economy of free games and technologies for data-driven game design
TRANSCRIPT
![Page 1: Economy of free games and technologies for data-driven game design](https://reader034.vdocuments.us/reader034/viewer/2022052116/54bb6ba54a7959f05b8b4571/html5/thumbnails/1.jpg)
Economy of free gamesand
technologies for data-driven game design
UNAgames
http://www.unagames.com
December 2013
Daniele Benegiamo Erika Vespa
![Page 2: Economy of free games and technologies for data-driven game design](https://reader034.vdocuments.us/reader034/viewer/2022052116/54bb6ba54a7959f05b8b4571/html5/thumbnails/2.jpg)
Economy of free games
![Page 3: Economy of free games and technologies for data-driven game design](https://reader034.vdocuments.us/reader034/viewer/2022052116/54bb6ba54a7959f05b8b4571/html5/thumbnails/3.jpg)
Tapsteroids: the game
Tapsteroids is a throwback to retro games which picks up on the asteroid genera with a new fresh and different asteroid shooter.
It puts players in charge of protecting spaceships from asteroids.
This is done by launching missiles from the space station at the center of the screen to destroy waves of asteroids tapping on them.
![Page 4: Economy of free games and technologies for data-driven game design](https://reader034.vdocuments.us/reader034/viewer/2022052116/54bb6ba54a7959f05b8b4571/html5/thumbnails/4.jpg)
Tapsteroids: paid version
![Page 5: Economy of free games and technologies for data-driven game design](https://reader034.vdocuments.us/reader034/viewer/2022052116/54bb6ba54a7959f05b8b4571/html5/thumbnails/5.jpg)
Free promotion days
September 5, 2011: 17,000 downloads
August 10, 2012: 4,000 downloads
![Page 6: Economy of free games and technologies for data-driven game design](https://reader034.vdocuments.us/reader034/viewer/2022052116/54bb6ba54a7959f05b8b4571/html5/thumbnails/6.jpg)
Monetization models for free games
Freemium Free-to-play Ad-supported
![Page 7: Economy of free games and technologies for data-driven game design](https://reader034.vdocuments.us/reader034/viewer/2022052116/54bb6ba54a7959f05b8b4571/html5/thumbnails/7.jpg)
Tapsteroids v1.2
![Page 8: Economy of free games and technologies for data-driven game design](https://reader034.vdocuments.us/reader034/viewer/2022052116/54bb6ba54a7959f05b8b4571/html5/thumbnails/8.jpg)
Tapsteroids v1.2
![Page 9: Economy of free games and technologies for data-driven game design](https://reader034.vdocuments.us/reader034/viewer/2022052116/54bb6ba54a7959f05b8b4571/html5/thumbnails/9.jpg)
Tapsteroids v1.2
![Page 10: Economy of free games and technologies for data-driven game design](https://reader034.vdocuments.us/reader034/viewer/2022052116/54bb6ba54a7959f05b8b4571/html5/thumbnails/10.jpg)
Tapsteroids: free version
![Page 11: Economy of free games and technologies for data-driven game design](https://reader034.vdocuments.us/reader034/viewer/2022052116/54bb6ba54a7959f05b8b4571/html5/thumbnails/11.jpg)
Advertising networks
![Page 12: Economy of free games and technologies for data-driven game design](https://reader034.vdocuments.us/reader034/viewer/2022052116/54bb6ba54a7959f05b8b4571/html5/thumbnails/12.jpg)
Advertising networks
![Page 13: Economy of free games and technologies for data-driven game design](https://reader034.vdocuments.us/reader034/viewer/2022052116/54bb6ba54a7959f05b8b4571/html5/thumbnails/13.jpg)
Projections
26,500 active users $270 ads revenue
↓$0.0102 ARPU
Average Revenue Per User
1,000,000 MAU
to earn $10,000/m
![Page 14: Economy of free games and technologies for data-driven game design](https://reader034.vdocuments.us/reader034/viewer/2022052116/54bb6ba54a7959f05b8b4571/html5/thumbnails/14.jpg)
Technologies for Data-Driven Game Design
![Page 15: Economy of free games and technologies for data-driven game design](https://reader034.vdocuments.us/reader034/viewer/2022052116/54bb6ba54a7959f05b8b4571/html5/thumbnails/15.jpg)
Data Driven Game Design
Design
Analyze
DevelopData
![Page 16: Economy of free games and technologies for data-driven game design](https://reader034.vdocuments.us/reader034/viewer/2022052116/54bb6ba54a7959f05b8b4571/html5/thumbnails/16.jpg)
Metrics
● Problem:– UX / Engagement / Flow are not
quantitative traits
– Unknown “cause-effect” dynamics
● Solution:– Measure events with quantitative traits
affecting the dynamics of the system
