I gave this talk at the Institute of Mathematics and its Applications Conference for Early Career Mathematicians at Warwick University on November 2016.
The talk details my experiences of working in the mobile games industry as a data scientist, drawing on my experience working at both Sega Hardlight and Exient Malta studios.
It was the final talk of the day and it was well received.
The document discusses using interactive technology to reduce stress and anxiety. It describes research showing that video games designed with "flow" in mind, where challenge matches player skill, can provide cognitive benefits. One study found that children who played video games before surgery had lower anxiety than those who did not. Another study showed that participants who played an anxiety-reducing mobile app gave less anxious speeches afterwards. The document argues that interactive technologies should be further explored and developed for mental health applications like anxiety management.
La Unión Europea ha acordado un paquete de sanciones contra Rusia por su invasión de Ucrania. Las sanciones incluyen restricciones a las transacciones con bancos rusos clave y la prohibición de la venta de aviones y equipos a Rusia. Los líderes de la UE esperan que las sanciones aumenten la presión económica sobre Rusia y la disuadan de continuar su agresión contra Ucrania.
1. The DekTec DTU-215 is a USB modulator capable of modulating signals for nearly every digital TV standard including DVB-T, DVB-C, ATSC, and ISDB-T.
2. It can modulate existing transponder streams or test signals and output them via RF in the VHF/UHF bands.
3. The modulator is easily recognized by Windows and its software allows the user to select modulation standards, frequencies, and output levels and artificially introduce errors into the signal for testing receivers.
Comodo Backup is free backup software that allows users to automatically back up files, folders, and system data. It supports various backup methods and sources. Backups can be saved locally or to cloud services. The tutorial demonstrates how to create a backup job by selecting files and folders to back up, choosing an external hard drive as the destination, and optionally adding password protection or system tasks before and after backup completion.
The document discusses using interactive technology to reduce stress and anxiety. It describes research showing that video games designed with "flow" in mind, where challenge matches player skill, can provide cognitive benefits. One study found that children who played video games before surgery had lower anxiety than those who did not. Another study showed that participants who played an anxiety-reducing mobile app gave less anxious speeches afterwards. The document argues that interactive technologies should be further explored and developed for mental health applications like anxiety management.
La Unión Europea ha acordado un paquete de sanciones contra Rusia por su invasión de Ucrania. Las sanciones incluyen restricciones a las transacciones con bancos rusos clave y la prohibición de la venta de aviones y equipos a Rusia. Los líderes de la UE esperan que las sanciones aumenten la presión económica sobre Rusia y la disuadan de continuar su agresión contra Ucrania.
1. The DekTec DTU-215 is a USB modulator capable of modulating signals for nearly every digital TV standard including DVB-T, DVB-C, ATSC, and ISDB-T.
2. It can modulate existing transponder streams or test signals and output them via RF in the VHF/UHF bands.
3. The modulator is easily recognized by Windows and its software allows the user to select modulation standards, frequencies, and output levels and artificially introduce errors into the signal for testing receivers.
Comodo Backup is free backup software that allows users to automatically back up files, folders, and system data. It supports various backup methods and sources. Backups can be saved locally or to cloud services. The tutorial demonstrates how to create a backup job by selecting files and folders to back up, choosing an external hard drive as the destination, and optionally adding password protection or system tasks before and after backup completion.
Payment Acceptance and Card Tokenization in JavaScript by Diwa Del MundoDEVCON
The document discusses payment acceptance and card tokenization in JavaScript using the PayMaya Payment Gateway. It describes how the Payment Gateway provides an abstraction layer to enable merchants to accept card payments without needing to understand complex card network standards. It also explains how card tokenization allows collecting card data in apps and websites while reducing PCI compliance requirements by replacing sensitive card details with tokens. Finally, it outlines the PayMaya Payment Gateway APIs and SDKs that make integration easy for developers.
Yamaha MusicCast Permanent Display Case Study - Gush CreativeAndrew Fox
Yamaha recently launched MusicCast, a new kind of multi-room audio system that supports high resolution audio unlike others that can top out at CD quality. Gush Creative had already worked closely with Yamaha on a number of industrial display projects, and was once again, approached to work on this new retail display.
