Helika groups with Yuga Labs to deliver analytics to Web3 gaming

Whenever a brand new sport platform arises, so too does an analytics startup. That’s as a result of analytics ship insights, and that’s what we’re seeing now with the launch of Helika for Web3 analytics.

Helika raised $4 million in March to develop its analytics platform for the Web3 group, and one of many new corporations it’s serving is Yuga Labs, the maker of the Bored Ape Yacht Club non-fungible tokens (NFTs) and Bored Ape video games.

To perceive this higher, I spoke with Anton Umnov, Helika CEO, and Spencer Tucker, chief gaming officer at Yuga Labs. Helika has about 20 individuals, principally engineers, and it’s based mostly in Toronto with places of work in Austin, Texas. The enterprise is simply getting off the bottom.

Helika tries to observe the pockets info to seize knowledge on a person, after which observe it throughout a social graph, wherever that pockets goes. Then they combination the habits of the people into cohorts of customers that behave alike to glean broader insights about what individuals play. Helika cross references no matter knowledge it might probably, although it’s typically very tough to take action in a world with out identifiers, as corporations should play by stronger privateness guidelines now.

“We have a number of game initiatives in development. And we will be using Helika to help us understand and inform us about what we’re doing,” Tucker mentioned. “They’re in different genres with different play styles. And so it’ll be interesting to see what those ultimately manifest as in terms of player engagement and reach, and how Helika can help us understand those relationships in the aggregate sense and help us better optimize and create more compelling and sticky experiences going forward.”

Helika’s funding spherical was led by Diagram Ventures, with participation from Sfermion, Sparkle Ventures, StreamingFast, Brain Holdings, Fenbushi, and Builder Capital. As nicely as participation from strategic angels, together with Montreal investor and sport entrepreneur Marc Alloul.

The traders noticed that the majority corporations in Web3 wrestle to make data-driven choices to drive progress. Helika’s no-code platform with built-in in-game, on-chain and social media analytics permits corporations to grasp their person’s habits and interactions to extend engagement, retention, person acquisition, and make higher strategic choices.

The platform presents a collection of highly effective merchandise permitting Helika purchasers comparable to Yuga Labs and Treasure to collect gross sales and royalty knowledge, analyze person pockets exercise, onboard new customers, and decide optimum mint pricing for future NFT drops.

The lack of visibility on attain, retention, and income of NFT collections has been a serious problem for a lot of Web3 gaming studios and well-liked NFT tasks. Helika’s platform gives these insights in order that prime web3 corporations could make knowledgeable, strategic choices.

Helika goals to supply gaming studios and NFT tasks by giving them the power to grasp their person engagement and retention, achieve insights into different video games and NFTs their customers work together with, and combine on-chain, off-chain, Web2, social, and zero-party knowledge. With this knowledge, Helika believes Web3 tasks will be capable to increase progress and product efficiency.

“The intersection of gaming and blockchain will provide a more sophisticated understanding of player behavior and interests as well as user acquisition performance. This is going to disrupt gaming as we know it. Helika is instrumental in unlocking the value of both Web2 and Web3 game data,” mentioned Alloul, sport entrepreneur, investor, and adviser, in an e-mail.

Looking at Dookey Dash

Back in December, members of the Bored Ape Yacht Club group took to the sewers to play one thing known as Dookey Dash.

Yuga Labs launched advanced and revolutionary mint mechanics by means of a narrative-driven expertise that launched new individuals to the world of Web3. More than 75% of Dookey Dash gamers have been new to the Bored Ape Yacht Club ecosystem.

It was additionally a stake within the floor for Yuga, which firmly believes that Web3 and gaming can and may intersect. In reality, esports legend Kyle Jackson AKA Mongraal gained the last word prize for Dookey Dash.

Helika has been digging into the information on the efficiency of Yuga’s skill-based sport, and it has dug out a whole lot of fascinating numbers demonstrating that Dookie Dash’s efficiency matches – and in some circumstances, exceeds – related Web2 video games.

Helika is already working with a number of companions together with Yuga Labs, Sandbox, Azra Games, Azuki and 5 triple-A sport studios (to be introduced quickly).

Learning from Dookey Dash

While trying on the Dookey Dash sport knowledge, Tucker mentioned he was organising methods to search out inside and exterior benchmarks for the sport, in order that the staff might work out the place to place their power and a spotlight sooner or later.

“Working with Helika, we were able to get visibility into the product,” Tucker mentioned.

With this info, Yuga Labs can higher work out how you can enhance the product for the participant.

One of the issues that Yuga Labs discovered was that the Dookey Dash engagement was longer and stronger than it gave the impression to be at first.

“It means we had strong retention,” he mentioned. “And many of these players were new to the ecosystem.”

Helika will merge knowledge that’s coming in from Yuga’s on-chain occasions with the off-chain occasions and use that to create a profile of a participant. Helika additionally tries to compile aggressive analytics, so builders can understand how a lot time a participant spends on different apps apart from the builders’ sport.

“It allows you to not only understand your competitive landscape, but actually identify the partnerships opportunities with brands that want to collaborate with you,” Umnov mentioned.

Origins and acquainted patterns

Umnov has an information science background with a give attention to gaming.

Umnov has constructed 4 analytics corporations and he labored on the Nielsen Company too.

