Mining gaming data will push eSports to new frontiers for all stakeholders, argues this analytics expert.
The eSports sector is becoming hugely popular all over the world, especially in the Asia Pacific region. The Southeast Asia market’s revenue alone was expected to grow 13.9% year-over-year in 2019, and the mobile games market was the fastest growing in the world, with revenues increasing by 17.4% compared to the previous year.
Additionally, with the introduction of 5G across the region, the multi-player online gaming sector stands to benefit from new investments by live-streaming platforms and gaming companies that are expected to push eSports into the mainstream.
Across the world, the eSports community is developing rapidly, with the audience watching games expected to reach 645 million people in 2022, from 454 million in 2019. The Asia Pacific region accounted for 57% of the frequent viewer audience. These viewers are oft en players themselves who cultivate great influence in specific games on platforms such as Twitch.
For eSports to continue to flourish in Southeast Asia’s distinct markets, it is incredibly important for brands to understand the gaming community’s motivations including why, what, and how much they play. This knowledge is vital to refining how the gaming community is marketed, as competition heats up in the region.
Gaming data is invaluable for improving the player and audience experiences, and developing innovations quickly based on their input and behavior. As investments in the sector (and overall interest in gaming and tournaments) grow, how can the eSports industry leverage, and improve, data analytics capabilities to enhance community experiences?
Connecting eSports data
The eSports industry has developed into a serious world where milliseconds make a difference.
In an almost purely-digital ecosystem, the eSports community has produced vast amounts of data that teams and other parties use to discover valuable insights about fans, transactions, and third-party partners. Escalating audience numbers and prize money from tournaments, as well as publicity for the industry, have simultaneously created a need for analytics companies to build and outfit teams and gaming industry players with data software.
From a player performance perspective alone, teams analyze spatial movement and player reactions within games and possible actions. They must also manage game currency and resources, as well as patch changes and regular game updates.
Capturing, analyzing, and sharing these vast data points is no easy feat, and it requires the latest technology to help data scientists mine the valuable data that will help players, teams and third parties to compete and win.
This ecosystem of stakeholders is highly-dependent on the game publisher’s data. Participants, viewership numbers, and game results are also important data points being accessed and analyzed during tournaments by third parties seeking to enhance fan experiences and increase revenues. In fact, application programming interfaces (APIs) enable many of the technologies supporting eSports and modern sports, creating the hands-on experiences we enjoy today.
As a result, game publishers and industry players will need to use management platforms to create products and distribute data that is consumable by the entire community. These cloud-native API management platforms enable third-party apps, mobile apps, and connected devices to interact with data outside the firewall, making the data sharing process simple, fast, and safe.
Data providers can use a portal to handle traffic and make data more consumable for their stakeholders. It is also a great way for game developers and other stakeholders to stay connected with their communities and gain insights into their needs (e.g., designing new games, promoting games or brands, improving experiences, and betting). This increase in the speed, security, streaming, and reliability of eSports data will allow the industry to fuel future innovative gaming developments and revenue growth for the industry.
Strong API management and data analytics capabilities will be critical to the future of eSports in the region to ensure the accuracy, consistency and relevance of live and historical data.
With quick, secure access to relevant data, stakeholders in the eSports community can obtain the insights needed to improve player performance, enhance gaming experiences and continue eSports’ move to the mainstream.
