Speaker for the data [blog post]

In the past ten years the gaming industry has exploded from 200 million active gamers to over 1.5 billion worldwide. And these gamers are playing on multiple devices, all hours of the day, in different languages, across the globe. Like wildlife biologists looking for patterns in the ebb and flow of migrating water buffalo across the African savannah, the question that we ask ourselves as game researchers is, “what can looking at a large group of gamers tell us that looking at just one doesn’t?” When a wildlife biologist ventures into the wild they are not looking to observe the lone water buffalo in order to establish patterns of behaviour, they are looking for the group and what the group can tell them about water buffalo in general. By nature gamers are physically separated by language and continents while virtually they construct armies united in providing an unlimited data set that goes nowhere except to their respective platforms and Internet providers. This is where big data comes in and researchers worldwide fall to our knees to plea for more of it.