The Mobile Gaming Metrics Bible

DAU is the count of unique users who opened or played your game on a given day. Not sessions — unique people. Someone who plays 10 matches still counts as 1 DAU. It's the heartbeat metric: when it's rising, something's working; when it dips, something went wrong.

Most studios track DAU daily and watch for weekly patterns. Weekends typically spike, Monday dips are normal, and a sudden midweek crash usually means you pushed a bad build or the servers had a rough morning. Always look at the trend line, not just today's number.

MAU counts unique users who played at least once in the past 30 days. It's a broader, smoother signal than DAU — less volatile, but also slower to react to problems. A game with a million MAU sounds huge, but if those users only open the game once a month to collect a login bonus, it means something very different than a game where 80% of its MAU are showing up daily.

MAU is best used alongside DAU (see Stickiness below) rather than alone. As a standalone number, it's often more of a marketing talking point than an operational signal.

WAU counts unique users who played at least once in the last 7 days. It sits between DAU and MAU and is particularly useful for games built around weekly content cycles — weekly tournaments, 7-day login events, weekly PvP seasons.

For many casual games, WAU is actually the most actionable engagement signal. It smooths out the day-to-day volatility of DAU without hiding real trends the way a 30-day MAU window sometimes does.

Stickiness is DAU divided by MAU, expressed as a percentage. It answers: "Of all the people who played this month, what share comes back every single day?" High stickiness signals habitual engagement. Low stickiness means you have a large but occasional audience.

WhatsApp sits above 70% stickiness because people check it constantly. Most casual games land between 10–25%. Neither is inherently "bad" — it depends entirely on genre. A bite-sized puzzle game people pick up every morning for 5 minutes has different expectations than a narrative RPG someone deep-dives into on weekends.

Retention tracks what percentage of users who installed on Day 0 came back on a specific day afterward. D1 is the next day. D7 is a week later. D30 is a month later. These numbers cascade hard — if your D1 is terrible, your D7 and D30 will be even more devastating.

This is the single most important signal for game health. No amount of marketing spend compensates for a game that people don't return to. Low D1 usually means the onboarding experience isn't landing. Low D7 often means the core loop doesn't have enough depth to sustain interest past the first week.

Average Session Length is how long users spend per play session — from launching the game to closing it. It's a quality-of-engagement metric. Short sessions in a puzzle game are by design. Short sessions in an open-world RPG are a problem.

Always interpret ASL in the context of your genre and intended play pattern. For hyper-casual games, 3–5 minute sessions are completely normal and healthy. For a mid-core strategy game, 20–40 minutes is more appropriate. And if your ASL is unusually long (say, 4+ hours), double-check your session timeout logic — the game might not be ending sessions when users minimize it.