Increasing Player Loyalty and Engagement
The deltaDNA platform is designed to achieve hyper-fast performance on huge data sets. The back end of the platform has two state-of-the-art database clusters, with Vertica serving as the data warehouse and Volt Active Data as the in-memory, real-time database. deltaDNA uses Volt Active Data’s in-memory database to provide real-time responses to player behaviors, so deltaDNA platform users can respond automatically as their players continue to play the game. This real-time analytics approach ensures that offers to players can be made at exactly the right time to optimize player acceptance.
While some very popular games can have as many as 100 million players, game providers usually need to have four to five million players to become profitable.
Typically, only 1 or 2% of these players will spend any money. “If you can boost the number of paying players from 1% to 1.2%, you can massively increase revenues,” Wright explained. “The ability to identify a small set of very important users based on a huge number of events lets us identify players likely to spend money. We need the ability to make the right decision, based on the right data at the right time, so each gaming experience can be tailored in real-time to encourage retention.”
Keeping players engaged and enjoying themselves leads to monetization, but this requires the ability to quickly adjust the game based on the interests and skills of each player. According to Wright, “Our customers need to be able to track each player, analyze their experience, and make intelligent decisions to encourage retention so they can maximize revenue opportunities. Volt Active Data allows our customers to make the right decisions based on fast analysis of a very small percentage of a very large volume of data. We can help customers increase player retention by as much as 200% and revenues by 20-40% by providing micro-personalization of each player’s experience.”
A significant shift to FTP across all gaming platforms has made it critical for developers to increase player loyalty and engagement by creating a “sticky” experience that translates into increased revenue. Giving players the kind of game they want means being able to monitor and respond to different behaviors instantly via micro-personalization. But performing this level of in-depth analysis on high-velocity event data streaming in from games—many of which have millions of monthly active users—requires data management that’s smarter and faster than ever. deltaDNA selected Volt Active Data after performing an extensive market evaluation of big data and in-memory databases. Volt Active Data supports deltaDNA’s high throughput and scalability requirements while also enabling complex decision-making on real-time data streams. It is an in-memory
SQL database that combines analytics on live data feeds with transaction processing in a single, horizontal scale-out platform. It runs on commodity hardware in a parallel processing, shared-nothing architecture, and is built to tap the value of fast data, or data in motion.
“We needed a front-end database that could complement our existing big data analytics, ingest massive volumes of data, and enable automated decisions for each player to optimize revenue opportunities,” Wright stated. “When we looked at the databases available, we couldn’t find anything that could match Volt Active Data and could allow us to respond to each player in sub-millisecond timeframes. We couldn’t find anything else that could deliver in-memory, fast processing capabilities while maintaining transaction consistency.”