Developing a successful game in todays market is a challenging endeavor. Thousands of titles are published yearly, all competing for players time and attention. Game analytics has emerged in the past few years as one of the main resources for ensuring game quality, maximizing success, understanding player behavior and enhancing the quality of the player experience. It has led to a paradigm shift in the development and design strategies of digital games, bringing data-driven intelligence practices into the fray for informing decision making at operational, tactical and strategic levels. Game Analytics - Maximizing the Value of Player Data is the first book on the topic of game analytics; the process of discovering and communicating patterns in data towards evaluating and driving action, improving performance and solving problems in game development and game research. Written by over 50 international experts from industry and research, it covers a comprehensive range of topics across more than 30 chapters, providing an in-depth discussion of game analytics and its practical applications. Topics covered include monetization strategies, design of telemetry systems, analytics for iterative production, game data mining and big data in game development, spatial analytics, visualization and reporting of analysis, player behavior analysis, quantitative user testing and game user research. This state-of-the-art volume is an essential source of reference for game developers and researchers. Key takeaways include: Thorough introduction to game analytics; covering analytics applied to data on players, processes and performance throughout the game lifecycle. In-depth coverage and advice on setting up analytics systems and developing good practices for integrating analytics in game-development and -management. Contributions by leading researchers and experienced professionals from the industry, including Ubisoft, Sony, EA, Bioware, Square Enix, THQ, Volition, and PlayableGames. Interviews with experienced industry professionals on how they use analytics to create hit games.
Cited By
- Melhart D, Togelius J, Mikkelsen B, Holmgård C and Yannakakis G (2024). The Ethics of AI in Games, IEEE Transactions on Affective Computing, 15:1, (79-92), Online publication date: 1-Jan-2024.
- Melo S, Bicalho L, Camacho de Oliveira Joia L, da Silva Junior J, Clua E and Paes A (2023). Encoding feature set information in heterogeneous graph neural networks for game provenance, Applied Intelligence, 53:23, (29024-29042), Online publication date: 1-Dec-2023.
Haider A, Gerling K and Vanden Abeele V The Player Experience Inventory Bench Extended Abstracts of the 2020 Annual Symposium on Computer-Human Interaction in Play, (248-252)- Martins Kummer L, Iida H, Nievola J and Paraiso E Identifying Influences of Game Upgrades on Profitable Players Behavior in MMORPGs Entertainment Computing and Serious Games, (299-310)
- Melhart D, Azadvar A, Canossa A, Liapis A and Yannakakis G Your Gameplay Says It All: Modelling Motivation in Tom Clancy’s The Division 2019 IEEE Conference on Games (CoG), (1-8)
- Liapis A, Karavolos D, Makantasis K, Sfikas K and Yannakakis G Fusing Level and Ruleset Features for Multimodal Learning of Gameplay Outcomes 2019 IEEE Conference on Games (CoG), (1-8)
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