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A true gamer always hopes to take the longer wrong route before taking the right one, because that is how you enjoy a game to its fullest.
The gaming industry has evolved from board games and low key video games to extensive multi-player games with excellent visual graphics and million user interactions like Dota, Halo, etc in just a few years. The gaming industry stands proudly over the US$100 Billion mark this year and continues to grow rapidly by leaps and folds. Today when games are expanding across platforms and are becoming more user friendly by extensive interactions, in game advertising, time stamps, real time events and multiplayer interactions to name a few, big data has become severely important to understand player behaviour and keep them hooked to your game. Game developers have thus started turning towards data analytical tools and techniques to store and make sense of player data, session data and game data for every game session in order to understand their players and step up their game to keep them engaged. Here is how big data analytics has been helping game developers change their game play mid field.
1. Real time data monitoring
Video games played in a virtual environment leave a massive trail of data for all gaming platforms, be it played online, on a social network, mobile or Xbox. This data has valuable insight into the psychological mindset of players of all age groups and types. By assessing the needs and requirements of such players, the game vendors can push in game promotions or products to gamers and help boost their in game sales apart from downloads.
2. Sustained engagement
The massive amounts of data recorded per game session helps game designers to understand what features of their game work best to grab the players’ attention and keep them motivated to play and score further. The big data helps them analyze the 360 degree customer view of their game cycle and design and help improve upon them for longer customer retention. After all the longer a player stays connected to your game, the higher the engagement rates, better credibility and greater the profits.
3. Optimized game designs
Each player has a different approach to their game. Some players like easy shortcuts, some go all guns blazing while there are others who prefer hide and seek or guerilla attacks. In order to become a one game destination for such players, mining relevant data from the vast records of data sessions is the key to understand what game design works best for all player categories. Data analytics helps draw conclusions based on player interactions to help game designers enhance the scope of their game landscape to accommodate all players within their design.
4. Business Intelligence
Properly recorded Data has a unique ability to bring out the best conclusions in even the worst of scenarios. The challenge for gaming companies is to increase their player retention, customer acquisition and monetization. Thus by performing the right searches in their data lakes and categorizing players, they have the ability to place the right content and push the right products to players who are most likely to pay for their games and develop better scenarios to predict their success rates.
5. Superior game experience
We have been talking about increasing player retention, customer engagement and increasing in game sales by acquiring the right data and improvising on it. However the entire ball game revolves around the user experience. Whether the graphic user interface is running smoothly or all interactions are being returned promptly or is there any bottleneck in the process of data storage and processing before each session, such intricacies of game development decide how a player would react to your game and would he ultimately end up promoting and sharing your game within his/her circle. The well analyzed data again comes to the rescue in the form of faulty interruptions in interactions or errors while relaying data or in game communications. Providing a superior gaming experience is an ongoing job of always testing for red flags and blockage in the system to develop the game further and help it evolve beyond expectations.
Through the tactical use of data analytics, the gaming companies have set upon the course of expansion and, are finding ample arenas of opportunity to monetize and expand their games while giving a faster and better experience to all the enthusiastic players out there.
All we can say at this point to everybody in the gaming industry is the game of Data analytics is on and we wish you “Happy Gaming”.
Image Credits : huffingtonpost
