Game modes, percentages and conclusions

As you may know there are three different game modes in Don't Mind the Mine.

1) Time Challenge
2) Against Miny
3) Multiplayer

Which one is the best game mode? Which one is more fun and played by more players? As you might guess we - as developers - are quite interested in the answer. Luckily there are means to answer those questions. If you are also interested just keep reading.

Let me first quickly introduce these game modes before we move on. In Time Challenge your goal is to find every mine and be very accurate (i.e. require as few moves as possible) and fast. When you play against Miny your goal is to find more mines as "he" can. This happens in a turn-based fashion and not simultaneously. Last but not least there is also a Mutliplayer game mode where you can play against your friends on the same device (also turn-based).

From the beginning we were curious about usage statistics. It is very important to be able to measure your application if you want to improve it. Otherwise how could you determine whether your improvement has a positive effect or not? If you have thousands of users you cannot say that everybody will like something only because you liked it - taste has high diversity. We need to measure whether a change in the game results in more or less fun.

Don't Mind the Mine collects anonymous usage statistics (which can be disabled by the user if preferred). We use Google Analytics to collect and aggregate any data we are interested in - it is a very powerful and easy-to-use tool. What kind of data do we collect?

We simply monitor which game modes are played by the user. Regarding this we differentiate among four cases. The gamer

1. played the Time Challenge
2. played against Miny and the Gamer has won
3. played against Miny and Miny has won (Gamer has lost)
4. played against friends (multiplayer) 

We took all data sent by all devices - since the game was released - and aggregated them. Let's see the distribution: which game modes are played the most?

Results are very similar to our expectations:

1. Time Challenge (~50%) and Against Miny (~48%) game modes are almost the same popular among users
2. Multiplayer (2.4%) has a quite lower penetration rate which doesn't surprises us as your buddy is not always there to play with you :)

But there is something that did surprise us: Miny wins circa 4 times more than users!

We don't wanted to create an easy opponent - this was part of our design decision. We don't like games that don't present a challenge to us. It is always better to face some difficulty than to be bored of easiness - but it's hard to find the golden mean.

We received a lot of feedback and some were confident that Miny is cheating and he "knows" more than he should. We can assure you that this is not true. Special care was taken to ensure that he won't cheat: in every turn he does not know more than what is visible. He is just programmed to be very smart.

What do you think? Is Miny too difficult to beat? Or is his difficulty just fine? Should he be less smart? You think he's cheating? Tell us!

(You don't have Don't Mind the Mine? Get it now for free.)