Forecasting
Creating accurate forecasts requires more than just knowing statistics. It requires a deep understanding of the industry. Competitive launches, international events, major tournaments, and cinematics are a few examples of factors that can significantly alter the trajectory of a brand.
NBI has developed a dynamic, integrated approach to forecasting different metrics, and has provided literally hundreds of accurate forecasts for major game studios, including peak concurrency, DAU/MAU, revenue, and social media buzz levels. Our models are developed to be not only self-adjusting but also to provide insights to medium-term trends impacting your business, along with the granularity to assess the impact of events, releases, and competitor actions.
Behavioral Segmentation
Players interact with games in different ways. Some players may focus exclusively on one or two modes, while others will migrate through various options. These different styles impact how often they play, what rewards they seek, the type of DLC, if any, they prefer, and can be predictive of churn.
Understanding how players group and evolve around these play styles and patterns is critical to understanding the health of your game and enabling you to maximize business outcomes. Using state-of-the-art data reduction and clustering techniques, NBI has helped several AAA titles identify and better understand how different player segments approach the game, the messages that resonate with each segment and mapped player journeys as they widen their experiences within your game. Our approach to behavioral segmentation will help to optimize your recommendation engine and drive your key KPI’s.
Churn
By the time a player leaves, it is very difficult to get them back. Some churn is inevitable, but some can be avoided. NBI helps companies to not only identify the controllable sources of churn and attrition, but also to determine early indicators and warnings, so that action and direct marketing can take place to keep players in the game.
In addition, we differentiate between players who are temporarily dormant (taking a break) versus those who have left for good, in order to better time marketing and content releases.
Business Intelligence Support
Most business intelligence is focused solely on dashboards, KPIs, and looking in the rear-view mirror. NBI’s four stage approach to BI analytics is geared toward changing the trajectory of your title. It starts with understanding the current environment, but does not stop there.
Our next steps include determining root causes of behavior, predicting the future, and then working with our clients to change the trajectory. Our staff has worked on site side by side with client BI staff to help maximize the effectiveness of their data science efforts and drive business success, supporting some of the industry’s most prominent AAA titles.
DLC Maximization
Who buys additional content, and why? There are different “personas” within your player base, and each one has a different revenue potential. NBI has successfully worked with clients to identify not only the personas that currently make a significant number of in-game purchases, but also those who, given the right incentive, would begin to do so.
Whether it is a skin pack, weapon, extra moves/lives, or a new map, additional content represents revenue potential, if it is marketing to the right audience.
Advanced Analytics
Our team of expert behavioral scientists (leveraging the power of our sister organization, NSI Inc.) bring tremendous depth and breadth of expertise in solving some of the industry’s most complex problems. For example, understanding community toxicity may require a social psychologist. Understanding how new content will be viewed by another culture may require a cultural anthropologist.
Determining the best way forward may best be determined by a decision science expert. Our firm helps to bring the best, and most qualified, expertise needed to answer some of the toughest and most critical questions our clients face in terms of understanding player behavior.
Sentiment Analysis
Our customized sentiment analyses and codebooks have been used to help companies prioritize bugs, support product launches, forecast concurrency, evaluate cinematics, and support quality assurance. The video game industry has its own unique language and set of expressions, that often mean something entirely different in other sectors.
For example, saying someone “tanked” in customer service tends to mean they performed poorly, while in video games, the “tank” is often the hero. Our proprietary discourse analysis approach takes into account not only what sentiments are being expressed, but how those sentiments manifest specifically for your industry, genre, and brand. Off the shelf tools are only partially effective; having a true lens into player sentiment requires a deep knowledge of the industry and its unique culture.
MaxCal
Our game event tracking app categorizes and stores significant events for 20 major video game titles from the initial launch to this week’s in-game events, patches, tournaments, and DLC releases. Enable robust competitive analysis, forecast revenue, strategically position your title launches, and improve player engagement. To date, MaxCal has tracked hundreds of in-game events for some of the industry’s top titles; it is fully customizable to include titles and competitors of your choosing.
In addition to this, MaxCal helps you track holidays, significant industry, and sporting events worldwide to understand the broader landscape and improve your title’s performance.
Additional Services
The NBI team brings a broad set of experience to help solve a wide variety of complex issues across a variety of disciplines. Some of the additional services we have provided for clients include: survey research, focus groups, subject matter expert elicitation, organizational barrier assessment, cognitive bias assessment and training, ad hoc analysis, and change management consulting.