[DSC Europe 23][Pandora] Siyu SUN Data Science Enter The Game.pptxDataScienceConferenc1
Siyu Sun presented on applying data science in the gaming industry. Some key applications discussed include optimizing monetization through improving in-app purchases, ads, and subscriptions. Specific use cases covered predicting payers versus non-payers, ad trigger points, and subscription tier and pricing optimization. Challenges with A/B testing large changes over long durations were also noted. Reinforcement learning applications and the future of generative AI and text-based games were briefly discussed at the end.
1) Carbine Studios wanted to identify which of its 125,000 beta testers were most likely to remain long-term players to combat customer churn.
2) Surveys and predictive modeling identified 5 unique gamer segments with different characteristics and spending behaviors.
3) Key insights included that 8% of beta testers were at risk to churn, females were twice as likely to churn, and passion for the game was more important than demographics in predicting loyalty.
Playtika Bets on Big Data Analytics to Deliver Captivating Social Gaming Expe...Dana Gardner
Transcript of a sponsored discussion on how Playtika is using data science going and an architectural approach to conquer some of these hurdles around volume, velocity, and variety of data.
This document provides an overview of key economic and business concepts related to the video game industry, including:
- It defines common economic terms like costs, revenue, and profit.
- It explains concepts like man-hours, goods and services, markets, and value.
- It discusses different types of capital (financial and personal), discretionary income, and how businesses re-invest profits.
- It covers risks associated with different investments and industries like video games, as well as the golden rule of risk.
- Finally, it examines relationships between laborers/owners, challenges video game developers face, and Sturgeon's Law which states that 90% of creative works are not very good.
Analytics can help the gaming industry increase engagement and profits through data-driven decisions. Gaming generates over $91 billion annually across platforms and is played by over 155 million Americans. Analytics provides insights into player behavior, technical performance, and key metrics like time spent, revenue, and engagement levels to improve games and marketing strategies. The goal is to use data-driven analysis to enhance features, target appropriate platforms, and increase customer retention and monetization for continued industry growth.
The document is a presentation by Dan McClary, a product manager at Google, about why data analysis is important for product management. He argues that analyzing data provides credibility with stakeholders and forms the basis for consensus. He demonstrates how to organize data in BigQuery for easy analysis and sharing. Examples show analyzing game sales data to determine market opportunities and instrumenting an app to understand user behavior after a product change. The overall message is that product managers should establish a foundation of organized data that can be expanded over time to support product decisions.
Why Big and Small Data Is Important by Google's Product ManagerProduct School
In this talk, Dan McClary, a Product Manager at Google, walked through the importance of using data to drive product decisions, as well as how to quickly pull together an architecture using free tools to help grow a product effort from market analysis to live data capture and data-driven product decisions. We also played a rousing game of Breakout.
Gaming is a mass medium commanding the attention of billions each year.
So, to help marketers of all stripes understand the many business and career opportunities gaming has to offer, here are answers to frequently asked questions (FAQs)
ANDi’s core focus is on Recommendations and personalisation.
Helping users find the right product from millions, learning with an intelligent “tinder swipe” feature, tracking mobile usage and creating personal user profiles to match them with the best options from the app stores. This includes assisting users with their downloaded apps and identifying which are the best time to promote new products for purchase or download.
The document discusses the future state of analytics in gaming devices and provides recommendations for harnessing analytics capabilities. It recommends understanding gamers through multidimensional data on behaviors, attitudes, demographics and social interactions. Platform providers should identify and engage social influencers who can help spread word of mouth. Combining behavioral data with attitudinal data from surveys can provide insights on gamer motivations and improve the gaming experience. Analytics can optimize business decisions around customer engagement, lifetime value, and marketing effectiveness.
This document summarizes key points from several presentations at the GDC 2016 conference on topics related to free-to-play game design and monetization. Some of the main ideas discussed include the importance of guild/clan systems for retention, targeting high spending "whales" and social influencers, addressing toxicity in game communities, and optimizing in-app purchases and rewards systems.
