GamesAnalytics hires Activision co-founder
Alan Miller joins team as strategic advisor and director of North American operations
GamesAnalytics, a firm specialising in behavioural analytics for online games set up by Chris Wright and Mark Robinson, has announced that Activision and Accolade co-founder Alan Miller has joined the team.
He's been appointed as strategic advisor and director of North American operations, and will be tooling up a small regional office over the coming months to handle sales and marketing.
"What thrills me is that it's novel," he told GamesIndustry.biz in an interview published today. "It's the first application that I'm aware of that uses analytics at this kind of level in the games industry.
"It shows tremendous promise for improving revenue, but also customer satisfaction - and that's the second part. It serves both players and publishers. I'd be much less interested if I thought we were only doing this to extract more money from publishers..."
He also explained how the company works, and what it is that differentiates GamesAnalytics from other businesses in the sector that also analyse online games.
"We use very sophisticated analysis to look at the entire player data-set, which could be hundreds of gigabytes or terrabytes in size," he said. "We look at it in an abstract way to identify desired behaviours.
"For example, the common problem in the industry is that only 1-2 per cent of online players generally make payments - and a lot of publishers are resigned to that. But we look at that as a great opportunity to bring in additional paying players.
"1 per cent of those 98-99 per cent of non-paying players substantially increases revenue, so if we assign our analytics to look for behaviours that address additional monetisation, we can identify several different patterns of behaviours that players have experienced in the past that lead to this monetisation.
"Then, in real-time, we look at all the active players, see if they're close to this monetisation model - and if they're close to it then we give them very specific marketing messages, like hints, challenges, offers, free goods, instructions and so on, that are delivered in-game to the player to motivate them to move towards these behaviours."
The first part of the two-part interview with Miller is available now; the second part will be published next week.