What do you find when you look at billions of dollars of in-app purchases? Certainly more nuance, diversity and variation than than “minnows” and “whales”. New megastudy covering almost 3000 titles shows how we spend money in mobile games, showcasing the incredible diversity in ways that games monetize. While most games earn from a few…
These days most game companies adopt some form of analytics: a process whereby data is collected on how well the game performs as well as how players behave within it. These data are processed and analyzed, and results serve to inform decision making and business processes across companies. Game Analytics is what allows major commercial…
Games live and die commercially on the player experience. Games User Research is collectively the way we optimise the quality of that user experience in games, working with all aspects of a game from the mechanics and interface, visuals and art, interaction and progression, making sure every element works in concert and supports the game…
In modern game development, it is crucial that we can place our players into sets of groups, where everyone in those groups shares specific traits. Without being able to do this, our ability to understand who the players are, and how they play our games, is hampered. The ability to profile the players is important…
Esports describes situations where digital (video) games are played competitively. It is a rapidly growing subsection of the games industry and associated culture, which has evolved from a niche segment into a mainstream global phenomenon. In 2017, over 388 million people worldwide played or watched esports, and the number of esports fans is projected to…
The game industry has access to detailed data about how players are interacting with games. The data can come from a variety of channels are often high-dimensional, time-dependent and potentially very large. Profiling users has emerged across multiple data science application areas as a way of managing complex user data, and to discover underlying patterns in the…
We have a tendency to consider ourselves unique and unpredictable, but digital games research shows that this is far from the case. In fact, we can be categorised into groups of people who show the same behaviours, and what we do in the future is imminently predictable. For example, how you play a game will reveal what you are likely…
In the latest issue (at the time of writing this, 2017. For a recent update, see arc.york.ac.uk) of Develop, we (Florian Block and Anders Drachen) discuss the use of data and analytics in esports: Whenever you play a game of DoTA 2, League of Legends or any other esports game, your behaviour and that of your…
Esports is the playing of computer games in a competitive environment, whether at the amateur or professional level. In recent years esports has become a global phenomenon and has gained immense momentum, outcompeting many traditional sports in terms of the number of practitioners, prize pools and even viewership – and is a potential future Olympic…
By Adam Alsen, Julian Runge, Anders Drachen and Daniel Klapper Is social gaming merely a marketing tactic? The point has been made (e.g. Liew 2009) and was welcomed by parts of the community where long standing gamers like(d) to see casual social games (CSGs) as crippled social media versions of authentic, deeply immersive games. We…
Social connections are important to the experience of many online games, and this is also the case in Destiny. We wanted to understand the value of social relationships in Destiny specifically to competitive play, and towards this analyzed close to one million Crucible matches across 3.5 million players. We found that strong social relationships are…
Given a huge and varied game like Destiny, it is of interest to see if there are any patterns in how people play the game. There can be a variety of reasons for this – for developers the focus can be on monitoring the players and checking no group emerges that has issues progressing, gaining…
Here we introduce the idea of using heuristics models in predictive mobile game analytics. Heuristics models are simple rules-sets that we construct based on machine learning-driven analysis, but which once developed can be fielded inside a game client. Heuristics models thus address part of the problem of enabling small companies to access frugal but effective prediction models…
Esports is computer games played in a competitive environment. As for any other type of sports competition, players and teams seek to improve their behavior to optimize their results. Thus, esports analytics is a new area identifying successful strategies and evaluating game play for computer games. Besides helping the players, esports analytics is also directed…
Kyle Polich from the Data Skeptic Podcast has released a cast on game analytics, featuring various ramblings from yours truly about analytics, games, challenges and the many opportunities in the field. Get it from iTunes, Stitcher or Direct from the web. Big thanks to the Data Skeptic Podcast team.
Game Analytics Resources 