Data Management and the Video Game Industry

Introduction

The video gaming industry is indisputably one of the most essential and future-thinking sectors that continues to deploy new innovation and technology. Interestingly, the gaming industry has seen a substantial growth in the last decade and has also surpassed the Music ($20.2b) and Box-Office ($42.5b) combined together last year to become the go to form of entertainment. Analysts forecast the video gaming sector to create a revenue close to $250 billion by the year 2025. Thus, it is no surprise as to why technology giants such as Facebook, Google, and Apple plan to enter the gaming industry.

While the prospects of the gaming industry’s growth are undoubtedly astonishing, the competition to gain a piece of the revenue is intense, and consequently, less than 5% of all games produced each year become profitable.

Why is Gaming So Popular?

Previously, gameplay data had a zero lifespan. Today, gaming is being done online, is high-definition, runs on intricate complex scripts, and links users globally in tournaments that are live streamed. That is millions of people, parallelly streaming terabytes of data, with high expectations.

This makes gaming a natural for testing what is possible with regards to resilience and efficiency. Developers have battle-tested the limits of data storage and streaming capacities with fantasy universes and virtual casinos. And they contend with real-world issues, such as accessibility during traffic spikes, user authentication, and safety of user data and transactions.

The present is all about social media and smart phones and this idea has brought down the market for video game consoles such as Xbox, PlayStation, and Nintendo. Not only international countries such as Sony, Electronic Arts (EA), and Microsoft, but also developers are getting into the gaming business as a promising field.

The Trends of the Gaming Industry

Following are the trends to watch out for in the gaming industry:

• The sweet spots of Artificial Intelligence, that is analytics and content generation convert unstructured data into enhanced experiences. Game developers are now looking for ways to deploy AI for better quality and efficiency from voice AI enablement to performance marketing. Employing AI to auto-generate content populates the scenery much faster, thus resulting in subtle details that keep the players more engaged as opposed to monotonous cookie-cutter graphics. Previously, a designer would be required to hand-sketch and render 3D trees in a landscape.
• Testing, QA, and continuous improvement/continuous development (CI/CD) should be at table stakes

Testing is essential in game production; however, it is not just player-centric. Laborious tests reveal quirks and bugs that can makes the revenue (and ratings) go down. Microservices environments and constant enhancement pipelines together make it possible for publishers to push software updates flawlessly to users.

• Keep track of emerging breakthroughs to recognize technological milestones.

Consider blockchain as an example; game developers have faced many early roadblocks with it, but breakthroughs are still being made. This progress can encourage the adoption of the different kinds of blockchain-based smart contracts.

Effective Data Engineering to Enable Data Analytics

We now understand that data analysis can assist gaming companies to accomplish business objectives. Yet, complications start to surface when companies must process data about different events and combine it with other data such as marketing data/ player payment/ to gain insights to discover opportunities for revenue maximization.

It is problematic for gaming companies to collect the massive amount of varied data created across different sources. Handling tedious data retrieval tasks, such as decryption, decompression, structure validation, auditing, error handling and so on always complicates data management.

Conclusion

In conjunction with a data analytics strategy, an effective data engineering strategy facilitates running, growing, and transforming the gaming business by presenting clean, reliable, and consistent data. This, in turn, allows accurate analysis and more dependent decision-making, thus improving gaming operations, mitigating compliance risk, decreasing system breakdowns, and recognizing new opportunities.