The document is a marketing research report comparing the PS3 and Xbox 360 game consoles. A survey of 88 respondents was conducted to understand perceptions, behaviors and demographics of console owners. Key findings include that most respondents have played video games for over 15 years, perceive the PS3 as more reliable but Xbox 360 has a more reliable online network. Respondents were willing to pay $20-50 annually for online access and exclusive titles influenced purchases. The report recommends PS3 improve its online network and Xbox 360 focus on reliability to help PS3 surpass it in sales.
- The document discusses how to use predictive analytics and A/B testing to increase user conversion and revenue for a gaming startup.
- By analyzing user data using decision trees, they found paying users had different experiences than non-paying users, spending more virtual currency on items.
- They implemented an A/B test where new users in group B were forced to spend coins on virtual items initially to mimic paying users' experiences.
- The success of this change would be measured by whether group B bought more virtual items and spent more coins, indicating aligning user experiences increased conversion.
Payment Acceptance and Card Tokenization in JavaScript by Diwa Del MundoDEVCON
The document discusses payment acceptance and card tokenization in JavaScript using the PayMaya Payment Gateway. It describes how the Payment Gateway provides an abstraction layer to enable merchants to accept card payments without needing to understand complex card network standards. It also explains how card tokenization allows collecting card data in apps and websites while reducing PCI compliance requirements by replacing sensitive card details with tokens. Finally, it outlines the PayMaya Payment Gateway APIs and SDKs that make integration easy for developers.
Yamaha MusicCast Permanent Display Case Study - Gush CreativeAndrew Fox
Yamaha recently launched MusicCast, a new kind of multi-room audio system that supports high resolution audio unlike others that can top out at CD quality. Gush Creative had already worked closely with Yamaha on a number of industrial display projects, and was once again, approached to work on this new retail display.
[DSC Europe 23][Pandora] Siyu SUN Data Science Enter The Game.pptxDataScienceConferenc1
Siyu Sun presented on applying data science in the gaming industry. Some key applications discussed include optimizing monetization through improving in-app purchases, ads, and subscriptions. Specific use cases covered predicting payers versus non-payers, ad trigger points, and subscription tier and pricing optimization. Challenges with A/B testing large changes over long durations were also noted. Reinforcement learning applications and the future of generative AI and text-based games were briefly discussed at the end.
1) Carbine Studios wanted to identify which of its 125,000 beta testers were most likely to remain long-term players to combat customer churn.
2) Surveys and predictive modeling identified 5 unique gamer segments with different characteristics and spending behaviors.
3) Key insights included that 8% of beta testers were at risk to churn, females were twice as likely to churn, and passion for the game was more important than demographics in predicting loyalty.
Playtika Bets on Big Data Analytics to Deliver Captivating Social Gaming Expe...Dana Gardner
Transcript of a sponsored discussion on how Playtika is using data science going and an architectural approach to conquer some of these hurdles around volume, velocity, and variety of data.
This document provides an overview of key economic and business concepts related to the video game industry, including:
- It defines common economic terms like costs, revenue, and profit.
- It explains concepts like man-hours, goods and services, markets, and value.
- It discusses different types of capital (financial and personal), discretionary income, and how businesses re-invest profits.
- It covers risks associated with different investments and industries like video games, as well as the golden rule of risk.
- Finally, it examines relationships between laborers/owners, challenges video game developers face, and Sturgeon's Law which states that 90% of creative works are not very good.
Analytics can help the gaming industry increase engagement and profits through data-driven decisions. Gaming generates over $91 billion annually across platforms and is played by over 155 million Americans. Analytics provides insights into player behavior, technical performance, and key metrics like time spent, revenue, and engagement levels to improve games and marketing strategies. The goal is to use data-driven analysis to enhance features, target appropriate platforms, and increase customer retention and monetization for continued industry growth.
The document is a presentation by Dan McClary, a product manager at Google, about why data analysis is important for product management. He argues that analyzing data provides credibility with stakeholders and forms the basis for consensus. He demonstrates how to organize data in BigQuery for easy analysis and sharing. Examples show analyzing game sales data to determine market opportunities and instrumenting an app to understand user behavior after a product change. The overall message is that product managers should establish a foundation of organized data that can be expanded over time to support product decisions.
