My background is twofold – I started out as a software developer for Alcatel, but switched into some project management, development lead, CTO and managing director positions, both inside and outside of the games industry (namely Rockstar Games, VeriSign, and a small german startup called plazz entertainment).

From my perspective, BI or data mining (if you can call it that) in the “traditional” retail-oriented games industry (think Rockstar shipping Manhunt 2 or Grand Theft Auto) back in 2005 has been pretty basic, and mainly focused on usability and play testing, like generating 2D heat maps for level architectures from people playtesting the game – with that, the game designers and level designers could determine which were the most and least frequently visited areas in a level, and be use that information to change the level structure and/or level elements accordingly to guide the player better.

Of course, Microsoft/Bungie (Halo) has been very active in that field, doing much more than that, and also talking about their approach and findings quite openly at conferences.

Things changed for me when I became CTO of a german startup, doing their own “Club Penguin” clone in Germany called “Atlantis“. Initially, we had a freemium (free basic access with premium subscription as option) business model. this was changed to the now typical microtransactions for virtual item sales.

Since we were building the complete platform from scratch, we had a lot of different areas to tackle, so BI was mainly seen as a “hobby” of mine, rather than the strategic necessity for commercial success I thought it is or should be.
Basically, we did aggregated log events from the database (a MySQL single read/write master, multiple read-only slaves setup) per time slot – like number of chat messages per day, time spent online per character per day. We did this using an open source tool called ART.

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On the website, Google Analytics (and Piwik) provided the standard metrics like Visits, Average Time on Site, Bounce Rate. I thought about using Ajax-calls into Google Analytics to track ingame events, but decided against it, not to mix web traffic stats and ingame events (that need to be stored in the database, anyway).

My employment there ended before I had time to research and implement something more elaborate and detailed. I’d be very interested to talk about what others did, what tools or methods you use, and so on.

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!

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!

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.

The thing is, there are some very cool options that appeared over the last 6 months or so, and I hope to be able to share what I will be doing in the future very soon.

This year again, the number of sessions about social, online, casual MMO etc. type of games increased – I should be attending most of the Social & Online Games Summit on Tuesday and Wednesday, and will roam around the following days.

The plan is to cover the most interesting stuff here in the blog – we’ll see how this goes.

If you are in SF and care for a coffee or beer (or have invitations to a hot exclusive party…), let me know.