How Big Data Has Revolutionized the Gaming Industry

Big data is driving a number of changes in our lives. Forbes recently wrote an article about the impact of big data on the food and hospitality industry. However, other sectors are changing as well.

Big data phenomenon has revolutionized almost every aspect of an average citizen’s life. Information about our online activity has been accumulating for years, and now is actively used to know more about us. Online shopping, gaming, web surfing – all of this data can be collected, and more importantly, analyzed.

Most businesses prefer to rely on the insights gained from the big data analysis. With the help of data mining and machine learning, it is now possible to find the connections between seemingly disparate pieces of information. Thus, new and unexpected solutions come to life and open the door for new business opportunities.

One of the fields that is evolving to big data is the gaming industry. You can see how disruptive it is by looking at the investments some gaming companies have made in big data. CIO shared a report showing that Minecraft invested $2.5 billion in big data.

The question many pundits are asking is what changes big data is bringing for the gaming industry. The answer is shared below.

What does it mean for the gaming industry? 

Practically, everything.

Mobile, online, and offline games are now experiencing their best days. The number of downloads and purchases increases every minute. According to the SensorTower statistics, in 2019, a simple arcade game Stack Ball reached 100 million installs and only continued to grow.

PC gaming isn’t going to give up its position either. In 2014, there were about 1.82 billion gamers worldwide. In 2019, this number increased to 2.4 billion and is expected to overpass 2.7 billion in 2021. This tremendous growth in the number of active video gamers in the world proves the necessity for game developers to adapt to the users’ wants and needs.

How does big data help?

Active game users generate hundreds of terabytes of data every day. It includes users’ device configuration, players’ actions and mistakes, system crashes, and other gameplay events. The whole array of this information, in its essence, is what we now call unstructured big data.

The goal of data scientists is to analyze it, classify and detect specific patterns that are common for seemingly unrelated concepts. All of this is later used to improve the gaming experience: enhance the gameplay or get up-to-date with the system requirements.

A comprehensive system of monitoring, logging, and analyzing helps the developers understand what needs optimization. Taking into account the data samples, they find bottlenecks, tweak the unbalanced scenarios, and avoid making the same mistakes in the future.

Based on this data, a scientist can make predictions about users’ behavior, create neurological networks that will automatically react to players’ actions and suggest solutions to the problem. They can even create models that predict what users will do after an update or a patch is released. What is more important, these models reduce the necessity of finding focus groups to test new things – the results can be foreseen through a simulation based on users’ data.

What’s in it for hardware developers?

As a gamer, when you face an error within any application, you can create a report and send it to Microsoft. Microsoft works with bug reports and one of their current goals is to optimize Windows 10 for gaming. If the data you and other gamers send them is useful, they will use it in the next system update or help the developers with the game optimization. Other hardware developers keep up with the game industry novelties too. For instance, the release of Call of Duty: War Zone coincided with the NVIDIA’s release of a new video card driver perfectly optimized for the game.

What to expect?

As the time spent on PC and mobile games is only increasing, there is no doubt that the gaming industry will only continue to obtain new markets. The NewZoo predicts that by 2022 the consumers will have spent $196 billion on gaming, making it the mainstream of entertainment.

However, the new GDPR policy may have an impact on using big data in marketing. More strict rules on collecting, storing, and handling the data have been implemented and make the developers rethink their ways of getting the information from their users.

Big Data is Radically Changing the Gaming Sector

If you work in the gaming industry, you should pay close attention to changes in the gaming industry. Big data has had a profound effect on this sector. You may see a remarkable improvement in the quality of online games, as they become more dependent on big data advances.