Why Big and Small Data Is Important by Google's Product ManagerProduct School
In this talk, Dan McClary, a Product Manager at Google, walked through the importance of using data to drive product decisions, as well as how to quickly pull together an architecture using free tools to help grow a product effort from market analysis to live data capture and data-driven product decisions. We also played a rousing game of Breakout.
Gaming is a mass medium commanding the attention of billions each year.
So, to help marketers of all stripes understand the many business and career opportunities gaming has to offer, here are answers to frequently asked questions (FAQs)
ANDi’s core focus is on Recommendations and personalisation.
Helping users find the right product from millions, learning with an intelligent “tinder swipe” feature, tracking mobile usage and creating personal user profiles to match them with the best options from the app stores. This includes assisting users with their downloaded apps and identifying which are the best time to promote new products for purchase or download.
The document discusses the future state of analytics in gaming devices and provides recommendations for harnessing analytics capabilities. It recommends understanding gamers through multidimensional data on behaviors, attitudes, demographics and social interactions. Platform providers should identify and engage social influencers who can help spread word of mouth. Combining behavioral data with attitudinal data from surveys can provide insights on gamer motivations and improve the gaming experience. Analytics can optimize business decisions around customer engagement, lifetime value, and marketing effectiveness.
This document summarizes key points from several presentations at the GDC 2016 conference on topics related to free-to-play game design and monetization. Some of the main ideas discussed include the importance of guild/clan systems for retention, targeting high spending "whales" and social influencers, addressing toxicity in game communities, and optimizing in-app purchases and rewards systems.
The document is a marketing research report comparing the PS3 and Xbox 360 game consoles. A survey of 88 respondents was conducted to understand perceptions, behaviors and demographics of console owners. Key findings include that most respondents have played video games for over 15 years, perceive the PS3 as more reliable but Xbox 360 has a more reliable online network. Respondents were willing to pay $20-50 annually for online access and exclusive titles influenced purchases. The report recommends PS3 improve its online network and Xbox 360 focus on reliability to help PS3 surpass it in sales.
- The document discusses how to use predictive analytics and A/B testing to increase user conversion and revenue for a gaming startup.
- By analyzing user data using decision trees, they found paying users had different experiences than non-paying users, spending more virtual currency on items.
- They implemented an A/B test where new users in group B were forced to spend coins on virtual items initially to mimic paying users' experiences.
- The success of this change would be measured by whether group B bought more virtual items and spent more coins, indicating aligning user experiences increased conversion.
DWS15 - Game Summit - Mobile Gaming - Sean Kauppinen - IDEAIDATE DigiWorld
This document discusses both opportunities and challenges for developers in the mobile game market. It notes that the market for becoming the next big hit like Rovio or Supercell has likely closed, as the top-grossing games are all over a year old. However, niche games may still find success. To engage players, the document recommends focusing on social sharing features, video capture and streaming, community forums, guild systems, status/achievement systems, in-game rewards, events, and loyalty programs. It also discusses new monetization models like pay-for-saves or cable subscription models for mobile games.
Prioritizing for Profit from AgilePaloozaEnthiosys Inc
The document discusses prioritizing a product backlog for profit. It recommends considering three core groups when prioritizing: stakeholder alignment, strategic alignment, and driving profit. For stakeholder alignment, the backlog should include at least one item for each stakeholder group. For strategic alignment, it should include at least one item that aligns with the company's strategy. And to drive profit, it should include at least one item that generates revenue or reduces costs. The document provides various techniques for involving stakeholders, determining strategic priorities, and identifying profit drivers to create a holistically prioritized backlog.
This document discusses social game design and data analysis challenges. It describes GREE as a global gaming company and outlines where mobile gaming is headed. It then covers building successful social features through integration, rewards, and campaigns. Key elements of social data are explored, including how it impacts product development, operations, marketing and requires a shift to analyzing collective player data and groups. Unique challenges of A/B testing and social network analysis in live games are also presented.
5 Things we Can Learn from Games About UXDori Adar
The document discusses 5 key principles that can be learned from games and applied to user experience (UX) design: 1) How to teach users by engaging them to learn through doing rather than just presenting instructions, 2) How to help users win early to keep them motivated, 3) How to reward users through subconscious, tangible, and status rewards, 4) How to diversify the experience to appeal to different personality types through competitive, research, creative and social elements, 5) How to bring users back through notifications and appeals to different motivations like competition, research and more. Examples are provided for each principle from both games and digital products.
