Big Data and Video Games

Big Data and Video Games

Video games are one of the most recent and challenging frontiers for big data analysis.  Over the past decade the market for video games had grown from 200 million active users to over 1.5 billion active users.  The data gathered from the game Battlefield 3 alone exceeds 1 TB per day.  This data can be visualized in what are called heat maps.  

As you can see from the heat map above, the red areas indicate high levels of player activity in these parts of the map, while the blue areas indicted areas of low activity.

Electronic Arts, one of the largest game companies, hosts 2.5 billion game sessions with 275 million users per month.  This translates to over 50 terabytes of data generate each day.  Companies can use this data in a variety of different ways from see if in game advertising is effective, are new additions to the game interface user friendly, and improving the overall game experience.  Needless to say, big data is playing a vital role in the way video games are developed and will continue to be an area of interest for some time to come.

Source:  http://strataconf.com/strata2013/public/schedule/detail/27603#