game-data-analytics-and-live-economy

name	game-data-analytics-and-live-economy
description	Use when defining game telemetry, player funnels, retention or progression metrics, experiments, remote configuration, virtual economy sources and sinks, live events, anomaly controls, or ethical data-driven decisions.
metadata	{"portable":true,"compatible_with":["claude-code","codex"]}

Game Data, Analytics, and Live Economy

Collect the minimum trustworthy game data needed for named decisions, and change live systems through reversible controls.

Use When

• Defining telemetry schemas, KPI/experiment plans, progression/economy simulation, remote config, live events, or anomaly detection.

Do Not Use When

• Data collection has no stated decision, consent/legal basis, retention, or owner.
• The request seeks manipulative monetisation or fabricated benchmarks.

Required Inputs

Decision questions, player journey, audience/age and territory, event/version taxonomy, separate Ads/Analytics/vendor identity/privacy/consent models, economy and ad-placement ledgers, cohorts, wellbeing/trust guardrails, experiment rules, data-quality thresholds, remote-config access, rollback/kill switches, and incident owners.

Workflow

1. Map each question to a metric, event fields, denominator, cohort/window, quality check, owner, and action threshold.
2. Version schemas and validate client/server events for duplicates, loss, ordering, clock skew, bots, test traffic, and late arrival.
3. Model currency/item sources, sinks, balances, caps, prices, grants, refunds, and non-paying paths; reconcile consequential events.
4. Model every ad format/placement with trigger, opt-in/decline, cap/pace, reward, no-fill/error/offline path, audience treatment and removal switch. Never infer consent across SDKs.
5. Pre-register experiments and guardrails; prevent overlapping contamination and stop on privacy, accessibility, child-safety, wellbeing, trust or data-quality failure even when revenue/retention rises.
6. Route remote config, economies, offers, ads and events through approval, typed validation, staged exposure, monitoring, expiry, reconciliation and rollback.

Quality Standards

• Every metric names its player or operational decision, denominator, version, cohort/window, owner and quality threshold.
• Economy, offer, event and ad changes are reproducible, staged, auditable and reversible.
• Consent, deletion, age treatment and data minimisation are verified separately for each SDK and territory.
• Commercial results are paired with fairness, accessibility, wellbeing, trust and failure-path evidence.

Decision Rules

Condition	Action
Metric has no named decision or denominator	Do not collect or publish it
Engagement rises while regret, harmful spend, inability to stop, sleep disruption, complaints, refunds or child incidents worsen	Stop or roll back; do not call the experiment a win
Rewarded ad is technically opt-in but progression makes decline punitive	Classify it as coercive and redesign the economy
Consent, deletion or SDK failure path is unverified	Keep collection/ads disabled and return the gap
Economy mutation cannot reconcile or reverse	Block remote release

Degraded Mode

When consent state, age treatment, network, vendor or telemetry is unavailable, use privacy-minimised defaults, preserve play without ads/analytics where feasible, queue only explicitly permitted operations, and expose a tested kill switch. Mark commercial and behaviour conclusions not assessed when data quality fails.

Anti-Patterns

• Dashboard without a decision. Fix: bind metric, owner, threshold and action.
• Retention as a solitary north star. Fix: pair it with player value, wellbeing, trust and exit measures.
• One privacy toggle for multiple vendors. Fix: map each SDK's data, purpose, consent and deletion separately.
• Live economy edit without version/reconciliation. Fix: stage, audit and rehearse reversal.
• Revenue-positive intrusive ad. Fix: treat interruption or coercion as a blocking product defect.

Outputs

Measurement plan; event/schema and SDK-purpose registry; data-quality tests; economy/ad-placement model and reconciliation; wellbeing/trust guardrails; experiment record; remote-config/event change log; rollback evidence; qualified decision readout.

References

• Live data and economy controls