Chapter 2 Game Analytics – The Basics

Take Away Points:  Overview of important key terms in game analytics  Introduction to game telemetry as a source of business intelligence.  In-depth description and discussion of user-derived telemetry and metrics.  Introduction to feature selection in game analytics  Introduction to the knowledge discovery process in game analytics  References to essential further reading. 1 Analytics – a new industry paradigm Developing a profitable game in today's market is a challenging endeavor. Thousands of commercial titles are published yearly, across a number of hardware platforms and distribution channels, all competing for players' time and attention, and the game industry is decidedly competitive. In order to effectively develop games, a variety of tools and techniques from e.g. business practices, project management to user testing have been developed in the game industry, or adopted and adapted from other IT sectors. One of these methods is analytics, which in recent years has decidedly impacted the game industry and game research environment. Analytics is the process of discovering and communicating patterns in data, towards solving problems in business or conversely predictions for supporting enterprise decision management, driving action and/or improving performance. The meth-odological foundations for analytics are statistics, data mining, mathematics, programming and operations research, as well as data visualization in order to communicate insights learned to the relevant stakeholders. Analytics is not just the querying and reporting of BI data, but rests on actual analysis, e.g. statistical analysis, predic-tive modeling, optimization, forecasting, etc. (Davenport and Harris, 2007). Analytics typically relies on computational modeling. There are several branches or domains of analytics, e.g. marketing analytics, risk analytics, web analytics – and game analytics. Importantly, analytics is not the same thing as data analysis. Analytics is an umbrella term, covering the entire methodology of finding and communicating patterns in data, whereas analysis is used for individual applied instances, e.g. running