FirstLook Engagement Analytics vs Lysto

FirstLook Engagement Analytics combines in-game telemetry with out-of-game player signals in player profiles for game studios. Native Unreal and Unity SDKs support session tracking and custom events. Teams can segment players by playtime, retention cohort, source, country, custom attributes, and tags, then trigger automated email or Discord direct messages from events or rules. Dashboards cover players, Discord, Steam, visits, sessions, custom events, retention cohorts, and funnels. Listed inputs include Unreal or Unity telemetry, Discord activity, Steam playtime, and API custom events; identity syncing spans Steam, Discord, Epic, and console accounts. Teams can export segments as CSV or through an API, and API ingestion can stream warehouse events. Counter and duration events can feed filters, segments, triggers, quests, rewards, and Discord roles. The Forever Free plan costs nothing and includes 100k player profiles, up to 500 playtesters, and 1,000 emails per month. Analytics Core costs $149 a month, billed monthly per game, and includes 1M events. Engagement Pro costs $3,499 a month, billed monthly per game, and includes 10M events. FirstLook lists Community Support for Core and Slack Support for Pro.

Lysto is a Player Experience Platform that turns feedback from real players into insights for game studios. Its research covers concept validation, first-time user experience, retention, gameplay, go-to-market, monetization, usability, publisher readiness, player archetypes, competitive studies, and funding or investment research. Gameplay Experience Evaluation looks for enjoyment and frustration moments, challenge balance, and features linked to replayability and longer-term engagement. Studios can run concept tests, single-session or multi-session playtests, and longitudinal studies. Lysto AI summarizes comprehension, friction, flow, and challenge, then tags confusion, hesitation, frustration, and delight with timestamps. The company says its global panel contains over 1 million verified gamers filterable by demographics, genre, and experience. Pricing is on request, with project-based studies or 12–18 month enterprise research plans. Android builds can be uploaded without SDK or code changes, while iOS testing uses live App Store builds. PC playtests use cloud streaming so players do not download builds. The platform itself is limited to laptop or desktop devices and must remain full-screen.