Presented by Snowflake
From player experience to ads, user acquisition, monetization, and more, data is helping game development studios thrive in a market that’s growing exponentially — but is more competitive than ever. Join GamesBeat’s Dean Takahashi and others at this VB Live event to learn what data can do for you and your game.
Not that long ago, capturing player data for your game meant interviewing your audience. But now mobile games and current console and PC games offer an extraordinary well of objective data for game companies — from how players are playing and using the game, to how they’re interacting with others across platforms, devices, channels, and more.
That data is essential to every facet of a modern game, and every part of your company, says Daniel Myers, senior developer relations manager at Snowflake.
“There’s a whole lot more data developers can gather and draw from,” Myers says. “Because of that, there are more opportunities to look into how players are playing games, how they’re using the game, how they’re interacting with others in the game, to improve all of those areas of gameplay. It’s interesting to see how data is being used by all the different areas in the game industry, both by the players of the games, and the developers of the games.”
For instance, data is essential to address latency issues in a game — it can help you determine where to establish servers geographically to reduce any unncessary latency. Multi-player games in particular require extremely low latency, and data can be used for “matchmaking” so that players are paired in the same region, improving the experience, rather than having one player in North America and one in Europe, creating lag. You can also improve the player experience by matching players of similar skill, which can be a complicated undertaking — and get even more complicated if it’s a team-based game. But data can do that.
On the development and gameplay experience side, data helps developers go from making assumptions about what players want from the game to actually knowing, with A/B testing.
And, of course, data is critical to growth and marketing. It will help you discover the target persona of your players, and in turn, achieve a higher return on advertising spend through personalization and smarter attribution to the right players, with the right campaigns. Data also will reveal the kinds of communities your players are associated with outside your game.
“The game industry in many ways is viral,” Myers says. “Games are naturally, organically, engaging with their communities. As a game developer, you want to encourage that even more. Using data to improve that social aspect is important.” And data can be used to determine key areas of social interaction within the game to improve the adoption of that game.
He goes on to talk about the cross experience between a game itself and the various ways that players can experience your game.
“Twitch is a great example,” he says. “You can be a Twitch streamer, but you can also be experiencing that game as a watcher of that Twitch stream. So how can you encourage your gameplay to be more watchable on Twitch, for example?”
As gamers move to online channels, their audiences are growing, says Ganesh Subramanian, Snowflake’s director of product marketing. A great player can have millions of people in their audience across their game platforms, and that means there’s a deep pool of user data with a lot of potential for both you and for your partner.
“Game companies are essentially a media platform,” Subramanian says. “They have an engaged audience, and the more you can know about who that audience is, based on matching with third-party data to understand the demographics that you’re attracting to different events, the better you can embed, very programmatically, targeted ads based on your demographics and command a higher advertising premium from brands.”
Ultimately, you make a great game by improving player experience, he says. And the only way to do that is by gathering data, making sure what you’re measuring is the right thing to identify success, and then analyzing how it correlates with other aspects of the game that you’re developing.
“You have to have a holistic view,” says Myers. “As much data as you can about your game, about how the players are playing your game, to have a true sense of north.”
To learn more about how data can help you develop the best game and the most targeted ad campaigns, and how to gain a holistic view of your audience across all platforms, don’t miss this VB Live event.
Don’t miss out!
Participants will learn how to:
- Better use data to improve the effectiveness of ads and marketing
- Make data-driven decisions around optimization and personalization
- Overcome challenges with legacy data stacks
- Break down data silos for a single-source, holistic view of audiences
- Ensure data privacy and security
Speakers:
- Jayne Peressini, Senior Director, Mobile Marketing and Growth, Electronic Arts (EA)
- Brian Sapp, SVP, User Acquisition Marketing & Ads, Jam City
- Daniel Myers, Senior Developer Relations Manager, Snowflake
- Dean Takahashi, Lead Writer, GamesBeat (moderator)