Game studios invest heavily in building and launching titles, but most have limited visibility on how those games are covered across affiliate websites. Which sites are reviewing your games? How does that compare to your competitors?
Where are the gaps and which partnerships are worth pursuing? These are basic questions, but until now studios have lacked a structured way to answer them. First Look Games Analytics is built to help with that.
Analytics sits on top of the existing First Look Games platform and brings together data from across our network of affiliate websites. It is designed to help studios find the right partners, understand where and how they are currently covered, measure how they compare against competitors and act on what they find.
Why affiliate visibility matters
Affiliates play a significant role in player acquisition. Depending on the market, they can drive anywhere from 19% to 95% of new players to an operator’s site. In the UK alone, slots generate £4.2 billion a year in GGR, and even a conservative estimate of the affiliate contribution represents a substantial share of that revenue flowing through a channel that studios have had very little way to assess. Analytics gives studios a clearer picture of where that value sits.
Finding relevant affiliate partners
The Website Directory is the starting point. Every affiliate website in the First Look Games network is listed and classified by market, with the default ranking based on traffic.
Studios can filter by market, traffic trends and domain authority, alongside our own site score. The First Look Games score factors in more than traffic alone. One of the signals is whether a site distinguishes between stronger and weaker games in its reviews, rather than rating everything similarly. That kind of distinction is a useful signal of how seriously the site takes its reviews.
Understanding a site’s value to your studio
Click through to any site and the Website Details page shows a clearer picture. Traffic data is broken down by market. Audience signals such as gender split help studios assess whether a site’s readership matches their target players.
Most importantly, the page includes takeaways tailored to your studio: how many of your games the site has reviewed, how that compares with competitors, and where there may be room to expand coverage. There is also a measure of how visible your studio is on that site compared with others in the market.
Benchmarking against competitors
Studio Benchmarking pulls together coverage data from across the platform and lets studios compare their performance against the wider market, against similarly sized studios, or against up to five competitors of their choosing. Metrics include total reviews, reviews per game, visibility across sites and total audience reach.
A studio does not need to compare itself only with the biggest names. It may get more useful context from looking at peers or a specific set of rivals.
Game Benchmarking works at a title level. Studios can compare one of their games against a competitor’s title to see how the two perform across affiliate sites. If you have released an Egyptian-themed slot, for example, you can measure its affiliate coverage against an established title like Book of Dead.
It helps answer straightforward questions: is this game getting comparable attention? Is a competing title gaining traction? Are there markets or sites where we are underrepresented?
[SCREENSHOT: Game Benchmarking comparison]
Tracking coverage
The Content Monitor gives studios a clean view of where their games are being covered, broken down by studio, game and market.
It makes it easier to spot gaps, whether that is a title with limited coverage in a particular market or a game that has not yet been picked up by higher-traffic sites.
For PR teams, agencies and marketing teams, it offers a quicker way to review coverage patterns without working through the full analytics suite.
Acting on the insight
Analytics includes a messaging tool that lets studios contact affiliate websites directly through the platform. Only studios can initiate outreach, and messages are limited to one at a time.
The tool is designed for more relevant, better-prepared outreach rather than mass messaging. Studios are encouraged to review a site’s details page first so they can tailor their approach based on what they already know about the site and its audience.
Early usage suggests studios are already using the platform to identify outreach opportunities and improve existing relationships.
What comes next
This is version one. We are working on similar insight for affiliate publishers, so they can see which games are performing well, where they have gaps in their review coverage, and how their competitors are working with studios.
As the platform develops, the aim is to give both sides of the market a more complete and useful picture of how affiliate partnerships are performing.
First Look Games Analytics is available for studio partners. Get in touch to find out more.
