Analysts predict gaming to generate more than $260 billion in revenue by 2025, and thus it is no surprises why the technology giants Google, Facebook, and Apple have made plans to enter the gaming industry. While the gaming industry's growth prospects are undoubtedly astonishing, the competition to gain a piece of the revenue is intense, and consequently, less than 5% of all games produced each year become profitable. Let’s look at the various data sources for gaming companies and discuss some case studies that showcase how gaming companies can leverage data for business benefit. The data generated from various sources such as marketing campaigns, gameplay microtransactions, social interactions, real-time events contribute to this massive surge in data. An interesting consequence of the proliferation of data is that the first movers in the gaming industry pre-empt the need to look at external forces to determine the need to introduce new games or augment existing ones and elicit intelligence from existing & historical data. Analysing data unravels information about players’ psychology, demographics, and behaviour, all of which can shore up business intelligence and decision-making. Therefore, investing in the analysis of data can help gaming companies to: - Identify trends - Player preferences, periodicity, abandonment of levels & not opting for specific challenges, player persistence, and even geographical & cultural trends across regions - Enhance customer experience through design alternatives not only on the UI but even ensuring fair play in a multi-player environment - Optimise marketing campaigns - Build effective strategies for increasing player acquisition and engagement - Ensure compliance by proactively identifying and correcting system glitches (e.g., GDPR required that gaming companies need to provide players with information on data acquired & processed concerning them should a gamer request for details. GDPR also requires online gaming companies to ensure data security. In 2018, a German supervisory authority fined a local social gaming network for storing unencrypted user passwords. In addition to the looming fines, the potential reputational harm from data breaches maybe even more dangerous for game developers.) - Improving revenue by analysing what and where a gamer spends more time & importantly what options they avoid & even which levels find frequent abandonment. Data analysis can even help companies prevent disruption due to system errors and quickly react to system breakdowns. For example: With more than a million new installations per day, a mobile gaming company used to push special offers automatically and in-app cross-promotions across various channels. These ongoing special offers and cross-promotions resulted in app purchases and hence were important for the company to achieve the revenue objectives. But a glitch during the mobile update resulted in the promotions and offers not being shown to users. Thus, the company lost opportunities to cross-sell and upsell to new and existing players. As the company had over a million new installations each day, the system glitch and lack of promotions due to it resulted in less app purchases resulting in around 15% loss in revenue. Read our detailed article to know how data analysis could have helped the gaming companies not only prevent losses but also achieve profitable growth.
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