Alan Miller: Part 1
The Activision co-founder on why he's joined the GamesAnalytics team
No, it's a huge challenge, and there are two phases to the analysis we perform. One is the initial analysis to identify all the desired behaviour patterns, and that has to be done over a period of a few weeks, studied offline. It's a combination of modelling and techniques, but it's significantly driven by human insight.
So we have a staff of very experienced analysts in the UK that perform that analysis, and once we've identified all of the desired behaviours, we get together with the game publisher and talk with them to define dozens to hundreds of very specific marketing messages that are designed to motivate the players to do specific things - and those things are to propel that player towards the desired behaviour.
Once we've aligned those marketing messages, then we enter the real-time phase and the our software will scan every active player - that can be thousands, hundreds of thousands or even millions of concurrent active players... and that's a big technical challenge.
We evaluate all of them to see if they're getting close to any of the desired behaviours, and when they start to get close, we signal the game to deliver one of the pre-defined marketing messages to that specific player. They're individually assessed and targeted marketing messages designed to accomplish specific things.
Zynga's approach to analytics is a common route for the social games industry, and there's one provider called Contagion that provides packages to help publishers preform A-B testing. Now, that's actually very different to what GamesAnalytics does.
To use an analogy - I have family in dairy farming - that approach that Kontagent provides gives a very high altitude view on the cattle, and it can tell you that 80 per cent of them are in Field A, and 20 per cent in Field B. It can also give you other global information, and that's very useful to publishers.
GamesAnalytics, because we do behavioural analytics at the individual player level, instead of looking at the entire herd, we look at each individual cow and can tell you a lot about that individual cow - and predict its behaviour.
Then, instead of just providing analytical results, we take it another step further and deliver immediately actionable marketing. In this analogy it would be sending a message to the farmer to have one of his field hands go out and milk a certain cow in a certain place - and tell you how much milk to expect from it.