Global Game Market Research Articles

Beyond the Meta: Leveraging Game Design Parameters for Patch-Agnostic Esport Analitics

Esport games comprise a sizeable fraction of the global games market, and is the fastest growing segment in games. This has given rise to the domain of esports analytics, which uses telemetry data from games to inform players, coaches, broadcasters and other stakeholders. Compared to traditional sports, esport titles change rapidly, in terms of mechanics as well as rules. Due to these frequent changes to the parameters of the game, esport analytics models can have a short life-spam, a problem which is largely ignored within the literature. This paper extracts information from game design (i.e. patch notes) and utilises clustering techniques to propose a new form of character representation. As a case study, a neural network model is trained to predict the number of kills in a Dota 2 match utilising this novel character representation technique. The performance of this model is then evaluated against two distinct baselines, including conventional techniques. Not only did the model significantly outperform the baselines in terms of accuracy (85% AUC), but the model also maintains the accuracy in two newer iterations of the game that introduced one new character and a brand new character type. These changes introduced to the design of the game would typically break conventional techniques that are commonly used within the literature. Therefore, the proposed methodology for representing characters can increase the life-spam of machine learning models as well as contribute to a higher performance when compared to traditional techniques typically employed within the literature.

Visualization of Muslims in Video Game as a Leading Image of Islam for Society

Economically, the global game market generates a profit of around IDR 2.2 trillion in 2020. Half of this revenue comes from the Asia Pacific region. Games can no longer be underestimated as a form of communication technology media that can affect human life. In video games there are messages conveyed to the players, these messages can be ideological, political, economic, social and cultural. One of the messages in the game world that is interesting to study is the image of Muslims in the world of games developed by developers from the West or Europe that display cultural bias, especially since the 9/11 incident in the United States until its development in 2022. This study aims to find a conceptual formulation in the application of imagery of a religion, especially Islam in game media. This research is oriented towards explanations in anticipation of religious phenomena/symptoms in supporting the process of its application in the game world as a technological medium. The method used in this research is descriptive qualitative research with the method of library data. This research was conducted by examining the visual representation of visual symbols of the Islamic religion in various video games, especially video games developed by western developers, then associating them with the activities in the game. In this study the description uses the facts from the data obtained as they are. The results of this research are expected to show the formulation of the concept in representing Islam in the game world and become the correct reference in its application. The results show that in the early 2000s, information about Muslims was minimal so that Muslim visualizations were often used as antagonistic positions and tended to be people from the Middle East, and over time, up to 20 years later, Muslim positions could be positioned better. The conclusion is that Islam is a religion for all races, therefore it is not correct to describe Islam only to one race. Hijab is the most appropriate way to visually represent Muslim women in games, or keffiyeh / shemagh even though it is a cultural artefact from the Arabs, but its existence has also spread to other Islamic countries and is firmly entrenched in the minds of the general public as a hallmark of Muslims. so that keffiyeh/shemagh can become one of Islamic identities, even though it is not quite right.

PerCLTV: A General System for Personalized Customer Lifetime Value Prediction in Online Games

Online games make up the largest segment of the booming global game market in terms of revenue as well as players. Unlike games that sell games at one time for profit, online games make money from in-game purchases by a large number of engaged players. Therefore, Customer Lifetime Value (CLTV) is particularly vital for game companies to improve marketing decisions and increase game revenues. Nowadays, as virtual game worlds are becoming increasingly innovative, complex, and diverse, the CLTV of massive players is highly personalized. That is, different players may have very different patterns of CLTV, especially on churn and payment. However, current solutions are inadequate in terms of personalization and thus limit predictive performance. First, most methods just attempt to address either task of CLTV, i.e., churn or payment, and only consider the personalization from one of them. Second, the correlation between churn and payment has not received enough attention and its personalization has not been fully explored yet. Last, most solutions around this line are conducted based on historical data where the evaluation is not convincing enough without real-world tests. To tackle these problems, we propose a general system to predict personalized customer lifetime value in online games, named perCLTV. To be specific, we revisit the personalized CLTV prediction problem from the two sub-tasks of churn prediction and payment prediction in a sequential gated multi-task learning fashion. On this basis, we develop a generalized framework to model CLTV across games in distinct genres by heterogeneous player behavior data, including individual behavior sequential data and social behavior graph data. Comprehensive experiments on three real-world datasets validate the effectiveness and rationality of perCLTV, which significantly outperforms other baseline methods. Our work has been implemented and deployed in many online games released from NetEase Games. Online A/B testing in production shows that perCLTV achieves a prominent improvement in two precision marketing applications of popup recommendation and churn intervention.