– Key Performance Indicator (KPI)(DAU, MAU, WAU, Stickiness, Retention, Churn, Duration,ARPU, DARPU, ARPPU, k-Factor, Lifetime, LTV, LNV, …)
![Page 17: Economy of free games and technologies for data-driven game design](https://reader034.vdocuments.us/reader034/viewer/2022052116/54bb6ba54a7959f05b8b4571/html5/thumbnails/17.jpg)
“Hosted” systems
● Flurry (free)
● Apsalar (free)
● Localytics (free community edition, open source client)
● Countly (hosted, open source client & server)
● Google Mobile App Analytics (free)
● Kontagent
![Page 18: Economy of free games and technologies for data-driven game design](https://reader034.vdocuments.us/reader034/viewer/2022052116/54bb6ba54a7959f05b8b4571/html5/thumbnails/18.jpg)
Analytics System
● “What is it?”– Data logger (Client/Server)
– Data analyzer
![Page 19: Economy of free games and technologies for data-driven game design](https://reader034.vdocuments.us/reader034/viewer/2022052116/54bb6ba54a7959f05b8b4571/html5/thumbnails/19.jpg)
Data Logger
● Client– Lightweight
– Fault tolerant
● Server– Stateless
– Secure
● Database– Write-
bounded
– Distributed store
![Page 20: Economy of free games and technologies for data-driven game design](https://reader034.vdocuments.us/reader034/viewer/2022052116/54bb6ba54a7959f05b8b4571/html5/thumbnails/20.jpg)
Client
● Runtime performances● Multi-threading● Data caching● Compressed chunks (gzip vs bandwidth vs HTTPS)
● Distributed “session id” (UUID, stateless server)
![Page 21: Economy of free games and technologies for data-driven game design](https://reader034.vdocuments.us/reader034/viewer/2022052116/54bb6ba54a7959f05b8b4571/html5/thumbnails/21.jpg)
Server
● PHP– Problem: database connection pooling
– Solution: application server (Java servlet, …)
● Tolerant to duplicated data
![Page 22: Economy of free games and technologies for data-driven game design](https://reader034.vdocuments.us/reader034/viewer/2022052116/54bb6ba54a7959f05b8b4571/html5/thumbnails/22.jpg)
Database
● PostgreSQL● Key / Value store
– hstore (NoSQL)
● Horizontal scaling– Load balancing
![Page 23: Economy of free games and technologies for data-driven game design](https://reader034.vdocuments.us/reader034/viewer/2022052116/54bb6ba54a7959f05b8b4571/html5/thumbnails/23.jpg)
Data analyzer
● Data store– Read-bound
● Numerical analysis– CPU-bound
– Memory-bound
– “Knowledge”-bound
![Page 24: Economy of free games and technologies for data-driven game design](https://reader034.vdocuments.us/reader034/viewer/2022052116/54bb6ba54a7959f05b8b4571/html5/thumbnails/24.jpg)
Data store
● Re-arrange data into suitable formats:– Reduce loading times
– Reduce memory consumption
– Optimize data for used access patterns
– In R: saveRDS(), readRDS()
Database
Data store
Data store
Data store
![Page 25: Economy of free games and technologies for data-driven game design](https://reader034.vdocuments.us/reader034/viewer/2022052116/54bb6ba54a7959f05b8b4571/html5/thumbnails/25.jpg)
Numerical analysis
● Mostly statistical analysis● R (or Scilab, Octave, Matlab, …)
![Page 26: Economy of free games and technologies for data-driven game design](https://reader034.vdocuments.us/reader034/viewer/2022052116/54bb6ba54a7959f05b8b4571/html5/thumbnails/26.jpg)
R tips
● Package “bigmemory” (allows analysis of datasets larger than available RAM)
● Package “data.table” (faster operations on large data.frame)
● Package “parallel” (explicit parallelism for multi-core CPUs)
● Vectorization, vectorization, vectorization!● http://cran.r-project.org/web/views/HighPerformanceComputing.html
![Page 27: Economy of free games and technologies for data-driven game design](https://reader034.vdocuments.us/reader034/viewer/2022052116/54bb6ba54a7959f05b8b4571/html5/thumbnails/27.jpg)
Problems
● Big Data● Scalability of numerical algorithms
– In the future (maybe): Hadoop, Mahout, …
– Currently: Amazon WS (large instances: 64-bits, 32 v-cores, 244 GB RAM)
● Most useful analysis are game-dependent– You need the right data
– You have to spot the rightformulas
![Page 28: Economy of free games and technologies for data-driven game design](https://reader034.vdocuments.us/reader034/viewer/2022052116/54bb6ba54a7959f05b8b4571/html5/thumbnails/28.jpg)
Thanks!
Daniele [email protected]@UNA_daniele
UNAgames
http://www.unagames.com
Erika [email protected]@UNA_erika