March 2025 Release Notes
Beyond Reviews: Unlocking Hidden Insights from Unstructured Customer Data
Edric Tse
Chief Product Officer at Neopets
October 2024 Release notes
Rambhatla Dhananjay Kumar
Player experience Manager at Scopely
April Laws
Lead Social Media & Community Manager at Wooga
Claudia Pons
Community Manager of Monopoly GO! at Scopely
Explore Jeff Parsley's journey as the February Player Insights Champion, recognized by Affogata for his data-driven approach to game improvement through player feedback.
Jeff Parsley
Global Community Manager of EA Sports
Lilian McDowell
CRM Manager at Sciplay
Explore Oyku Kural's journey as the October Player Insights Champion, recognized by Affogata for her data-driven approach to game improvement through player feedback. Gain insights into the role of player input and its impact on community growth, content, and environmental initiatives.
Oyku Kural
Community Manager at Supercell
What matters more? Quantity or quality? Well, how about combining the two for a better understanding of your player community? Nothing will complete better your gaming analytics than adding your player community voice to the mix.
A cross-functional team is a group of a company’s employees, each with different expertise, working towards a common goal. They may also use outsourced consultation but mainly work internally and usually come from the marketing, sales, team, product, finance, and customer service departments.
Colleges are huge traditional institutions all across the USA. College sport is a big thing among fans and television viewers. And March Madness is huge too, referring to the single-elimination colleges' basketball tournament that takes place annually during the last two weeks of March and the first week of April. The 2022 NCAA Men's basketball tournament is already on its way, attracting the attention of college sports fans all across the country. Now, how about adding some crypto and NFT magic, or what others term “madness”, to such March Madness?
Netflix and Spotify changed the way consumers are paying for television and music. In recent times, it seems that more and more gaming services are following suit. Instead of consumers paying for single games, such as was the case when paying for a movie or a song, it is now all about paying a monthly subscription fee for a library full of gaming options. And while Game subscriptions currently account for only 4% of total player spending in the USA and Europe, it is estimated that gaming subscriptions will almost double, between 2020-2025, and reach $11 billion.
Actionable insights, or as some call them actionable analytics, are deep and meaningful findings that stem from analyzing data. In the case of businesses, they usually refer to the analysis of customer feedback for the purpose of taking further actions to improve either a product or a service.
What does a Danish construction toys company that started in 1949 and a major American movie studio have in common? Well, apparently, a lot. The sixth and newest chapter in the massively popular video game combination of the Lego brand and Warner Brothers’ Star Wars franchise resulted in Lego Star Wars - The Skywalker saga, issued to the market on April 5th. Since the previous five editions of the video game alone, with the first one issued in 2005, sold collectively over 50 million units worldwide, expectations for the new version among players were high.
As Russian troops were invading Ukraine on February 24th, the country’s digital transformation minister Mykhailo Fedorove made two quick moves. Two days later, while knowing that money aid would take days or weeks to arrive, he announced Ukraine’s acceptance of in-minute cryptocurrency donations. In mid-March, the country’s pro-crypto efforts continued with his government placing legal crypto exchange moves to allow easier usage by local consumers.
There are various ways by which companies deal with players who stopped doing business with them, namely with those who churned. Player churn is always a headache for businesses, and after they employ churn data analysis and measure what happened, they begin examining why it happened and then focus on efforts that would help reduce player churn. But as the player churn rate is relatively easy to calculate, the reasons for it happening and the means to analyze customer behavior can be, and often are, a tough nut to crack. Sometimes it is the game itself that players complain about, other times it is the company's service that is the cause they churn, and oftentimes it's the competition that comes up with a better game or feature. And as they say, the player knows best.
Art imitating life? Life imitating art? Or in the words of one commentator on Youtube: “It is not a graphic engine…this is art!” This was one typical reaction to the latest generation of Unreal Engine, issued this April by developer Epic Games. As seen in the short Unreal Engine 5 trailer, the scenery and images look artistic but also way too real. The 5th edition of this game engine, which debuted in 1998 and was first showcased in the Unreal video game, has been further improved, as it continues to serve a variety of 3D games as well as film and television projects.
The gaming industry did not stay silent about the Russian army’s invasion of Ukraine. With fundraising efforts such as Fortnite's maker Epic Games’ $144 million collections in aid of victims serving as a leading example, many gamers also voiced their opinions about the war and aid-related issues. Affogata tracked what players had to say about aiding Ukraine on Twitter, during the March 14th-April 17th time frame. As shown by the data tracked and analyzed, many gamers either helped or participated in charity streams and crowd fundraising events, aimed at supporting the Ukrainian victims. Simultaneously, they tweeted their support by cheering the Ukrainian people and by displaying dissent towards the global community and the Russian gamers.
