Game Analytics:A Practitioner’s Perspective

2nd IEEE Consumer Electronics Society Games Innovation Conference

23 December 2010

Game Analytics is crucial to the success

of any online game

Peter Burton

• Civil Engineering first degree• MBA• Worked mainly in:– Retail – Banking and Insurance Industries– Call centre consultancy– Mobile Telcos– Online advertising– Most recently applying lessons learnt from being

a “white coated” media accountant to the online gaming industry

Outline

• Outblaze• Adserving and Game Analytics (GA)• Learning from other industries• A crash course in GA jargon• Some analysis tools• Summary

• Privately held company founded in Hong Kong in 1998 with staff in Hong Kong, US, UK, Korea, Singapore, Philippines, Malaysia

• Originally a pioneer in white label messaging, managing 40+m active mailboxes per month. Outblaze sold its messaging business to IBM in 2009

• New focus is: Entertainment and Media– Video Games– Social, Community and Online Multiplayer Games

iPhone Apps

AnimatedTV shows

Virtual Reality

Products

DS & Wii

GamesPublishingPC

GamesIn APAC

Facebook Apps

Ben10

Hello Kitty

Flash Games

Online Games

Community Web SitesHello Kitty

Online

Adserving

Data RULES

Game companies are NO different from

Airlines, CC, Mobile Telcosor Supermarkets

The data collected aboutuser activity provides

differential competitive advantage

It’s about making sense from unstructured data

It’s about knowing what and how to use that data

It’s about multi-disciplinary collaboration

Data is the ENGINE that helps you:

Improve ROI

Make better decisions

Provide a continuous feedback loop for your game designers, engineers, marketers

game economists, …

Sometimes pinpoint unforeseen issues!

Some proxies for learningAirlines: like CX

Upgrades linked to your direct Value to the airline.CRM.

Aircraft provisioning.Yield Management.

Demand based pricing.

Some proxies for learningSupermarkets: like TESCO

Where to place the biscuits?Edwina Dunn & Clive Humby of DunnHumby.

Rolling Ball Analysis.

GA is Not:anymore about gut feel about guessing

It would appear Hopkins that your gut feel was only indigestion

nor

It’s a guess. I never said it was an educated guess.

GA helps REMOVE gut feel and guess workfrom the decision making process.

My KEY Audience at Outblaze is our:

• Ka Ching team• Engineers• Retail mall teams• Customer Service

teams

• Game developers• Marketers• Game economist• Pricing specialist

multi-disciplinary collaborationis KEY

The Jargon of GA

GAME TELEMETRYthe RAW data that is collected

from online games

GAME TELEMETRY

Telemetry is driven by event logs:name value pairs

(which identify events)

PLUS a unique session ID

GAME TELEMETRY

Build the event logs PLUS unique session IDs into the game

at the game design stage

GAME TELEMETRY

event logs PLUS unique session IDs

should NOT be written backto the Game dB!

GA means:

• analysing large volumes of in game data feeds to help us find, get & keep players

• understanding player user behaviour so that we can continually improve our games

• playing with the data to tease out trends and insights via what if scenarios

• providing a near real time feedback loop for our designers, engineers and the game economists…

GA is about:

• making money using FACTS rather than gut feel or guesswork!

• understanding what satisfies players and making them come back, again and again and again (retention)

• understanding what drives the money, what works and what doesn’t work

• making better games that generate better levels of return

GA is a mix of old school statistics combined with

the latest in web engine metrics

GA typically usesmulti variable analysis:

Players | Levels | Quests | Profiles |Dollars

Crash course in basic GA metrics

• Active Users (DAU, WAU, MAU) key measure DAU/MAU

• ARPU (Average Revenue per User … over time)

• Churn or attrition• Cohorts• Engagement• Entry event

• Exit event• Funnels• K factor (virality)• Lifetime value• Re-engagement• Retention• Session analysis• User Acquisition Cost

Player insightsWhat they buy? | How they buy? | Why they buy?

Connecting the dotsWho matters most? The 2% to 5%

Data SourcesGame logs | Mall | Payment gateway | Player profile

Driving engagement

Gam

e D

esig

ner F

eedb

ack

Loop

Visualisation ImportantYour audience typically fall

into 2 user categories:

Your Numerate Audience(prefer a table of numbers)

Your Visual Audience (the majority who prefer a picture

and pre-digested insights)

TOOLS

If you do use Excel you’ll need Excel 2010 – 64 bit with MAX RAM

(plus the PowerPivot add in)

Excel is not generally man enough!It’s great for proto-typing

How to burn out an i7 laptop12G of RAM maxed out!All 12 i7 cores maxed out!

The culprit; some excel magic which helps to calc uniques by day and by week and by year:=IF(SUMPRODUCT(($A$2:$A500,000=A500,000)*($S$2:$S500000=S500,000))>1,0,1)

Col A is the user-id, Col S is the day flag.

The output of the above is a count of the unique user-ids for a given day.

For proto-typing, I now use a desktop i7 with 12 cores, 24G of RAM with 8 fans!

It’s a MONSTER gaming machine without a superadooper graphics card!

What we use…

a data warehousing and data visualisation tool to

automate data feeds and provide a suite of standardised reports… plus the tools to allow

us to “dive” into the raw data and slice and dice it

Summary – 6 keys

• GA is crucial for any game. It will help you:– find, get and keep players – focuses effort on ROI (2%-5%)– provide a near real-time feedback loop for game

designers, engineers, marketers and game economists…

– to better understand player behaviour and open the way for continuous game improvements

Summary – 6 keys

• TELEMETRY is key.– Build it in at game design stage– Event flags (name value pairs) need to be combined with

a unique session ID – DO NOT write Telemetry back to the dB!

• Visualisation• MD collaboration / communication• Employ smart grads• Learn from others within and outside of

your industry

Thank You