by definition are measurements and data that are collected at remote or inaccessible points.

When defining what you want to know about your game, you ultimately want to ask questions about your players and their behaviors. Essentially, you want to ask the underlying questions of What and Why something happens, does, or is.

Telemetry data can also be used to measure the success of your game. There are three primary outlets of measurement that are common in the gaming industry:

• Engagement - Are my players having fun in my game and want to play more and for longer duration?
• Retention - Do my players want to come back and play the game day after day? How often do they come back to play?
• Monetization - Do players spend money in my game? When do they spend money? How often do they spend money? What is preventing them from spending money?

You can learn more about these concepts in the Analytics - Overview where we further discuss Analytics and reporting for your game.

Another use case for Telemetry is to react to what your players are doing in your game. You may want to create groups of players that you can identify according to a behavior pattern. We call these groups Segments, and while there are multiple ways to create Segments in Beamable, one of them is to write specific telemetry data about your players' behaviors so you can group them into a Segment for all players with the same behavior.

Segments are great because once your players are segmented, you can run A/B Tests on them. You can learn more about A/B Testing on the A/B Testing - Overview doc where we explain how to run experiments using Segments.