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…
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…
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…
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.
As part of an on-going project on exploring player behavior via the Steam platform (see e.g. here and here) we decided to run a quick correlation analysis across games on Steam, focusing on sales (game ownership) and a two different aggregate review/ranking scores. In addition, we wanted to explore if review scores correlated with the actual amount of time people spend playing games on Steam.
5 billion hours of play. 6 million players. 3000 games on Steam. 1 distribution model that explains how time spent playing games on Steam rises and falls – as a function of time. This has powerful implications: if playtime follows a specific distribution, we can predict it. This post was written by Anders Drachen, Rafet…
Game Analytics Resources 