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…
When scientists want to understand the specifics of genetics, they usually avoid studying humans, as it takes 30 years to reach a new generation. Instead they focus on fruit flies, which are born, mature and die on the same day. This allows for studying the causes and effects of changes occurring from one generation to…
From the GA blog, a new post on player progression analysis in Tomb Raider: Play style and progression are two important keywords in game analytics, as all methods for optimizing design and monetizations strategies revolve around them. When building games, we design with a specific operational space for the players in mind, so finding out how…
Thanks to Heather Stark for her kind words and spot-on critique of the game analytics book. As she hints we are indeed working on a new book on game analytics. We are still hashing out the details, but I am hoping we can release the content online on a running basis to keep up with…
In March I had the pleasure of giving a presentation on game analytics and game user research at the Game User Research Summit in connection with GDC in San Francisco. The talk was mostly an introduction to game analytics and a call for more communication about methods and techniques. The presentation is now online at…
