Metrics and Terminology - XBOX Game Development Documentation

What are metrics?

When raw data is combined to produce a meaningful measure, we refer to the result as a metric. Certain metrics have become standard across the game industry, because they’ve proven valuable at informing the team and guiding the decision-making process. Some examples include:

New Players
Monthly Active Users
Session Length
Retention

How PlayFab supports metrics

PlayFab’s automatically calculates industry-standard metrics for you on a daily basis, making them available to explore from the Reports and Trends tabs in the Analytics section. PlayFab offers views that are easy to digest, filter, and analyze.

Engagement metrics

Metric	Definition
API Usage	API Usage statistics are summarized by counts of total calls, total successful calls, and total errors.
DAU	Daily Active Users gives you the count of unique players who logged in on a given day, from 12AM to 11PM UTC.
Installs	The count of installations on new devices, measured by the number of unique device IDs. This number may include both new and returning players.
Logins	The count of player login events. Unique logins count the number of unique players. The total logins counts all login events, which can be used to track number of sessions played. Average logins per user tracks the average number of login events per active player. Note: To obtain an accurate distribution of session counts, we recommend logging in the player on each session start - even if the old login ticket is still valid.
MAU	Monthly Active Users. In the Rolling Thirty Day Totals Report, MAU refers to the count of unique players who logged in during the span of last 30 days. In the Monthly Totals Report, MAU is calculated per month, based on the first and last days of a given month.
New Users	The count of players who logged in for the first time, thus creating new player profiles.
Retention	The percentage of players who logged in again exactly N days after a reference date, marked as day 0. The Thirty Day New User Retention Report considers new users who joined the game within the span of last 30 days. The Thirty Day Retention Report includes both new and returning users who logged into the game within the span of last 30 days.

Revenue metrics

Metric	Definition
ARPDAU	Average Revenue Per Daily Active User in USD.
ARPPU	Average Revenue Per Paying User within a specified time period (e.g., hourly, daily, or monthly) in USD.
ARPU	Average Revenue Per active User within a specified time period (e.g., hourly, daily, or monthly) in USD.
Average Purchase Price	The average transaction amount in USD (= Revenue/Purchases).
Conversion	The percentage of players who become paying users. The Thirty Day New User Conversion Report tracks purchases made by new user cohorts over a 30 day period. Unlike Retention Reports, the Conversion Report tracks a cumulative total of players who converted within a given time span.
Purchases	The count of transactions.
Top Items	The top 100 items which generated the most revenue in your game within a specified report period.
Top Spenders	The top 100 players who spent the most money in your game within a specified report period.
Transaction Revenue	The sum of Transaction amounts in USD. Transactions made in other currencies are converted into USD, based on daily exchange rates.
Unique Paying Users	The count of unique players who spent money in your game.

Terminology

Metric	Definition
Cohort	A group of players who joined or played the game on a given day, marked as Day 0.
Event	Events mark the transition between important states in your game, such as a player logging in, making a purchase, leveling up, or dying. A data event is a data structure that captures information about the event. PlayFab uses JSON to represent data events. Standard events are generated automatically during use of PlayFab services; games can generate custom events to track other important game-specific events. All data events can be saved, aggregated, reacted to, and analyzed via PlayFab’s real-time data pipeline, known as PlayStream.
Platform	PlayFab tracks four different types of platforms: OS (iOS, Android), Device Type (iPhone, iPad, Samsung Android, PC, XBOX, etc.), Account Type (Steam, Facebook, Kongregate, Custom, etc.), and Payment Type (iTunes, Google Play, Steam, Facebook, Xsolla, etc.).
Segment	A group of players who share similar properties, e.g., geography, demographics, platform, purchase patterns, etc. In addition to standard segments, users can define custom segments. Note that segment definitions are limited to properties in the entity profile.
Timestamp (TS)	All PlayFab real-time analytics and reports are based on Coordinated Universal Time (UTC).

Last modified on August 20, 2026

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