Fun with Steam Statistics

by The Acagamic

Our favorite gam­ing plat­form Steam has not only become one of my favorite tools for pur­chas­ing games, but it also seems to sport some inter­est­ing fea­tures for sta­tis­tics related to Valve’s games.

Now, being the nice guys they are, they make some of those avail­able to the pub­lic. I find espe­cially the sta­tis­tics they report about num­ber and loca­tions of player deaths of high inter­est. They also include some pretty visu­al­iza­tions in the forms of heat map overviews of the lev­els as to where most play­ers died on the bot­tom of the episode 2 page. You gotta love this approach. I always preach that is impor­tant to know your play­ers, your con­sumers, the end user, the per­son that will use your prod­uct, play your game. Valve has totally under­stood this phi­los­o­phy and are min­ing mean­ing­ful data on their player demo­graphic, an approach which will cer­tainly be copied by many com­pa­nies soon as they become aware of the ben­e­fits. Now, while it may be inter­est­ing also for graph­ics cards com­pa­nies and third party con­trac­tors that Valve may be work­ing with to know the tech specs of the tar­get machines, it is of much higher value to know how play­ers actu­ally play your game. Where they die. How often they die. Even much fur­ther: how they feel when that hap­pens. I hope to see more of these sig­nif­i­cant gam­ing sta­tis­tics become a part of the game devel­op­ment process. Maybe even a step closer towards game research and see how our exper­i­ments can feed back into the design process of games... Ok, you caught me dream­ing for a moment there. :)

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