User Lifetime Value

A gaming company needs data and analytics to understand player behavior, predict LTV, and innovate live ops. Understanding this will allow them to improve player experience and grow their community.

Games with lifetime values (LTV) measured over months or years is where the industry is heading. But in creating games with much longer LTV periods (think Candy Crush and the like), the associated user acquisition (UA) costs to scale such a game also rise dramatically.

As app marketing gets more sophisticated, there’s an increasing focus on metrics of every sort. Having a clear understanding of your unit economics is extremely important specifically customer acquisition cost (CAC) and user lifetime value (LTV) - how much a customer costs to acquire and the expected value of that customer over time from your app or game.

When most developers are looking at acquisition costs on mobile, many get stuck in short-term thinking, getting hung up on headline prices rather than a return on investment calculation.

Lifetime Value is prized as a predictive metric, one that yields the value of future cash flows based on calculations tied to the actions and affinities of your users. But users are different and provide a different level of value depending on the category of app you offer and the user journey it enables.