Player value · principles
How AFITMRR™ grouping happened
We like working with principles. AFITMRR™ — Yardstick’s player-value grouping — grew from a simple observation on live titles: one “engagement” number makes two very different players look the same.
A daily logger who never deepens skill. A twice-weekly player who invites friends and recovers after a dry week. Both “active.” Only one is building the long game.
Why one number was not enough
Product and live teams drown in events and still miss value. Dashboards reward what is easy to count — sessions, DAU, time in client — and blur trade-offs that matter for shipping:
- A whale with low resilience is a churn risk, not only a revenue win.
- A free player with high referral may matter more to the network than their ARPDAU suggests.
- Intensity without frequency is a different product problem than frequency without intensity.
We needed a grouping that kept those stories distinct — and still let teams share one language across product, live ops, and data.
Group by principle, not by feature
The move is strict: map behaviour to principles that answer a product question, then work those principles deliberately.
| Principle | Question | |
|---|---|---|
| A | Attention | Do they show up and focus? |
| F | Frequency | How often do they return? |
| I | Intensity | How deep is a session when they are here? |
| T | Tenure | How long have they been with you? |
| M | Monetary | Do they fund the product fairly? |
| R | Referral | Do they bring others? |
| R | Resilience | Do they recover after friction or dry spells? |
Two R’s on purpose: Referral is social growth; Resilience is recovery after stress. Collapse them and you are back to a polite lie.
Depth is a preference — the spine stays the same
Some teams want a shared vocabulary for design reviews. Others want principle-led segments, live dashboards, and operating cadence season after season. Both are the same craft at different depth.
We have methods to work your data this way — and to keep operating it this way live — as far as you want to take understanding of populations and their preferences. Principles scale; the title decides how deep the stack goes.
Why the grouping stuck
- It matches how PMs already argue — “they come often but don’t go deep” is Frequency vs Intensity.
- It survives feature churn — events change every season; principles do not.
- It surfaces trade-offs — Monetary can rise while Resilience falls if nobody is looking.
- It pairs with Measure · Retain · Monetise — principles are what you measure; MRM is when you act.
What to do next
Inventory the events that matter this quarter. Map each to AFITMRR™. If an event maps to nothing, it is noise or an unowned surface. Compare cohorts by principle. Intervene where the weak lens still moves retention or revenue.
Causation discipline: Truth Mirror. Segments on principles: How we select segments. Careful data systems: Data conscientiousness. Synthetic rehearsal: player dataset generator.
Work populations on principles
From shared language to live data operations — at the depth your title needs.