Ask HN: Review my startup

We're really targeting two different markets with the common thread being Flash but two very different uses of it. In some cases you could force the relevant data streams into GA but you're working against the system and yourself from the very start - gaforflash is not the same as ga for flash games, which doesn't really exist and has no community of developers to help you figure it out.

Google Analytics is fantastic at what it's designed to do, which is track a site and with gaforflash pieces of Flash on a site. There are a few key reasons why that's not a good match for casual games:

1) GA is from the ground up designed to presume the people are coming to you, and it's the opposite with the casual game business, our games go to 100s or 1000s of different websites. Straight away you lose a lot of the functionality that makes GA great because it just isn't applicable / usable.

2) Events don't transfer directly to the structure of games, in general as a concept they do and especially compared to our custom events, but when you start digging into per-level and tracking multiple streams of data and multiple values on those streams it becomes complicated and difficult to interpret the results and even to figure out just how you're actually able to track these things.

To put it in perspective, if I quit on level 1 is the category quit and the action level 1, or vice versa, or both? If I collected 30% of the coins then the problem gets bigger - category level 1, action collected, value 30%? Or category collected, action level 1, value 30%, or category collected 30%, action level, value 1? These are all the right answer, together, but now you're tripling the requests you're sending back to Google and creating so many events that you start jeopardizing the ability to interpret what's going on.

The other issue with the complexity of GA is most of the time you only get one chance at getting this stuff right - and there's a lot you need to get right otherwise the data's useless - because after your game's being distributed you can't easily push changes out to all the sites your game will be on.

3) The gaforflash api is heavy - 160 kilobytes - which is an expensive addition in terms of filesize and especially performance, both of which are critical in casual games where we might already be cramming a ton of work into a 30-times-a-second loop that already doesn't run well on whatever office/college/school computer the player's using.