How is Big Data Transforming the Gaming Industry?

Rise of the Gaming Industry 

 

This is a well-known phenomenon that the gaming industry is booming due to the surge in smartphone users all over the world. 

 

Data says that approximately 2.5 billion people play video games across the world. The global video game industry was supposed to surpass $159 billion by 2020. In fact, in 2019, mobile games made up around 60% of the global gaming revenue. This shows how the gaming industry has gained immense popularity in the last five to seven years. The number of gamers who prefer to play on connected devices, especially mobile phones, and want to play with their large group of friends in a multiplayer game is at an all-time high. 

 

This has led to a massive increase in the amount of data generated by the gaming industry. Popular video games such as Pubg and Fortnite have hooked millions of players belonging to different age groups. These games just needed a smartphone and an internet connection with a speed of a few Mbps as prerequisites but provided a gaming experience worth an enormous time investment of hours on the part of players. 

 

These games rely on in-game interactions among the gamers along with chat features and availability of voice-chat support. These functions generated terabytes of data, which enabled game developers to roll out new, exciting and promising functionalities after deep analysis.

 

(Related blog: Applications of IoT in Gaming Industry)

 

 

Gaming Industry and Big Data 

 

Big data has proved its worth in the gaming industry by bringing a disruptive change in the world of gaming technologies and solutions. Free-to-play games are on an ever-increasing level, accompanied by premium features to be purchased, leading to the growth of freemium games. 

 

The huge amounts of data generated by gamers every single day enable game developers to come up with the latest features that are personalized to a great extent, making them the go-to option for most gamers. The big data generated from gaming platforms usually emerge from a multitude of sources. For instance, Electronic Arts host approximately 50 billion gameplay minutes over 2.5 billion game sessions every month. 

 

This example is enough to understand the depth of in-game big data that needs to be analyzed so that the results can be leveraged. This in-game data shows up in various forms, such as those (but are not restricted to) the scenarios described below: 

 

• Glitches during the game that got logged into log files or got reported by the users. By recreating these scenarios, developers can work upon these issues and fix them.

 

• In-game chats and voice messages are saved and tracked for complaints and issues against the game through sentiment analysis.

 

• In-game interaction between players can be tracked via log files that can be utilized by developers to make these more realistic with time. This process requires analyzing thousands or even millions of interactions.

 

• In-game purchase data, or in-game options selected by users, or any data generated by users in-game, that is not while the user is playing the game itself, can be utilized to understand specific user behavior and hence promote targeted advertisements. This leads to the development of a much more successful and profitable monetization strategy for video game developers.

 

• Game developers can track specific points in the game where the user usually finds it hard to complete tasks in contrast to the points where the tasks are too easy. This can be done by analyzing similarities between gaming data generated by multiple users.

 

Big data generated in the form of log files are analyzed by an intelligent system to decide the appropriate difficulty level of the next stage. If it would not have been for big data, such in-game user-experience management would never have been possible. 

 

This also enhances customer experience as the users no longer need to select their desired settings every time they make their mind for a quick game session. The emergence of real-time monitoring and analysis of player data has coincided with game streaming and the ever-growing number of games that rely heavily on the internet for loading their features. 

 

( Also Check: How Blockchain is Transforming the Gaming Industry )

 

 

Significance of Big Data in Gaming Industry

 

Real-time tracking, monitoring and analysis of data have a lot of benefits to offer. It enables businesses to effectively reduce their downtime which could otherwise lead to a catastrophic loss in revenue of tens of percentages.

 

Each and every department of the business involved in game development can make use of big data to their advantage. Right from the marketing team or the designing team to the finance team, all can function with much more efficiency, with the all-encompassing effects of using big data.

 

For instance, when the marketing team knows the requirements and interests of gamers, they become empowered to come up with trending ideas for advertisements that are bound to catch the gamers' eyeballs. 

 

When the designing team knows deeply the trending interfaces after analyzing user sentiments, they can easily develop the latest themes and updates. The purchase history and subscription data of gamers can be of huge utility to the finance team, allowing them to analyze the growth in the number of paid users in order to plan out expenses in advance.  

 

In other words, harnessing the power of big data allows business leaders to personalize their services to customers to a much greater extent than ever before. They can analyze and figure out what type of advertisements and promotions work best in attracting the maximum number of gamers to their products. Leveraging big data enables gaming companies to create engagement on social media. 

 

In this fast-paced age of unprecedented digital transformation, big data is proving to be beneficial for gaming companies in creating targeted in-gaming advertisements. These not only boost customer experience and value but also generate more and more revenue for the industry. Big data is working towards improving the game along with creating a gratifying gaming experience for millions around the world. (Source)

 

 

Ending Note 

 

This blog ends here. While reaching the end of the blog on how big data is disrupting the gaming industry, we can clearly see that data has the potential to either make or break an industry.

 

Any company that does not utilize data and leaves it sitting idle, cannot think of getting an edge over its competitors. Companies that are active in the gaming industry have begun to develop a data-driven environment so that they can leverage big data analytics for their best advantage.

 

Gaming companies need to focus on timely collection of data, synchronization of internal and external data sources, data visualization, and the efficient classification of highly relevant data.

 

Big names in the gaming industry have already leveraged big data and seen extraordinary results. It is high time when the smaller players too start utilizing the power of big data in order to target the most important segments that still have ample scope for optimization.

 

The gaming industry is evolving day by day, with tons of different gaming modes and platforms coming up every single moment. The key for tapping the ever-growing rise in the number of game lovers around the globe ultimately lies in leveraging big data. The technology has revolutionized the gaming world and is here to stay, leading to an unexplored domain of data-driven gaming. 

 

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