next »

[stevesan]

Hi folks,
I've recently started implementing my own stats in my games by hosting my own stats server (on Google App Engine) and putting HTTP GET calls in my game (I'm using Unity's WWW). I'm wondering if this is OK for a site like Kongregate? I find its own stats API relatively restrictive (I imagine they try to anonymize stats for public viewing), as I want to gather some pretty user-specific stats for my own education (I don't plan on publishing or selling them at all...they'd be useless to any one else or any other game). So, are portal sites OK with this, specifically Kongregate?

Cheers,

--Steve

[Radix]

Pretty confident that nobody gives a shit, but you'd probably be better off asking Kongregate themselves.

[Moczan]

Most flash games use www.playtomic.com for tracking stats and most major portals doesn't have problems with it.

[larsiusprime]

We use playtomic all the time, Kongregate doesn't mind. Some other portals are really anal about it, but Kong+Newgrounds don't care, and I'm pretty sure Armor games doesn't either.

[stevesan]

We use playtomic all the time, Kongregate doesn't mind. Some other portals are really anal about it, but Kong+Newgrounds don't care, and I'm pretty sure Armor games doesn't either.

Cool, good to hear. Btw, I'm not sure why, but I've had terrible experiences with Playtomic (free plan). The stats don't update in time, some updates seem to get dropped completely, etc. Did you experience any such issues with, say, Defender's Quest?

[Radix]

We use playtomic all the time, Kongregate doesn't mind. Some other portals are really anal about it, but Kong+Newgrounds don't care, and I'm pretty sure Armor games doesn't either.

Armor was the ONLY one in my experience who has ever asked for tracking to be stripped out. I have no idea why though.

Most flash games use www.playtomic.com for tracking stats and most major portals doesn't have problems with it

I dunno about most. swfstats/playtomic is better and definitely has the most presence on sites like FGL for obvious reasons but mochibot hasn't gone anywhere.

But yeah, I thought the question was about whether they'd care about you using your own home-rolled stats tracker or whatever as opposed to playtomic/mochi, which is a more specific question than whether they mind tracking at all. Right?

[Moczan]

We use playtomic all the time, Kongregate doesn't mind. Some other portals are really anal about it, but Kong+Newgrounds don't care, and I'm pretty sure Armor games doesn't either.

Armor was the ONLY one in my experience who has ever asked for tracking to be stripped out. I have no idea why though.

It was some US children protection act that prohibits them from collecting data from players under certain age.

[Radix]

That makes sense. Is it no longer the case?

[Moczan]

I'm not sure, I got that info from FGL chat with one of the Armors long ago, you would have to ask somebody who had a recent deal with them.

[bateleur]

I've had terrible experiences with Playtomic (free plan). The stats don't update in time, some updates seem to get dropped completely, etc. Did you experience any such issues with, say, Defender's Quest?

The Playtomic stats for UpBot Goes Up show 310K plays on Kongregate, whereas Kongregate itself shows 369K plays, so there's definitely something going on there.

That said, Playtomic are generally good about announcing problems on their blog and I'm not aware of the service dropping updates when it's supposed to be working correctly.

[stevesan]

Whooaahh dude UpBot is awesome... I love these simple puzzle games

[bateleur]

Whooaahh dude UpBot is awesome...

Hey, thanks!

It's not all mine - it was a team effort at TIGJam UK2 with Luke Davies (lefishy) and Craig Forrester (ishi).