The document discusses how mobile games make money through three pillars: user acquisition, engagement, and monetization. It describes the process of acquiring users through ads and organic discovery. Key metrics for engagement include retention, session frequency and length, and virality/K-factor. Games can monetize through premium, in-app purchases, or ads models. Key monetization metrics are conversion rate, ARPU, and LTV, which is predicted using the monetization or lifetime approach based on past user revenue or retention over time. The document provides an overview of analytics used to optimize the user funnel and maximize revenue.
Similar to Massively multiplayer data challenges in mobile game analytics (20)
06-04-2024 - NYC Tech Week - Discussion on Vector Databases, Unstructured Data and AI
Discussion on Vector Databases, Unstructured Data and AI
https://www.meetup.com/unstructured-data-meetup-new-york/
This meetup is for people working in unstructured data. Speakers will come present about related topics such as vector databases, LLMs, and managing data at scale. The intended audience of this group includes roles like machine learning engineers, data scientists, data engineers, software engineers, and PMs.This meetup was formerly Milvus Meetup, and is sponsored by Zilliz maintainers of Milvus.
Analysis insight about a Flyball dog competition team's performanceroli9797
Insight of my analysis about a Flyball dog competition team's last year performance. Find more: https://github.com/rolandnagy-ds/flyball_race_analysis/tree/main
Global Situational Awareness of A.I. and where its headedvikram sood
You can see the future first in San Francisco.
Over the past year, the talk of the town has shifted from $10 billion compute clusters to $100 billion clusters to trillion-dollar clusters. Every six months another zero is added to the boardroom plans. Behind the scenes, there’s a fierce scramble to secure every power contract still available for the rest of the decade, every voltage transformer that can possibly be procured. American big business is gearing up to pour trillions of dollars into a long-unseen mobilization of American industrial might. By the end of the decade, American electricity production will have grown tens of percent; from the shale fields of Pennsylvania to the solar farms of Nevada, hundreds of millions of GPUs will hum.
The AGI race has begun. We are building machines that can think and reason. By 2025/26, these machines will outpace college graduates. By the end of the decade, they will be smarter than you or I; we will have superintelligence, in the true sense of the word. Along the way, national security forces not seen in half a century will be un-leashed, and before long, The Project will be on. If we’re lucky, we’ll be in an all-out race with the CCP; if we’re unlucky, an all-out war.
Everyone is now talking about AI, but few have the faintest glimmer of what is about to hit them. Nvidia analysts still think 2024 might be close to the peak. Mainstream pundits are stuck on the wilful blindness of “it’s just predicting the next word”. They see only hype and business-as-usual; at most they entertain another internet-scale technological change.
Before long, the world will wake up. But right now, there are perhaps a few hundred people, most of them in San Francisco and the AI labs, that have situational awareness. Through whatever peculiar forces of fate, I have found myself amongst them. A few years ago, these people were derided as crazy—but they trusted the trendlines, which allowed them to correctly predict the AI advances of the past few years. Whether these people are also right about the next few years remains to be seen. But these are very smart people—the smartest people I have ever met—and they are the ones building this technology. Perhaps they will be an odd footnote in history, or perhaps they will go down in history like Szilard and Oppenheimer and Teller. If they are seeing the future even close to correctly, we are in for a wild ride.
Let me tell you what we see.
ViewShift: Hassle-free Dynamic Policy Enforcement for Every Data LakeWalaa Eldin Moustafa
Dynamic policy enforcement is becoming an increasingly important topic in today’s world where data privacy and compliance is a top priority for companies, individuals, and regulators alike. In these slides, we discuss how LinkedIn implements a powerful dynamic policy enforcement engine, called ViewShift, and integrates it within its data lake. We show the query engine architecture and how catalog implementations can automatically route table resolutions to compliance-enforcing SQL views. Such views have a set of very interesting properties: (1) They are auto-generated from declarative data annotations. (2) They respect user-level consent and preferences (3) They are context-aware, encoding a different set of transformations for different use cases (4) They are portable; while the SQL logic is only implemented in one SQL dialect, it is accessible in all engines.
