How Indian Developers Are Using Data Analytics to Enhance Player Experience

The quick answer to how to play card games would be to collect your cards and arrange them in the right manner in the least possible time. This increases your chances of getting a favourable result. Much like data analytics, where you collect data, analyse it efficiently and quickly, and get a meaningful result.

You may think that data analytics may not have anything in common with rummy games or online games in general. But the truth is that the online games industry in India generates huge amounts of data, with projections of more than 500 million gamers by 2025 and a revenue forecast of $6 billion by 2028.

Data analytics is a function that game developers can no longer ignore. Given its immense strategic importance, data analytics has become a key focus area for many industries.

Role of Data Analytics in the Indian Games Industry

Indian developers can put data analytics into extensive use in various areas. Once they collect the data generated by their systems, developers can filter and cross-refer the data to come up with meaningful insights. These data analytics insights then serve an array of purposes.

Analysis of player data helps developers understand the gamer’s interaction with game mechanics. These act as inputs for the developer to improve the gaming mechanics and the gaming experience. Analysis of player behaviour and preferences also helps developers create the immersive gaming experience that is rated by every gamer today. This is evident in popular adventure games like Raji and Kurukshetra.

India has a sizeable gaming population that enjoys online card sessions with poker and rummy games. To ensure that these gaming sessions are fair, platforms extensively use data analytics. Indian platform RummyCulture has been popular for its Guinness World Record for hosting the world’s largest online rummy tournament and for giving handy tips on how to play rummy. But it doesn’t end there. In the background, the platform has also been using data insights to detect and prevent cheating and fraud in games and transactions. A lot of data analytics go into building security systems that identify and eliminate fraudulent activities during the game in real time.

Analysis of player skills and progression is very helpful in deciding the difficulty levels in games. Indian gamers have an affinity for skill games as well, and these insights are used to offer the ideal levels of challenges in games.

Opportunities and Areas of Influence

The use of data analytics by gaming companies across the world has been well documented. Electronic Arts has used data analytics to gain insights about player behaviour and feedback. Their decisions on aspects like new updates and features were consequently a lot more data-driven.

Candy Crush Saga used data analytics to shape its monetisation strategies. Player data helped the developers to integrate in-game purchases and marketing campaigns more seamlessly into the game. Candy Crush makers, King Digital, used predictive analytics to forecast player behaviour and maximise the potential of their in-game offers.

Ubisoft, the maker of Assassin’s Creed, used data to create player base segmentations and develop a targeted retention strategy. Notably, a game falling out of trend is one of the top three reasons for gamer’s exit in India. Ubisoft adopted a data-driven approach to increase gamer loyalty and reduce their game’s churn rate.

The Director of Data Science for Rummy Culture, Anurag Garg, recently spoke about the platform’s endeavours in data analytics. Rummy Culture does a deeper analysis of player’s gameplay and in-app behaviour. Real-time analysis of data has helped the platform provide a more engaging and personalised experience to rummy enthusiasts.

Based on these examples, it is fair to say that data analytics in gaming can help developers make informed decisions in game development and gaming experience, game monetisation, retention strategies and, of course, fraud prevention.

Enriching Player Experience

As advanced technologies like Augmented Reality (AR) and Virtual Reality (VR) transform the gaming industry, Indian developers will benefit by combining data science with these technologies. Enhancing the immersive experience is high on the agenda for all game developers, and AR/VR are key to interactive gaming experiences.

Analysis of AR/VR data can give Indian developers key insights into player behaviour and preferences, as well as their engagement patterns. This eventually helps developers to optimise their gameplay mechanics and design elements. Data science has been instrumental in the personalisation of services for the customer. In gaming, creating a personalised experience for individual gamers can further enrich the entertainment factor.

Final Thoughts

The presence of 450 million gamers in India gives Indian developers huge data sets to play around with. By using machine learning algorithms, behavioural patterns can be identified and used as the reference point for predictive analytics. For the 1000 gaming studios and developers in India, data analytics can be the strategic advantage needed to add to the three gaming unicorns from the country.