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…
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…
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…
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…
Sometimes as a game analyst, you get to run analyses that do not have an immediately useful application, but which are just fun (yes, data analysis can be fun). Such exercises sometimes begin when people get together socially after a long day and start speculating. This was also the case when one day, a bit…
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…
Game Analytics Resources 