Unity analytics & liveops

The levers that turn a playable casual game into a retentive and monetizable one are mostly measurement and iteration, not more features. A game ships, you watch D1/D7/D30 retention and ARPDAU, and you tune the difficulty curve, onboarding, and ad cadence against real numbers. This skill covers how to instrument that loop in a Unity casual iOS game and how to act on it.

You cannot improve what you do not measure. Retention is largely set before user acquisition — by whether players find the fun, get guided to it, and hit low onboarding friction (Solsten — D1/D7/D30 retention). Instrument the first session first.

Doctrine

1. Instrument before you tune. Don't guess at difficulty or ad frequency — wire analytics, ship a soft launch, read the funnel, then change one thing.
2. Gate tunables behind remote config. Difficulty constants, ad cadence, onboarding variants, and paywall copy should be server-driven so you can change them without an App Store resubmission (review takes days; a config flip is instant).
3. Change one variable at a time (A/B). Attribute a retention/ARPDAU move to a single change or you learn nothing.
4. Measure ad frequency against retention + ARPDAU. Over-serving ads hurts BOTH retention and eCPM, so "more ads ≠ more revenue" (Tap-Nation — hybrid-casual KPIs). Tune cadence empirically; do not hardcode a "correct" number.
5. Privacy is a build gate on iOS. Every analytics/attribution SDK adds data-collection that must be declared in the privacy manifest and respect ATT. Wire this with unity-qa-release, not as an afterthought.

What to measure (the casual KPI set)

Wire these events/metrics from day one. Benchmarks are targets to converge toward, not guarantees.