The Japanese firm’s analysts were drowning in data processing and report generation duties rather than focusing on strategic innovation.
In recent years, a global gaming firm specializing in video console games had noticed the increasing importance of the mobile game sector. In order to increase its market share, it needed data to continuously understand evolving gamer needs and enable business and development teams to make informed decisions.
Typically, its teams of analysts for each game title have to conduct complex analyses spanning vast amounts of game data and external data from various sources, including social media and advertisements, to improve games. Many routine reports need to be generated to fulfill analytical requirements, which often require system engineers to create algorithms that incorporate new analytical indicators and external data.
This manual approach was making it difficult and time-consuming for teams to gain strategic insights flexibly and promptly. According to Masaki Takeuchi, business planning Section Manager, Game Contents & Service Business Division, SEGA, the firm needed to “free analysts from the routine work and enable them to spend more time solving complex analysis challenges. By extracting better insights from more data sources faster, our employees can better understand market movements and evaluate game performance from multiple perspectives.”
Takeuchi was referring to the firm’s adoption of a cloud data platform to become more data-driven. Its analysts can now automatically generate 450 different reports, reducing the average analytics workload by 170 hours per game title. Analysts can now also independently collect, process, and analyze data from external sources without writing complex algorithms.
Result: the firm can acquire gamer insights more quickly, detect problems earlier, verify strategy hypotheses, plan improvements and change direction quickly in response to market trends.
Said Hiroshi Imai, Country Manager, QlikTech Japan K.K., the firm’s chosen cloud data platform: “We are pleased to help SEGA conduct data analysis more efficiently, leading to new game insights. Sega can (now) benefit from real-time information that triggers immediate actions, further developing (its) data-driven corporate culture for even more exciting games.”
