A few years back I was invited to Facebook offices in London and our account manager said that of all the industries they manage - games are the most intense in terms of data.
It is no wonder then that when it comes to data and games there are challenges everywhere, from the collection of data, validating it, and getting insight so that product managers can actually take action and understand what is going under the hood.
If we compare other industries like travel or e-commerce the data flow is rather simple. The user will add items to the cart or book a flight or hotel and checkout. When it comes to games though…. There is a whole world of player activity and engagement, game balancing and economy, and other challenges that won’t let you sleep at night.
I'm not talking about hyper-casual as its a more simplified game genre. I am also not talking about paid games. I am talking about those “living games” that are very popular on mobile as well as PC, those that last for years. Think about all the moving parts in a builder, or MMO. Every single interaction of the player results in data that can be tracked to analyze behavior
Just to give you an example, it is “normal” for a free-to-play mobile game that is just running in soft launch with a couple of thousand players DAU to track around 50 - 60 million events a month. (and that is with pretty basic tracking… not even going into super detailed activity)
And many companies have tried building dashboards to try and “generalize” the problem. Dashboards that focus on the retention…. Or session time…. But this is really basic stuff. You don't balance the game economy with a retention dashboard, you do it with custom, detailed, deep analytics that the product and game design team can actually use to generate insight.
At Dive our bread and butter is data, custom data. We tailor everything per game, and over time our platform started covering LiveOps with segmentation, personalization, AB testing, campaign management of game events, marketing data import, and the list goes on and on… because when the data is of good quality - building on top of it is really not that complicated.
The bottom line (IMHO): games and data have to be customized. Because games are different from each other, they require a different approach to tracking and building isight.
Elad Levy
Dive's Founder and CEO. Elad is an industry veteran, investor, and advisor.