Video Games and Big Data Analytics

Over the past decade, video games have undergone a change in the way that they are sold and marketed to consumers. Games have gone from physical packaged goods being sold exclusively through retail stores to an instant download, subscription based model accessible directly on your gaming device. The concept of gaming itself has shifted from playing with friends on your couch to playing with millions of players online around the world.

Bill Grosso, Principal consultant at Osolog LLC, gave a webinar detailing some of these changes in the gaming industry and how analytics can be used by game studios to better understand its customers and in turn build better games. The hope being, with the power of analytics, game studios will be able to capitalize on the growth in the gaming industry which is now a 20 billion dollar industry in the North American market alone.

Zynga, a leading online game developer, which builds its games on social media platforms, provided the infographic on the left about the kind data that is being generated in its systems. Developers like Zynga have begun to build some form of social interaction directly into its games from in game chat functionality to providing “share” options to users through Facebook or Twitter.

An interesting observation to note is many of these gaming companies used to use MySQL databases but as the size of the data quickly grew, data warehouses could not handle the load and a lot of ETL operations would take about 24 hours to complete. Scaling the MySQL instances vertically didn't help as well. 





It turned out Hadoop was a natural solution to their problems because of its following qualities:

• Cost effective
• Scalable
• Open Source
• Quick execution

Now that they could store all this information the next question for game companies was what to do with the massive amounts of user generated data that they were collecting?

Listed below are some of the possible use cases for this data:

1.    Enhanced Customer Experience

Facebook is a popular gaming platform for casual games which has an inherently wide consumer base. But for a game to be popular on this platform it needs to ensure that the needs of the people playing it are addressed in order for consumers to continue playing the game. Zynga used the data they collected from the original Farmville to make "animals" the central character in the next version of the game. In the data that they collected, they found that people interacted a lot with "animals" in the first version of Farmville and this prompted the change in version 2.0.

Riot games which owns the successful "League of Legends" franchise made significant changes to their game client based on data collected from its users. Certain components of the client which were loading slowly on user’s computers and were re-written to reduce this delay.

2.    Increased sales

Virtual item sales are a major revenue generator for online games. Companies sell their merchandise through in game shops based on user behavior within the game. Dota 2 which is an online game, is offered free of cost for users to play. But the revenue earned through Dota 2 comes from sale of in game "virtual items" that users can buy and equip to personalize their in game characters.

3.    Increased player engagement

Based on data collected from user behavior gaming companies can make decisions on how engaging the game is for the user. If a specific scenario in the game is very difficult and has a lot of users dropping out, the company can incorporate this insight when it makes decisions while redesigning the game.

As we look at these statistics one thing stands out, video games are massively "data bloated" and with the increased adoption of Hadoop and NoSQL, game companies will be able to meet the growing needs of their customer and make better business decisions.

To conclude, here's a video of Barry Sohl, CTO of Buffalo Studios talking about how analyzing game data helped their studio address their conversion goals.

References:

http://www.bigdata-startups.com/BigData-startup/zynga-is-a-big-data-company-masqueraded-as-a-gaming-company/#!prettyPhoto

http://www.qubole.com/big-data-gaming-industry/

http://www.slideshare.net/StampedeCon/big-data-at-riot-games-using-hadoop-to-understand-player-experience-stampedecon-2013?related=1