Improving Gaming Experience with Cutting-Edge Analytics For a Leading Game Developer

Millions of event data points are collected in real-time with any (popular) mobile game. How these data points are utilised to improve the player experience is often the deciding factor that differentiates a good game with a short lifetime, to a great game with millions of loyal fans. 

Over the past decade, this leading video game creator has been unlocking the value of their petabytes of event data, and transforming how their business makes data-driven decisions. For the last few years, Google Cloud Platform has been the business’ data foundation, providing a future-proof single source of truth of the gamer’s journey.

In particular, BigQuery enabled the business to scale up and down their data workloads cost-efficiently and flexibly over their games’ lifecycles, administer best-in-class data governance, and allow their data engineers to focus on value-added projects (vs. data administration). Looker was also an integral platform in the business’ BI data stack, but predominantly used by technical users with a SQL background.

In anticipation of their highly-awaited game, our client wanted to change this set-up. They wanted to enable both technical and business users with cutting-edge analytics and tailored data experiences in Looker, regardless of whether the team member had a SQL background.

To do so, the business needed to:

• Audit and migrate from their legacy third-party tool, DeltaDNA
• Unlock advanced analyses, better visualisations and data experiences, in BigQuery + Looker
• Deploy a scalable code base and flexible reporting layer in Looker
• Enable and upskill technical and business stakeholders to manage, maintain and continue to develop their BI solution

Our client chose to partner with Datatonic, due to our status as Google Cloud Data + AI partner and Looker deployment partner, to execute this program with speed and agility. Over a course of 12 weeks, Datatonic delivered:

1. Audit & Enhancement of Analytics Capability, including: assessment of current capabilities and limitations in DeltaDNA, conversion of relevant reports from DeltaDNA to Looker, and recommendation and development of advanced features, such as advanced segmentation on new vs returning users, made possible in BigQuery + Looker.
2. BI Development in Looker, including: Developing a scalable code base and reporting layer on top of BigQuery, building the LookML model in Looker with appropriate caching policies and derived tables, and developing Dashboards + Explores to support 16 Data Experiences.
3. Looker Developer Bootcamps, including: Knowledge sharing & upskilling of game developers to enable them to drive, maintain and further enhance models in Looker.
4. Business User Training Sessions, including: Knowledge sharing & upskilling of business teams, from product development, user experience to operations, to easily access critical game KPIs, build their own reports, and action insights as these occur.

A significant focus on this project was the delivery and enablement of 16 data experiences which captured all relevant KPIs for each team. These data experiences reported on key metrics in real-time, including: Game Performance, Back-End Performance, Player Retention, Engagement and Churn, In-Game Feature Performance, In-App Purchase Monetisation, and Ad Monetisation.