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…
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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…
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…
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…
Game Analytics Resources 