#SQL #Views #Privacy #Compliance #DataLake
Learn SQL from basic queries to Advance queriesmanishkhaire30
Dive into the world of data analysis with our comprehensive guide on mastering SQL! This presentation offers a practical approach to learning SQL, focusing on real-world applications and hands-on practice. Whether you're a beginner or looking to sharpen your skills, this guide provides the tools you need to extract, analyze, and interpret data effectively.
Key Highlights:
Foundations of SQL: Understand the basics of SQL, including data retrieval, filtering, and aggregation.
Advanced Queries: Learn to craft complex queries to uncover deep insights from your data.
Data Trends and Patterns: Discover how to identify and interpret trends and patterns in your datasets.
Practical Examples: Follow step-by-step examples to apply SQL techniques in real-world scenarios.
Actionable Insights: Gain the skills to derive actionable insights that drive informed decision-making.
Join us on this journey to enhance your data analysis capabilities and unlock the full potential of SQL. Perfect for data enthusiasts, analysts, and anyone eager to harness the power of data!
#DataAnalysis #SQL #LearningSQL #DataInsights #DataScience #Analytics
The Ipsos - AI - Monitor 2024 Report.pdfSocial Samosa
According to Ipsos AI Monitor's 2024 report, 65% Indians said that products and services using AI have profoundly changed their daily life in the past 3-5 years.
2. Take-aways of this talk
An introductory overview of a very modern, complex, and lucrative industry that
doesn’t usually get a lot of press in academic circles.
Present challenges relating to free to play apps and games.
Discuss the current best practices in the industry.
Tempt both ardent academics and those considering industrial work that the
games industry offers a lot of ‘low hanging fruit’ and real hardcore challenges also.
Talk about videogames! Ask me anything!
3. About Me (Fun Version)
Lifelong Gamer
Content Creator (Lunch Time Game Review)
Tabletop Gamer (board and card games, mostly)
Blogger (103% Complete Gaming Blog)
LU Comedy Society
Vegan Runner
4. About Me (Career)
(2006 - 2010): Msci Maths and Stats at Lancaster University
(2008): Study Abroad at UC Berkeley
(2010): Data Intern at Unilever (Next Generation Methods, Port Sunlight
(2010): First Cohort of Stor-i DTC MRes
(2011 - 2016): PhD (currently writing up corrections)
(2015): Exient Malta : Lead Games Data Analyst
(2016): Sega Hardlight : Games Data Analyst
6. Sega Hardlight
Created in 2012, based in the West Midlands.
Leamington Spa (very close to Warwick, home of JLR and Aston Martin).
Owned by and a part of the Sega group of companies (Did I mention SONIC!?).
Speciality in Mobile Games Development.
Leamington Spa is also known as Silicon Spa for the surprisingly large amount of
game developers and tech companies in the area.
This is because the Oliver Twins (Codemasters) set up there originally.
10. Mobile Games: Narrowing it down (by business plan)
Paid: Traditional,
consumer pays an
upfront cost and gets
the complete game.
Subscription: Pay
regular installments to
have access to game.
No upfront fee most of
the time.
Free to Play: No upfront
cost or subscription tiers,
in-app purchases and in-
app advertising drive
revenue.
11. Mobile Games: Narrowing it down (by business plan)
Paid: Traditional,
consumer pays an
upfront cost and gets
the complete game.
Subscription: Pay
regular installments to
have access to game.
No upfront fee most of
the time.
Free to Play: No upfront
cost or subscription tiers,
in-app purchases and in-
app advertising drive
revenue.
12. How does Free to Play work generally?
Economies of Scale
Since the price of entry is $0 (and sometimes incentivised!), the volume of users
using the app is large.
Not just games either! Most of us adopted Dropbox, Spotify, Skype etc because it
was free to install and access to most of the functionality of the product was given
away for nothing.
Even if only 10% of users ever purchase additional features and add-ons, that’s
10% of a large volume of users, so this pricing model still covers costs, in theory.
13. Success for a mobile app
Some definitions:
Churned user: Someone who has ‘permanently’ stopped using the app.
