During the unprecedented times of the COVID-19 pandemic, concerns about increased video gaming due to lockdowns were prevalent. The DORC’s new groundbreaking study, which scrutinized 251 billion hours of gameplay, reveals a narrative that defies expectations. Unexpected Findings in Gaming Habits While it was speculated that lockdown measures could spike gaming addiction, our comprehensive analysis…
Research in esports has really hit the ground running in the past decade. In parallel with the rise in popularity of esports worldwide, research covering a wide variety of fields from law, physiology, health, marketing, strategy, team behaviour, and more, has emerged. Professional esports teams can now have their own groups of researchers analysing data,…
Yesterday the UK government released its new Video Game Research Framework. The framework establishes a structure that guides games research and development and presents exemplary research practices, and it is important to everyone in games because it represents the first time that policy makers, industry and independent researchers (academics) in a key games market (the…
Esports analytics just got a major boost with the Time to Die 2 framework, predicting player deaths in DOTA 2. Esports has rapidly become a popular form of entertainment, with millions of viewers tuning in to watch professional players compete in various video games. However, broadcasting esports matches comes with unique challenges, particularly when it…
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…
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…
Game Analytics Resources 