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. There is a revolution happening in the game industry. The sheer size of the global game industry is astounding. The gaming industry stands proudly over the US$100 Billion mark this year and continues to grow rapidly by leaps and folds.
Video games played in a virtual environment leave a massive trail of data, be it played online, on a social network, mobile, PlayStation or Xbox. Big data has become severely important to understand player behavior and keep them hooked to your game. Because there’s a lot on the line, Game developers don’t want to be gambling hundreds of millions of dollars on a whim. That’s exactly why more and more companies are relying on gamer data to increase the chances of developing a popular game that’ll sell. Game developers have thus started turning towards data analytical tools and techniques to stay on top and remain aware of gamer demands and trends. It also helps 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.
Game developers are using a variety of advanced IT techniques such as Hadoop to help them understand game player behavior. Game development studios are turning to commercial Hadoop distributions to collect, process and analyze data from these massive data streams. It helps in increasing player retention by:
- Analyzing gamers’ activity and social behavior
- Tracking players’ statistics
- Quickly generating leader boards, calculating rewards, and delivering virtual prizes
- Changing game play and mechanics so that experienced players will continue to play the game
- Analyzing the 360-degree customer view of their game cycle
- 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.
Big Data thus helps in retaining the players, increases the engagement rates, and also results in better credibility and higher profits. There are ample opportunities for game developers to improve the gaming experience with Big Data, drive more revenue and improve the game faster and better. Game developers should therefore not miss out on Big Data, because the benefits for the developer as well as the player are too big to ignore.
The game of Data Analytics is on and we wish you “Happy Gaming”
