Organic promotion

Ranking

Ranking refers to how games are sorted in the Yandex Games catalog.

Games are ranked based on ML algorithms that evaluate various metrics, including:

• Game Card Completion Progress scale.
• Rating.
• Session count.
• Session duration.
• Number of returns.
• Revenue.

The games with the best metrics rise to the top of the sections and are first to catch the user's eye.

The ML algorithm is constantly evaluating games. If you make significant improvements to your game, boosting its key metrics, this will be reflected in its ranking.

Featuring

Featuring is when a game is included in a themed collection compiled by Yandex Games. Use the Card Completion Progress scale to track how ready your game is for featuring.

Card Completion Progress is a tool that evaluates a game's ability to take full advantage of the Yandex Games toolkit for driving traffic. It doesn't directly assess the game's quality, but checks that all necessary materials are provided for it: images and videos for promotion and advertising, texts, and so on.

View the progress of your game's scale in the Games Console:

1. Access the Games Console with your developer account.

2. Click Applications in the upper-left corner of the Games Console.

3. Find a previously uploaded game in the list and click its name.

4. Go to the Draft tab.

5. Switch between languages to assess the completeness of the card for each one:

   • Red — The game's draft is almost empty and needs to be filled out more.
   • Yellow  — Many of the draft's fields are filled in, but some materials need to be added.
   • Green — The draft is fully filled out, and the game has every chance to rise in the rankings.

Catalog sections

Displaying a game in certain catalog sections helps promote it.

In each section, games are ranked based on metrics. The most popular ones are displayed first.

New

A section where new games appear once, upon their first publication. They remain there for a week.

While a game is in the New section, ML (Machine Learning) algorithms determine who to recommend it to.

The recommendation system helps users find interesting games. Players spend more time in these games, make purchases, and return more often. As a result, the overall quality of games chosen by players improves.

How the recommendation system works

The recommendation system studies each new game: it shows it to different users several times and then evaluates its characteristics based on metrics.

All games on the chart are divided into 3 groups, according to user metrics and their quality:

🔴 Red — quickly lose traffic after placement because they have weak indicators: ARPU and average play time per user. Usually these games have little content and optimization problems, no updates or activities that work to return and retain users.

🟡 Yellow — find their audience of players and gather much more traffic. After reaching a certain number of players, these games can maintain it even for a long time.

🟢 Green — games with better-than-average metrics. They build an audience and often become hits. Typically, developers regularly improve them: add new content, work on user motivation and retention.

From these charts, we can draw conclusions:

• Being in the New category provides less than 30% of traffic.
• The main traffic comes from the recommendation system.

The charts show that the recommendation system needs just one week to understand how good a game is and which users it suits. If a game has good metrics, the system will increase traffic to it. If they're poor — it will reduce traffic.

Popular

A section for additional promotion of promising games. Games for it are selected manually. The main criteria:

• The game:
  • Is adapted for mobile and desktop devices.
  • Is translated into at least Russian and English.
  • Contains quality promotional materials.
  • Has good metrics.
• The project uses various Yandex Games SDK methods.
• Work is being done with player reviews.

The Popular section is the same for all users with the same environment, but differs for:

• desktop;
• mobile devices;
• different countries.

It updates once a day.