“The whole Nielsen premise was how can we syndicate and standardize analytics across the whole industry,” he mentioned.

Helika has constructed a whole lot of sport analytics merchandise for various sport studios, principally inhouse. But about 18 months in the past, he gathered a staff to give attention to analytics for the fledgling trade of Web3 video games. These blockchain-based sport corporations operated in very alternative ways from conventional sport corporations.

Yet they’d the identical drawback the place they didn’t actually need to construct their very own analytics instruments. Rather, they wanted to give attention to making nice video games, Umnov mentioned. So Helika constructed its Web3 analytics platform and provided to dump the duty from the builders.

“The gaming studios should be focusing on building the great games,” Umnov mentioned. “So let us do the dirty work and the teams can design the best products for consumers essentially.”

I heard this sort of pitch with the rise of social video games (Kontagent), cellular video games (Flurry and App Annie — now Data.ai), digital actuality (Virtualitics) multiplayer video games (Playfab) and extra. Helika has been available on the market for a yr now, and so it feels prefer it’s on the bottom flooring of Web3 gaming, which has a core of devoted gamers however has but to interrupt into the mainstream. And Umnov believes analytics is vital to that breakthrough.

It began working with Yuga Labs final fall to supply it with a “foundational layer” of analytics for its NFT collections, Umnov mentioned. Key to getting understanding is to have the ability to take the participant knowledge and phase it in a significant solution to perceive how loyal they’re and the way a lot they may spend over time in a sport, Umnov mentioned.

“This understanding helps game developers build better experiences for the end consumers,” he mentioned.

How to study from the analytics

It was a procedurally generated infinite runner sport that was hyper aggressive, as gamers have been ranked on a leaderboard. Yuga Labs additionally created a tech known as a “warm wallet,” the place an proprietor of a token might enable another person to make use of it, perhaps a member of the family, with out having to personal it. It’s like a digital token for another person. That helped with progress of the sport because it unfold to others. In that sense, the core gamers might turn out to be evangelists for a sport they usually can deliver extra individuals into the ecosystem.

Using an information product like Helika throughout a bunch of video games provides you insights into the connection between the video games, how persons are interacting, and understanding the social graph, Tucker mentioned.

“How many people are touching how many of your different products?” he mentioned. “You may have a unique identifier, but the joining of those datasets is complex, even inside of a company that’s got a pretty mature one in terms of data infrastructure,” Tucker added. “What blockchain allows you to do is make those relationships very clear, very easily if there’s a lot of data. And what Helika provides is the ability to parse that data in a meaningful way, and then tie them back and give us a better perspective on the overall participation, overlap and engagement within the ecosystem.”

And he mentioned, “Put it another way. In the old Web2 world, maybe you paid $3 for this player and they spent $1.50. So the ROI wasn’t there. However, what if you brought in that person for $3, they spent $1.50 in that one game, but they just also happened to organically start playing three or four other games in your portfolio?”

“This idea of the social graph is very important because we can see how that specific players spends across different games or how much time they spend, giving you additional insights on attributes or meta data,” Tucker mentioned.

Why Web3 analytics is hard

Umnov was been speaking with one firm, which senior knowledge engineers, and it took them eight to 9 months to have the ability to roll out even the foundational analytics layer.

“It’s a highly competitive industry and they’re really trying to fast-track it,” he mentioned. “They figure out it takes a lot of resources and time. The biggest issue is how you merge all of the datasets together.”

“We work with a lot of Web 2.5 studios,” Umnov added. “If you’ve been an analyst in Web2 and you make the leap to Web3, it’s not necessarily intuitive that that person can pick it up right away. There’s a lot of stuff happening. On the backend, there are in-game events recorded on the chain. And so many people will be struggling.”

Tucker famous you need to do pockets deduplication, since many customers create a number of completely different wallets and don’t keep on with them for very lengthy.

“I would agree with that. I also have a lot of sort of analytics data and business intelligence in my background,” Tucker mentioned. “The problem space for Web3 is pretty unique in that the blockchain is, by definition, very anonymous. That notion of a consistent identifier is effectively nothing. I can create a new wallet on the fly. And so the process of identifying an individual person and tracking behavior and what they do and how they interact with the on-chain experiences is pretty complex.”

Anchoring habits knowledge again to a singular identifier and monitoring an individual’s experiences over time could be tough. Tracking tokens within the crypto house usually isn’t useful as a result of the tokens can change fingers a lot in crypto buying and selling.

“You’ve got all kinds of additional complexities that you don’t really run into,” Tucker mentioned “It’s an interesting problem space. The data product is a thing that’s definitely going to be necessary for Web3 companies to have a better point of view.”

Some knowledge on the blockchain may be very clear. But while you wish to create a cohort, or group of customers who’re related, then it will get advanced.

“It’s an anonymous wallet,” Tucker mentioned. “You know what it holds and what it does, but you don’t know if it’s the only wallet for that person. Or if that person has multiple wallets. Or if they transfer things between them.”

He mentioned, “We’re trying to push the boundaries, especially on the blockchain tech side. It’s an interesting problem space. I don’t think a lot of people understand the complexities of designing and building Web3 games. There are so many things that are so counterintuitive to Web2 gaming that you would never even have to consider. Just because people own the content they can sell it. And like what that does to your game design and balance and stuff is complex, to say the least.”