Cloud and Big Data boost up the gaming industry
Every gaming company knows the secret to increasing revenue and beating the competition is through greater engagement of players. Every click and player interaction creates incredibly valuable data in game logs that, if aggregated and analyzed, holds the answer to keeping players engaged and coming back for more.
A powerful application of big data lies in the gaming industry, where game logs accumulate large streams of data as the gaming industry grows and expands to consoles, PCs, and mobile. Big data here incorporates every interaction and transaction that the gamers make, storing streams of pure data ready to be analyzed. Unlike other industries, the challenge doesn’t lie in data collection, but in how to make best use of it.
The global video game market is on track to grow by 9.4 percent in a single year—from $83.6 billion in 2014 to $91.5 billion in 2015. At this pace, global revenues will reach $107 billion in 2017. And with this immense potential upside, the industry’s top players continually search for new ways to harness technological innovation that can help capture larger portions of market share.
The world of gaming is big, growing rapidly and taking full advantage of the Big Data technologies. There are more than two billion video game players in the world, and Electronic Arts, who has 275 million active users, generates approximately 50 terabytes of data each day. The gaming industry does $ 20 billion in annual revenue in America alone of which 2 billion in sub-category social games.
Basically, Big Data and the gaming industry go hand in hand, and gaming has become a major contributor to big data. Here are some additional statistics to consider:
- More than 2 billion gamers = 50 Tb of data / day
- Social games = 150Gb of data / day
- In a typical month, EA hosts about 2.5 billion game sessions, representing about 50 billion minutes of gameplay
The goal of an effective BI system in the gaming industry is to gather data from several types of external sources and analyze it against streamed online data with historical stored data, to arrive at conclusive decisions about a customer’s spending patterns, tastes and levels of satisfaction. In addition, companies in the hypercompetitive gaming industry must be able to guarantee uninterrupted play sessions.
Cloud-based architecture has proven to be able to uniquely address the technical challenges posed to the gaming industry. A cloud offering may be the only feasible option if a company needs terabyte-scale storage and availability to billions of records for immediate streamed analysis at minimal investment.
Converting more users to pay to play requires being able to combine and analyze logs and player data to identify common characteristics to better understand what drives each of those gamer segments to play longer. Then it’s a matter of testing and analyzing results to iteratively improve your game based on real player data feedback.
Photo source: http://www.freedigitalphotos.net