Mean Lifetime value (LTV) of a user: The mean amount of $revenue that an
individual user generates for the business by using the app and buying in-app
goods before they churn forever.
Cost per Install (CPI): The mean cost of acquiring a single user.
What we want to see: User Volume * (LTV - CPI) > Overheads + Dev Costs
14. A business model built on miserly users!?
Yes! But even those who do not pay any of their own
money still have real money value to the business.
1. They contribute to the virality of app, reducing the
cost of user acquisition depending on the k-factor of
that user (more on that later).
2. Passive and incentivised advertising costs nothing to
the user but provides revenue to the business if
consumed.
3. Their sheer numbers incentivise others to spend!
We’ll talk about ‘virality’ in some more detail/
15. What on earth is Virality/k-factor?
It’s actually very
costly to get users
to download your
app/game!
$4 to get a loyal
user on board.
Loyal doesn’t
necessarily mean
‘paying customer’!
16. What on earth is Virality/k-factor?
Virality for apps means that your
current users acquire even more
users for you.
Back in the ‘bad old days’ this meant
that your Facebook feed was awash
with invites to play Candy Crush
Saga.
As annoying as that was, it was a
monster success for King,
17. But how is Virality defined?
Open problem! One of many!
The k-factor method counts the average number of ‘free users’ you get from each
existing user.
If k = 0, that means nobody is inviting their friends to the party. If k > 1, then you
typically have a ‘viral game’ as the user base grows exponentially.
The Catch! -- Attribution is very hard and messy. How do you know why a user
decided to join your game? Especially when companies ‘lie’ about it.
You can track invites and clicks, but you can’t track word-of-mouth and response
to TV/Cinema ads very accurately! We needs better models for this...
18. Truth: Games Data Analytics is a Mess
1. Academic research in
this area is very
fragmented.
2. Many mobile studios
are currently made up
from former console or
tech start-up talent.
19. 1.Academic Work
Analysts like myself don’t publish their work and we’re not unionised yet.
We ‘pull’ inspiration from the (free!) literature as we need it but we don’t ‘push
back’. Not great links between academia and industry (Let’s change that?).
Operational pressures means that the industry can’t formalise its learning.
There are very few academic practitioners like there are in medicine and energy
for example. There’s not a prominent ‘games data’ themed journal or portal.
This is very sad because game development, publishing and live operations offer
a vast amount of potential projects for Stats, OR, and CS students and faculty.
Even sadder because I know how many of you are game nerds!
20. 2a. Former console talent
A great proportion of mobile studios consist of former console devs, making
‘finished’ box products (Think Assassin’s Creed, Tomb Raider, Bok-tai)
Traditional console studios never included analysts that worked on the games
themselves.
Analysts in the industry usually worked in publishing and market intelligence
side of things out of studio.
The presence of analysts in a games studio is an idea which isn’t even a
decade old at this point. Even big studios with centralised Business
Intelligence Departments are flying by the seat of their pants at this point in
time.
21. 2b. Technology companies who also make games.
These companies are awash with very bright analysts,
computer scientists and tech heads.
They’re ahead of the field in terms of solving a lot of
complicated technical problems and optimising processes.
However, they lack any real pedigree in game design
experience and user experience knowledge.
Probably not the kind of company that are interested in the
‘science of fun’ and more interested in simply grinding
money out of people in a soulless kind of way.
22. They found that Mariah Carey gets more installs
than Kate Upton through AB Testing though!
23. One more thing… you have to do this on the fly.
You have to collect this data while your
game is running.
If you have a complex real-time tactical
experience, you have to be able to
grab everything you need while the
game is happening, to a potentially
huge concurrent roster of players on
a server.
A large proportion of it will be available
to sample at the time that the
analytics events you want will fire.
24. So now we get to what I do for a living!
1. Providing regular ‘health checks’ on the games that are live for players right
now: Identifying risks and areas for improvement in our KPIs.
2. Overall data strategy: What we decide to track, how we track it and which
technology we use. The studio look to me to provide that direction.
3. Insights: Deep dives, post mortems, market analysis… that’s on me too!
4. Optimisation: Experimenting on players to learn what makes them play for
longer and spend more.
