You bought traffic into their strongest week — when their players had no reason to leave. Metriqal tracks what is happening to a specific competitor and to your own game: CCU, community sentiment, ad library activity. When a rival's multi-week decline shows up in the data, you see it, with the numbers behind it. Our timing recommendations are experimental: every one is logged and graded, and we publish the measured hit rate when it exists. One external view that doesn't require attribution precision.
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Buying traffic into a rival's strong week inflates your CPIs and acquires players with no reason to churn from them. Metriqal monitors the signals that mark a rival's structural weakness (CCU trend, review velocity, community sentiment) so you can judge when spend is worth testing. ROAS impact is measured after the fact, not promised.
Your watchlist runs on an hourly radar cycle, with live CCU sampled every 30 minutes. CCU trends, sentiment velocity, review decay, and ad library freshness across Steam, Metacritic, community channels, and Meta Ad Library. When signals converge — CCU dropping, complaints spiking, ad creative exhausted — we show you the convergence and the numbers behind it. (Internal back-test on one title, Nov 2024; not evidence of general predictive accuracy.)
Hourly · 30-min CCUSpend directives carry a confidence ceiling based on signal convergence. A single CCU dip is weak evidence — ceiling stays low. CCU decline + sentiment surge + review velocity shift + ad pullback = high confidence. You see the ceiling before approving budget. The signal is external and observable, regardless of your own attribution stack.
Signal-weightedDaily IGDB scan surfaces high-velocity titles in your genre with overlapping Steam tag profiles. Jaccard similarity against your game's tag set. New relevant competitors appear in your watchlist without manual hunting. Dismissed suggestions stay dismissed.
Daily IGDB scanRising CPIs are expensive. Acquiring players who immediately churn because your own game has a retention cliff is more expensive. Knowing a competitor is weakening only matters if your product is in shape to absorb the spend. The gate checks both sides before issuing a directive.
Your own product health, checked automatically
If your game's 7-day retention drops more than 5 percentage points from its durable baseline, the spend gate activates — regardless of what competitors are doing. No analyst required. No dashboard to check. It fires on every directive calculation, automatically.
The studios that win competitive windows are the ones that scale into a rival's weakness when their own product is solid. Scaling into a competitor window with a leaky product acquires players with no reason to stay. The gate separates those two situations.
The baseline filters multi-week retention signals to avoid false positives on short-lived post-patch volatility. A one-day dip doesn't trigger the gate — a sustained structural drop does.
Post-ATT, attribution precision is broken across every media source. D7 doesn't predict D30 by channel and nobody can prove causality from a dashboard screenshot. Metriqal validates every spend directive 7 days post-execution — giving you the sentence that justifies the next budget increase without depending on MMP accuracy.
Validation without extra tooling
Metriqal runs a two-proportion z-test on your player cohort data 7 days after every directive. Pre/post retention comparison, p-value, cohort size. Without a holdout, lift is directional — internally consistent, not causal. Strong D7 doesn't prove strong D30 by media source, and a screenshot doesn't prove causality.
Wire a geo-split or customer-hash holdout through Stripe, HubSpot, or Shopify and the same validation run produces incremental evidence. The ledger keeps every decision's full record: directive → lift → p-value → holdout flag. Attribution optional.
"Spend window · retention +4.2pp · p=0.031 · holdout n=8,400 · incremental." That is a sentence a finance director uses to justify a budget increase — not a dashboard screenshot.
Your internal telemetry sees one game: yours. It's structurally blind to every rival. Metriqal turns public Steam signals into the competitive intelligence no internal BI team produces — the rivals and the whole field, not just your own game.
We mine every tracked rival's negative reviews into ranked complaint themes — fixable defects vs. sentiment-driven narratives, with share-of-voice and verbatim quotes. Your roadmap openings and UA poach angles, sourced from what their players actually hate. Internal mining only ever sees your own game; this is the field.
AI-minedEvery tracked rival and your own game on one page, ranked by live concurrency — 30-day trend, 7-day momentum, recent + all-time review scores, Boxleiter sales estimate, price & discount, and a vulnerability/opening score. The whole field, benchmarked and refreshed continuously, not a quarterly deck.
Continuous refresh"The cost of marketing is rising constantly. Measurability is declining at the same time — meaning it's getting harder and harder to do marketing profitably. The missing signal is external: knowing when a specific competitor is structurally weakening, independent of your own measurement stack."— Recurring theme from UA-practitioner interviews at mid-market mobile and PC game studios, 2025–2026
"Way of the Hunter's physics overhaul shipped 1 Nov 2024. The CCU decline became publicly visible on SteamDB at T+41 hours. Running Metriqal's signal model against the historical data, the vulnerability score crossed the threshold at T+3 hours, 38 hours before the decline was visible on SteamDB. This is one retroactive back-test on one title; it is not a measured hit rate."— Retroactive back-test, based on public data only (Steam CCU, SteamDB) · Metriqal detection model vs. SteamDB public visibility · 38-hour lead · Nov 2024
We publish our data methodology as reproducible reports — every figure sourced to a named query, no fabricated precision, no predictive claims dressed up as descriptive ones. Two studies to date measure what continuous Steam and Twitch sampling reveal that a daily snapshot hides.
Manual SteamDB monitoring tells you what already happened. MMPs tell you which channel it came from — when attribution works. Metriqal monitors rivals continuously and gives you a graded, experimental read on when to push and when to hold.
| Capability | Metriqal | Manual Monitoring | MMPs & Attribution Tools |
|---|---|---|---|
| Structural decline detection (multi-week CCU + sentiment + ad pullback) | ✓ automatic | manual, slow | ✗ |
| Pre-public decline detection (back-tested) | ✓ | ✗ reactive | ✗ |
| Signal independent of your own attribution stack | ✓ external signal | partial | ✗ attribution-dependent |
| Readiness gate for your game (blocks spend when product is weak) | ✓ automatic | ✗ | ✗ |
| Spend directives with confidence ceilings | ✓ | ✗ | ✗ |
| Post-directive lift validation (two-proportion z-test, 7 days) | ✓ built-in | ✗ | export only |
| Competitor discovery (automated daily scan) | ✓ IGDB + Jaccard | ✗ | ✗ |
| Per-rival complaint-theme mining (roadmap + poach angles) | ✓ AI-mined | ✗ | ✗ |
| Setup time | 10 min | ongoing manual | weeks–months |
No analyst. No data warehouse. No attribution dependency. Works against your existing App ID in 10 minutes.
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