As a gamer, I was especially interested to see what Electronic Art's Rajat Taneja had to say about big data challenges in video games. Here are some of the key stats from his talk at Strata Santa Clatra 2013:
- There are more than 2 billion gamers worldwide, generating 50 Tb of data per day.
- AAA multiplayer titles like Battlefield generates about 1Tb of data per day from in-game telemetry.
- Social games like Simpsons Tapped Out generate about 150Gb of data per day.
- In a typical month, EA hosts about 2.5 billion game sessions, representing about 50 billion minutes of gameplay.
Taneja said that an important initiative at EA is to be able to move from descriptions of the collected data ("what happened") to predictions about the future ("what happens next"). They've designed an ongoing process of data distillation to extract relevant data from the 50Tb stream, and use that for predictive analytics. I've embedded the video of Taneja's presentation at Strata below:
Microsoft's Dave Campbell also presented the data-collection architecture behind the Xbox platform at Strata.
Very interesting post. It's good to see that game companies are now embracing big data techniques.
"Predictions over descriptions" is something that will be really important.
At GDC Online 2012, I gave a similar talk describing our predictive player scores at Sony Online Entertainment. They are used to optimize the player experience and are an integral part of the player relationship management system at SOE.
Posted by: Nick Lim | April 11, 2013 at 13:30