중국 게임 <원신>의 트랜스-내셔널 스토리월드 구축

In the era of the 4th industrial revolution, it is undeniable that the cultural and economic impact of the game industry, which is the forefront industry of the IP (Intelligent Property) value chain, is becoming increasingly important. Amid this trend, identifying recent trends in the game industry and major game contents in other countries and analyzing their success factors are essential tasks for cultural content industry and its researchers. Meanwhile, China, not only as a content consumer but also as a content producer, is increasing its influence in all directions through the expansion of IT infrastructure in line with its rapid economic growth. In this context, this article targets China's open-world CCG RPG game Genshin Impact. The game emerges as an important analysis target in several contexts, including its popularity established in the global game market and its special position as a ‘Chinese game’. In terms of content creation, operation, and marketing, this article aims to analyze Genshin Impact’s Trans-nationality strategy beyond ‘Chinese characteristics’ or ‘Chinese characteristics’. Secondly, this article focus on the ‘Character Moe’ code that functions as a key mechanism of the storyworld construction and a business model of this game. Through this, this article intends to examine the reason of Genshin Impact’s global success and popularity as a trans-national storyworld.

Video games development in the periphery: cultural dependency?

ABSTRACT Video games developers engage with their creations, and games in general, in profoundly emotional ways. Since the industry became a mass-market phenomenon, a growing body of research has emerged interrogating the connections between developers and the games they produce and how these connections relate to broader affective issues seen in the cultural and creative industries. Most of the research in this field focuses on core markets such as the United States (US), Europe and Japan, leaving a significant gap of empirical research in peripheral locations. While emotional and affective issues are also present in peripheral games development, games production in these locations is often influenced by core-like global cultural tropes. Drawing on ideas and concepts about immaterial labour and based on semi-structured interviews, the analysis shows that many Chilean developers often see Japanese and North American games as the primary source of inspiration. As a result, the periphery’s games are essentially locked into the tropes, themes, and core markets’ characters. While this might be viewed as disadvantageous, Chilean developers have identified this trait as a major strength when competing in the global game market.

How the Business Model of Customizable Card Games Influences Player Engagement

In this paper, we analyze the gameplay data of three popular customizable card games where players build decks prior to gameplay. We analyze the data from a player engagement perspective, how the business model affects players, how players influence the business model and provide strategic insights for players themselves. Sifa et al. found a lack of cross-game analytics, whereas Marchand and Hennig-Thurau identified a lack of understanding of how a game's business model and strategies affect players. We address both issues. The three games have similar business models but differ in one aspect: the distribution model for the cards used in the game. Our longitudinal analysis highlights this variation's impact. A uniform distribution creates a spread of decks with slowly emerging trends while a random distribution creates stripes of deck building activity that switch suddenly each update. Our method is simple, easily understandable, independent of the specific game's structure, and able to compare multiple games. It is applicable to games that release updates and enables comparison across games. Optimizing a game's updates strategy is the key, as it affects player engagement and retention, which directly influence businesses' revenues and profitability in the $95 billion global games market.

Determinants of growth and decline in mobile game diffusion

Rapidly advancing mobile technology has made mobile games a leader in the global games market. As the market size of mobile games has grown, the competition has also accelerated enormously. Thus, in order to ensure success, mobile games must sustain their initial boom for a long time, as well as attract enough users to solidify their installed base. The purpose of this research is to detect diffusion patterns and identify the determinants of mobile games' growth and decline hazards. The results show that mobile games have a distinctive brand-level life cycle in which the growth possibility decreases monotonically over time after the release, while the decline possibility rises after reaching the peak and then later begins to fall. This paper shows how the games' characteristics affect their attracting/holding power. The study provides implications for developers and distributors in terms of how to design, market, and manage mobile games.

확산모형과 군집분석을 이용한 게임제품의 흥행요소 분석

As the global game market has been more competitive, it has been important to analyze success factors of game products. In this paper, we applied a Bass Diffusion Model and Clustering Analysis to identify the success factors of games based on data from Steam, an international game platform. By using a diffusion model, we first categorize game products into two groups : successful and unsuccessful games. Then, each group has been analyzed by using clustering analysis based on product features such as genres, price, and minimum system requirements. As a result, success factors of a game have been identified. The result shows that customers in game industry appreciate sophisticated contents. Unlike many other industries, price is not considered as a key success factor in the game industry. Expecially, advanced independent video games (commonly referred to as indie games) with killer contents show competitiveness in the market.

The Role of Fashion in the Characters of Online Games

Abstract This research study aims to discover the relationships among the fashion of characters, storytelling, and game satisfaction in Massive Multiplayer Online Role Playing Games(MMORPG) in order to examine the influence of the fashion of characters in games on storytelling and game satisfaction, and to identify the following constructs: fashion of characters, storytelling, and game satisfaction. The global game market has grown rapidly every year since the introduction of computer games. The size of the global game market in 2010 was 6 billion dollars, and the online game market captured 64.2% of the total market. The competition in the online game market has become increasingly fierce in South Korea. Millions of people now spend several hours per week on MMORPGs, which have several features that attract a large number of users. First, the world of MMORPGs is open and user-oriented. Many game users interact with each other in the same space and play games in their own way. MMORPGs also have continuous...