Upgrading from Legacy Analytics to Unity Gaming Services Analytics

In October 2021, we launched Unity Gaming Services (UGS) – an end-to-end platform with flexible solutions to help you build, manage, and grow your game. Alongside this launch, we also announced that we rebuilt and re-envisioned our standalone Legacy Analytics tool to be integrated within the platform. 

Our new Analytics (beta) solution is a data visualization and dashboard tool to help you understand and analyze all of your game data in one place. It works as a standalone tool (similar to the Legacy version) or you can use it with other Unity Gaming Services offerings to make it more powerful. 

Today, our new Analytics offering is free while in beta. Upon full release, it’ll have a free tier and a pay-as-you-go pricing model that scales with your usage – learn more about Analytics pricing here.

Analytics sits within the Unity Gaming Services Dashboard and can be used as a standalone service or with other services to make it more powerful. Analytics has been redesigned to take the best of both of Unity’s pre-existing solutions: Legacy Analytics and deltaDNA to deliver a powerful, intuitive end-to-end analytics solution. 

Analytics delivers all the value of our Legacy Analytics plus more functionality. See how we’ve upgraded the experience below:

• Fresh data: One hour data processing time, down from eight hours on Legacy Analytics. 
• Unlimited events: We’ve removed the strict event and parameter limits on Legacy Analytics so you can track what you need with no limits.
• Designed to work out-of-the-box: Pre-built dashboards, Standard Events, and Audiences give you quick insights so you can get started quickly. 
• Built with flexibility and depth: We’ve added incremental tools to give you all the power to customize what you need for your studio. Custom Events, Custom Audiences, Custom Dashboards (coming soon), and SQL Data Explorer let you capture and analyze all the data you need. 
• Built to work with other UGS tools: We’ve designed Analytics to operate within the platform, so there are use cases supported across our individual tools. Use Remote Config and Analytics together to run A/B tests, change variants within your game using Remote Config, and understand which variant performs best with Analytics. 
• A dynamic platform for all: We’ve prioritized a simple UI and built-in tools for non-technical users, with robust, deep functionality for the most technical members of your team. We’ve taken learnings from both of our platforms to improve the user interface, increase data transparency, and build new use cases and workflows that weren’t previously possible. 
• Better quality control and oversight of your data: A new event validation step has been introduced during event ingestion to prevent invalid events from polluting your dataset. You can also now use Environments to separate development and production data and config.
• Funnels: Our Funnels feature has been improved to ingest historical data so you can see and analyze your game progression immediately. 
• New and improved functionality: Our new tool is already an upgraded version of Legacy Analytics but we’re continuing to invest in more functionality.
• SQL Data Explorer (new): Now you can write your own queries using SQL, so you can aggregate and visualize any data needed for your game.
• Acquisition Channel Tracking: We know how important it is to see your monetization data with the rest of your game. Now, you can bring data from your attribution provider into Analytics. Use this to identify your best performing campaigns or start to build an LTV model.  

Custom Dashboards (coming soon): Soon you’ll be able to create custom dashboards that will let you view the data and charts most important for your studio. This also allows you to create side-by-side comparisons.

To put more resources into our upgraded Analytics platform, we will stop investing in Legacy Analytics with the aim of fully replacing the product with Unity Gaming Services Analytics. It is advised that new projects are created with the new Unity Gaming Services Analytics platform and we also recommend using this guide to migrate existing projects over. 

Transitioning a live game to a new Analytics solution can be difficult, so we’ve designed a data pipeline so you can run Analytics and Legacy Analytics in parallel. The Core Events data (from July 2021 onwards) from your Legacy Analytics integration will be automatically imported into the new Analytics solution. 

Metrics such as DAU, MAU, session length, revenue, and others will be populated in the new Analytics solution for a trial of the product ahead of implementing the SDK.

Please note that this does not cover any Custom Events that you have defined; these will need to be redefined both in your game code and the dashboard – see the tech docs guide for more information.

Note: No duplication or double counting will occur, standard events being triggered by the Analytics package will take precedence over imported data for each individual player. 

Want to learn more about Unity Gaming Services Analytics? Register here for our free UGS Analytics bootcamp on May 17 at 12 PM EST/ 9 AM PST and get a live overview of everything you need to know for your next project.

If you have any concerns or questions, please contact our support team here or reach out to your client partner and we’d be happy to help you through this transition.