Big Data is taking the gaming industry by storm

From Candy Crush, to League of Legends to Fifa, the electronic gaming industry has something to please everyone. Across this year, gamers worldwide will generate a total of $99.6 billion in revenue (Source: Newzoo).

When you hear gamer, I bet your mind goes straight to a console gamer, avidly pressing buttons on the controller before throwing his head back in frustration of his team mates whispering ‘noobs’ before ‘rage-quitting’ and starting again. But no – gamers can be anyone on any device, for example a mobile, tablet, computer or a gaming console. It’s a large market and extremely profitable if you get it right.

Worldwide Players: Gaming has conquered every region across the planet

If you think about the global population being 7 billion, it’s rather astounding to hear that there are more than two billion gamers in the world. Where there is virtual reality, there is data and with a database this large even the word goldmine is an understatement.

With a variety of ways to obtain data from video games, such as gameplay data, price points and payment systems, in-game adverts, multiplayer interactions and content updates; it would be easy for a developer to risk creating a ‘data for data’s sake game’.

Therefore, when obtaining data through gaming, developers are focused in only gaining data that they need to create actionable insights. The gaming industry is fickle, with players constantly moving from game to game which makes it hard to retain people and monetize.

Data, data and more data

The beauty with the gaming industry is that it can access a ridiculous amount of live data about every single one of their players. Due to the virtual aspect, every move can be tracked and every aspect can be measured. What’s an enviable position.

It’d be easier to count the people who aren’t gaming

50 terabytes is a lot, right? Well video game companies regularly gather this much data PER DAY. This means that Big Data technology is routinely improving games and streamlining operations to increase revenue.

Games are extremely clever in the way that they are constantly being adapted and adjusted to suit the gamers’ style. Using Big Data Analysis, games can be personalised very quickly and accurately. So this not only makes play better, but it also means that more revenue can be created from each player.

Making Big data massive

So what do companies need to achieve from their business intelligence system? Well, using external sources of data, for example social media profiles, this needs to be compared and analysed against current online data and then compare that with older data which has been stored in order to gain a realistic and accurate insight about a customer’s spending pattern etc.

The age range of gamers has increased significantly, with more and more older people joining in. Furthermore, people are more attuned to the amount of interruptions during play. You must have played a game, for example on your phone that has a pop up advert every two minutes which gets really irritating. Therefore, companies must be able to provide uninterrupted play sessions because players will find a similar game elsewhere.

The sky might be the limit, but the Cloud is unlimited

So with all these ridiculously large data sets, this poses an obvious technical problem. Physical storage space will get quickly eaten up and so companies will start looking to cloud based systems to store their Big Data. Real time analytics can also be based online, and so can the cleansing and validation of data.

In Conclusion

So now that the gaming industry is becoming more and more entwined with Big Data and all the technology associated with it, target advertising and the ability to create a single customer view will no doubt enhance the user experience. Additionally, online real-time analysis of Big Data is allowing smaller companies to harness the power of their user data without experiencing technical problems.