25. Let’s talk briefly about ‘passive reporting’
1. Providing regular ‘health checks’ on the games that are live for players right
now: Identifying risks and areas for improvement in our KPIs.
2. Overall data strategy: What we decide to track, how we track it and which
technology we use. The studio look to me to provide that direction.
3. Insights: Deep dives, post mortems, market analysis… that’s on me too!
4. Optimisation: Experimenting on players to learn what makes them play for
longer and spend more.
26. Top level Reporting - Always available to all
Non-technical execs want to be
able to look at ‘high-level
stats’ without adult
supervision.
This tends to be non-game
specific for cross title
comparisons
There’s a culture of ‘let’s track
what everyone else is
tracking’ but there’s certainly
room for improvement here.
27. Trying to improve our workflow and toolchain.
1. Providing regular ‘health checks’ on the games that are live for players right
now: Identifying risks and areas for improvement in our KPIs.
2. Overall data strategy: What we decide to track, how we track it and which
technology we use. The studio look to me to provide that direction.
3. Insights: Deep dives, post mortems, market analysis… that’s on me too!
4. Optimisation: Experimenting on players to learn what makes them play for
longer and spend more.
28. The tech I’m using.
It’s also a matter of evangelising the need to
think about analytics from design to servicing.
29. ‘Big Ticket’ Analysis - Deep Dive Reporting.
1. Providing regular ‘health checks’ on the games that are live for players right
now: Identifying risks and areas for improvement in our KPIs.
2. Overall data strategy: What we decide to track, how we track it and which
technology we use. The studio look to me to provide that direction.
3. Insights: Deep dives, post mortems, market analysis… that’s on me too!
4. Optimisation: Experimenting on players to learn what makes them play for
longer and spend more.
30. Example of Recent Deep Dive: Churn Detection.
What are the key predictors of churn? (leaving a game, never to return)
It largely depends on the game and the audience.
Took a lot of inspiration from some pioneer’s on Kaggle working in World of Warcraft.
https://www.kaggle.com/thibalbo/d/mylesoneill/warcraft-avatar-history/wow-dataset-exploratory-
analysis
It’s important that we can predict which of our users are at risk of leaving us so
we can decide when and how to intervene.
What we’ve found so far.
Social obligation reduces churn: Online ‘teams’ can create a sense of loyalty.
Social proof also reduces churn: Just seeing that your friends are playing puts you at lower risk.
31. But how do we intervene!?
1. Providing regular ‘health checks’ on the games that are live for players right
now: Identifying risks and areas for improvement in our KPIs.
2. Overall data strategy: What we decide to track, how we track it and which
technology we use. The studio look to me to provide that direction.
3. Insights: Deep dives, post mortems, market analysis… that’s on me too!
4. Optimisation: Experimenting on players to learn what makes them play for
longer and spend more.
32. AB Testing Approach (Boo!)
It seems to be the industry standard.
You randomly allocate users into separate groups and then change the game
experience for people in that group.|
Candy Crush changes the order and difficulty of its levels all the time to optimise
the trade off between selling extra moves and people getting fed up with it.
It’s slow, inefficient, and doesn’t control for an awful lot of things. It’s simple.
It’s also tricky when you have multiplayer games and clever clogs on forums
33. Bayes Optimisation: The Multi-Armed Bandit Future
You want to expose the fewest number of users as
possible to potential variants of the game
experience while still learning about the impact of
potential changes you want to make.
It’s very expensive to lose players, particularly if they
are influential spenders
Bandits seem to be the best way to balance the delivery
of product insights and the overheads associated
with doing so.
Gaming is behind the curve on this front, as it is with a
lot of its data practice, so the service providers that
deliver Bayesian versions of ‘off-shelf’ tools and
backend services stand to do well. (I’m doing my
34. The vital take-aways from all of this.
Mobile Gaming remains a growth industry with plenty of money flying around.
Large outfits such as Sega, Nintendo, and even King are far from yielding the
additional revenue to be gained from the proper application of analytics.
If you love games and you want to help make them, you can try and make these
changes from the belly of the beast like I’m doing.
If you’re more academically inclined there’s a whole lot of interesting problems
and applications up for grabs if we can establish good links between