Big Data and Predictive Analytics in Video Games

As a gamer, I was especially interested to see what Electronic Art’s Rajat Taneja had to say about big data challenges in video games. Here are some of the key stats from his talk at Strata Santa Clatra 2013:

As a gamer, I was especially interested to see what Electronic Art’s Rajat Taneja had to say about big data challenges in video games. Here are some of the key stats from his talk at Strata Santa Clatra 2013:

• There are more than 2 billion gamers worldwide, generating 50 Tb of data per day.
• AAA multiplayer titles like Battlefield generates about 1Tb of data per day from in-game telemetry.
• Social games like Simpsons Tapped Out generate about 150Gb of data per day.
• In a typical month, EA hosts about 2.5 billion game sessions, representing about 50 billion minutes of gameplay.

Taneja said that an important initiative at EA is to be able to move from descriptions of the collected data (“what happened”) to predictions about the future (“what happens next”). They’ve designed an ongoing process of data distillation to extract relevant data from the 50Tb stream, and use that for predictive analytics. I’ve embedded the video of Taneja’s presentation at Strata below:

Microsoft’s Dave Campbell also presented the data-collection architecture behind the Xbox platform at Strata.