Game g = new Game();

I started a LinkedIn group to talk about Business Intelligence and Data Mining for all kinds of games – social, browser, console, PC, mobile.

As I have posted before, I think this is a very interesting topic, but somehow there does not seem to be a lot of information available – so let’s talk about how you approach it, what kind of tools and frameworks do you use, how you integrate the various data sources, what kind of (automated or manual) decisions and optimizations you feed back into your game design and/or virtual economy parameters, and so on.

So, whether you already have vast experience in that area, or you just starting out, join now and let everybody know!

Another new social game coming from Vienna – TeamVienna’s “Zombiees” started their private alpha today on Facebook.

At a glance it seems that a majority of Vienna’s finest game developers are all creating social or web games or frameworks –  spielwerk, mipumi, platogo, Team Vienna, fatfoogoo …

Special gratulations to socialspiel for winning the Austrian Staatspreis for Push!

A project that I have been working on during my employment as a development team manager at VeriSign has been the base for an open source version:

EasyRec enables you to include item recommendations based on the behaviour of your website users.

From their website:

User Actions are sent to the easyrec using the REST API. Possible actions are viewing, buying or rating an item.

These user actions are stored in the database of the Recommendation Engine.

The provided Analyzers periodically analyze all recorded data for identifying patterns to generate recommendations.

These Recommendations can be accessed through calls to the easyrec webservice API and presented to a user.

I left VeriSign in 2008, so it will be quite interesting for me to see how it evolved.

I just came across Turiya Media, a startup concentrating on providing data mining for social and mobile games that sell virtual goods.

Founded in 2009, and they won the “Best Startup” prize at last year’s Game Developer Conference, but even now they still appear to be in stealth phase.

Interestingly, I have been thinking about data mining since I was working on Atlantis at plazz entertainment. Having talked with a lot of developers and publishers, it seems that most of them rely on basic data aggregations and averages as a basis for their decisions to optimize, while obviously it would be very rewarding to segment your customers into groups and and target them more specifically, predicting revenue curves and lifetime value, presenting them items to purchase that other, “similar” users have bought, etc.

If you are game developer (or publisher) using data mining techniques, or are interested in this topic, please contact me via Xing or LinkedIn.

Some people noticed the updates on my Xing and LinkedIn profiles.

Although I have not been able to talk a lot about my current work or employer, chances are that this will change soon.

Expect more frequent updates soon.