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…
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…
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…
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.
In this fourth and last post in the cluster analysis series, we provide a couple of examples showing how cluster analysis operates in practice on player data, as well as how to present the results of cluster analysis, in order to make them actionable. Grab a cup of coffee and sit down in a comfy…
Game Analytics Resources 