Importance of Analytics

If you make a game and it sells well, then make a second game that's pretty similar and it doesn't perform well. What's the difference?
Well that's were data analytics get involved. Analytics is a structured breakdown of all the numbers such as;
What got discussed? What wording was chosen? When was it public? Was there people waiting for the game or was it a quiet release? How many views did the original release get? etc etc.

All these questions and many more get noted, answered and then put into some form of readable info - Usually a graph or some form of visual guide rather than a million page long tome <sarcasm implied>.
Now have some understandable info about your 2 games, what do you do with it? 

Analytics are important as they tell us a ton of info that can be managed and help identify problem areas in a product, the products reception and lots of other factors. In the above example we could have info come back saying we marketed it for a different audience, but the previous audience were more receptive or we can look at the dates and find out there was another big game release so our audience got split off (as people tend to have a money limit and will spend it were they want to). 
Key Performance Indicators also known as KPI's are a great series of tools commonly used to help understand these numbers.

So are data analytics important? Yes, they help us understand the information we have in a much more readable and manageable way.