Hacker News Reader

Comment by mrtksn | Hacker News Reader

Let's think about it. Are games doing analytics? Games are essentially UIs that people pay for the privilege to use.

Although I am sure that contemporary game makers use analytics to understand user behaviour and optimize for in game spending and engagement, at least in the bigger games probably the core experience comes from creative human processes.

The more the analytics the further optimised the game would be towards KPI.

Also, I suspect that Netflix is creating it's materials based on analytics rather than creative human input.

Maybe the problem is not analytics but greed and ill chosen KPI? Pre-total-tracking world, creatives still needed to test ideas and to test ideas you need to be able to measure. They would pay attention to what sells, how people react to a specific line etc.

Maybe it was more fun because it was less optimised for profit?

View on HN

A prime example of analytics driving games is Slay the Spire, where they would record every decision you made and outcomes in the game to better balance the experience and give the player interesting decisions.

https://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/314975/How_Slay_the_Spir...

Slay the Spire does not have subscriptions, loot boxes, etc. so it can optimize for balance, instead of engagement or play time. It's very much the exception.

The risk of analytics is an erosion of your design and vision. You just do whatever makes the numbers go up in the short term.

Valve did this with Portal!

Or at least I feel like they did after playing through the games XD

The games theme felt like a giant analytics test where everything was noted!!

I'm sure Portal was heavily playtested but it hasn't significantly changed after release so there is no reason to believe that they are making changes based on player analytics (even if they are collecting at least some via achievements).

Yes games are doing analytics.

What do you think half of the achievements are for in a game - a very primitive form of analytics. There is usually an achievement for making it past the first level or prologue, there's another one for finishing the game, and probably many more for passing stages of the game. These are all to see how many people progress that far in the game.

Apart from that there's also crash telemetry and other event based tracking included in games.

I believe I read that some games even track what you look at and for how long.

I think for companies like Activision, EA, analytics drive a massive amount of their decision making.

I would even go so far as to posit that Blizzard (a master of psychological manipulation), most decisions are driven by analytics based optimization for engagement FIRST, then mechanics and creative design get to come play.

I have no evidence, nor am I an insider, just an observer and scholar of games.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com