PG.biz Podcast – Embrace’s Eric Futoran on turning user experience into tech tha | Pocket Gamer.biz
Good games offer great experiences, and accurate and timely issue resolution is imperative for keeping LTV high and your game in good graces with its users.
And it’s not just a must to please your players. App store algorithms have begun to rank games based on performance metrics and can punish games that go on the fritz. But, as all devs know, pinpointing the source is complicated, especially since most resolution tools either lack the data to determine the real cause or the holistic view of the player journey to check if other factors, such as low bandwidth during the commute, are the real culprit.
Years of frustration trying to figure out the root cause of problems during his years as a co-founder of Scopely motivated Eric Futoran to build Embrace. This mobile-only monitoring solution effectively removes the guesswork by providing a “play-by-play of each user experience,” so your team can spend less time pointing fingers and more time building a hit game.
Eric joins host Peggy Anne Salz in this week’s episode to explain how Embrace “collects [an app’s] exhaust” and walks us through its key features that empower engineers to find solutions and, more importantly, take their seat at the decision-making table. “My goal at Embrace is to [prevent] you from constantly thinking about crashes and ANRs,” Eric says. “And allow you to get back to building games and making your users happy.”
What’s inside:
00:00 – Intro
03:06 – When you’re forced to release a game
07:29 – Eric’s lessons from his time at Scopely
10:47 – Give engineering a seat at the table
14:18 – Performance metrics now affect your ranking
17:30 – The need for proactive tools
21:39 – How does Embrace empower engineers?
26:30 – Examples of Embrace’s effectiveness
33:07 – Eric’s vision powering Embrace
35:48 – Can UA teams use Embrace?
37:29 – Advice to mobile studios + devs
41: 05 – Favourite games Q&A with Eric
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