Consumer Behavior Metrics vs. Engagement Metrics
Aug 4, 01:13 AM
GameShadow has announced a new service called GameShadow metrics, which is another in a genre of what, off the top of my head, I would call consumer behavior metrics. This is the kind of service that measures how much time people spend playing certain games. So you can say, “People who like BioShock also play a lot of Civilization 4 but never play racing games” or what have you. In addition to the more obvious “how much time are people spending on game X” metrics.
There are a bunch of these services. Gamestrata comes to mind as one, although they do not publish their own stats: they actually use feeds from XBLA, IGN/Gamespy, etc., then they aggregate these stats into a web package for consumers. Xfire, the IM/chat service for gamers, publishes statistics on popular games as played by their users. Gamestrata is partnered with a few companies; I’m not sure if Xfire actually sells their data to game companies or publishers. Steam has consumer behavior metrics as well.
I stress that these are consumer behavior metrics because all that they measure is consumption, rather than, say, engagement. They are measuring (a) how many people are playing the game, and (b) for how many hours a week. I would say those two metrics are more on the consumption side than the engagement side because engagement actually says something about the amount a game is played. I could have Battlefield 1942 open in the background for 3 hours while making a sandwich, watching a movie, and waiting for my buddies to get home so we can fire up a game. That would show up in one of these CBM services as 3 hours played, when really it doesn’t tell us all that much about play.
Engagement metrics for video games are things like
- amount of time spent in different activities in the game (versus in a menu screen)
- average number of matches played in a week in a multiplayer deatchmatch game
- total items traded, by volume, value, and type, in an MMORPG
- time spent grouped vs ungrouped in an MMORPG
- time spent using modded content in a game (this points to extended shelf life for a title)
These metrics are incredibly difficult to build a universal plug-and-play type of application for. It’s relatively easy to measure what processes are running right now on the OS and keep track of how long they’ve been running. But to understand what a player is doing in game requires partnership with the game developer to actually put hooks into source code and extract the meaty data.
