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Online Gaming Industry Faced with Big Data Analytics Challenges

Starting from the first video game launched back in the 70s to graphic-intense, multiplayer online battle royale games, the gaming experience has evolved tremendously for millions of users worldwide.

The advent of smartphones and social games has collectively made online gaming available to the masses. At the same time, they have provided game developers worldwide with the opportunity to collect data. They can analyze this data and find new business opportunities by catering to the specific needs of their customers.

Apparently, game developers can analyze these actionable insights to understand exactly how their customers think and respond. This will help them boost retention and pave the way for the future of online gaming.

Growing Dramatically

The online gaming industry is massive in terms of its serviceability and revenue, quickly passing both film and TV in the entertainment segment. As the market is huge, there is a lot to learn about consumer behavior to take necessary actions.

According to the statistics released by SuperData Research, the gaming industry generated a revenue of $91 billion back in 2016. The segment with the largest revenue of $41 billion (approx. 18% of the total) was mobile gaming, followed by retail games and free online games with $26 billion and $19 billion, respectively.

Gaming and Big Data

The gaming industry is one of the major contributors to big data worldwide. On average, an online gaming service with a large user base generates about 50TBs (terabytes) of gaming data every single day. The monthly gameplay data of Electronic Arts (EA) comprises about 50 billion minutes of gameplay from 2.5 billion gaming sessions worldwide.

‘Always On’ Gaming

As the data keeps streaming from multiple sources like gameplay, online transactions (if any), linked social media account, in-app purchases, in-game advertising, virtual interactions with objects, multiplayer interactions, various real-time events, and content updates, online gaming platforms like Mars casino require you to be live, in a 24/7 ‘always on’ world. One of the best features of today’s online games is that you can tap on your smartphone display and quick-start the gameplay anytime, anywhere with internet connectivity available.

Thinking from the data’s POV, it can be a real challenge to carefully merge varied forms of data, ensuring every player has a clear picture of everything.

The reason why this can be hard is the data volume (10 to 20 billion events every day) and because the data is Big Data.

The Future: Analyzing Gaming Data with AI

The gaming industry apparently has the richest customer data available with it. With the numbers of gamers growing worldwide, the gameplay consistently generates data that is accumulated on the servers of the game developer.

To make sense out of it all, a broad and thoughtful application based on analytics and machine learning is required.

AI-powered analytics can certainly provide valuable business insights into the data to enhance the overall gaming experience across platforms, optimize advertising, and enhance the user experience to eventually grow revenue.