Data Drives Success

Data analysis has been attached great importance to by many industries, including technology, finance, insurance etc.. However, in game industry, it seems that the enormous potential of big data hasn’t been fully utilized. Basically, analytics have become as important a factor to the success of gaming companies as other traditional aspects. Only some big companies have hired professional analysis team to extract information of user experience and successfully earn profit from it.

For example, one of the firms that has harnessed data in a big way is King, a video game developer that specializes in the creation of social games. According to its chief scientist Vince Darley, “What we’re seeing in particular is that mobile games started off extremely simple and have become progressively a bit more complicated.” He also explained that, “I think in future we’ll see more need to understand a more complicated world inside the games, and that will give more insights into the richness of experience in games — the data that we get on it will give more insights into what’s actually happening, what the players are enjoying, not enjoying.” Obviously, the more information it gets, the more easily the company can understand what players want and provide better things.

Our practicum is about data analysis of a game company. What our MIP wants is to segment users and provide users with customized product and price. Before this project, our MIP has started to try to make full use of data to optimize gaming experience, such as applying A/B testing to test user’s preference. But an enormous amount of data about user’s profile and gaming behavior hasn’t been taken advantage of. Based on my understanding if data analysis, I think our MIP company could benefit from data-driven strategy in the following three aspects.

In our project, we will conduct user segmentation based on user’s performance in the game, using technologies including k-means clustering, regression, cloud computing and so on. In this way, users can get more comfortable experience, like customized products they need, and the company can increase total revenue.

However, our project is just the first step to utilize the huge data set. Data-driven strategy could help extract more insights than this. For example, according to a report about global analysis of mobile gaming industry, more than 60k mobile games and over 3 billion players worldwide were investigated in the research. Some interesting and essential insights about retention and user activity were found, such as at day 7, the most promising games show retention between 15–25%, and people tend to play longer in winter especially around Christmas. From my perspective, considering the research above, our MIP could also try to apply data analysis on existing user data to summarize characteristics about retention and activeness, and target results with different strategies to retain more users or get more revenue.

What’s more, our project just focuses on one of the games developed by our MIP company. After testing the effectiveness and accuracy of data-driven strategy, it can be applied to all the games of the company.

In addition to optimizing existing games, data analysis could also be used to develop new games. One successful example is about Voodoo. Voodoo reviewed D1 and D7 KPIs of games and gathered crucial feedback from the data. And then, based on its promising D1 and D7 KPIs, Voodoo identified a new game which became a hit on the App Stores and ranked #1 in more than 40 countries. The success of this new game largely depends on the strategy with data collection and analysis. Similarly, our MIP could also learn performing features of games and then develop new games which might be popular in the market.

In a nutshell, data analysis in gaming companies has gone from being a half-remembered aside just a decade ago, and has been the driving force behind some of the world’s biggest studios. Our MIP company could also seize the opportunity, utilize this strategy and benefit from it.

Reference:

2. A Global Analysis of Mobile Gaming Benchmarks 2018 Edition, GameAnalytics.

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