Video Game Taxonomy Archives

Category: Video Game Taxonomy

21 NovemberVideo Game GenreVideo Game Taxonomy

How our Genre Taxonomy Powers Game Design and Discovery

The gaming industry is not only more lucrative than the movie and music markets combined, it is also expanding at a dizzying pace. The industry is projected to grow at a rate of nearly 10% per year in the next four years to reach a market value of more than $360 bn. By 2027, there will be 3 billion gamers worldwide, constituting nearly half the global population. Xbox estimates that over 800000 games are currently available across various platforms, and this number will only grow as the market grows.

But game development is such a risky business that a company has actually come up with an AI de-risking tool that parses a developer’s game concept to see if it’s already been done, and then estimates the idea’s chances of success. The industry is big, but the risks are even bigger. As the number of games increases, e-retailers and subscription platforms will also be hard-pressed to provide tailored recommendations to guide thousands of users to the few standout games they want.

In this blog, we will discuss how our genre taxonomy can power game design, and how our genre labels can organise a game e-retailer’s storefront into a coherent game library perfectly suited for discovery and conversions.

Empowering Developers

In a previous blog, we discussed how our game taxonomy resolves the confusion that results when there is no standard by which genre labels are defined and assigned to various games. This ‘genre muddle’ can handicap game makers, thwarting any attempt at informed game design because they lack a clear blueprint for the type of game they are making. Our robust taxonomy, however, can drive game design choices, allowing developers to allocate costly resources in the right way and even empowering them to reach and surpass their design goals.

This is because our core genre labels allow us to class a variety of seemingly disparate games accurately. This is why we need not rely on marketing to determine that Immortals of Aveum (2023) is a first-person magic shooter; the shooter genre label already accounts for aiming magic projectiles. Even a platformer doesn’t need to be 2D: Sony’s Spider-man games have elements of the platformer – Spider-Man can swing past entire city blocks and land on various ‘platforms’ such as roof-tops and even window panes simply by web slinging. This approach to genre enables a game developer to envision shooters without guns, platformers without jumping, and simulations of impossible worlds where faster-than-light travel is a mundane reality. In essence, our genre definitions, by their very nature, inspire innovations.

In subsequent sections, we will discuss how our genre taxonomy can expand a designer’s vision if they pay attention to key game concepts assigned to games – such data points can become a well of inspiration, potentially transforming the developer’s original idea, especially when they mix and match features from various games to create an entirely new interactive experience.

We will also discuss the challenges of making a game like the souls-like, as the term is a descriptor rather than a well-defined genre in its own right. As such, it requires a particularly strong taxonomy so that the developer can nail down exactly what a souls-like must have, allowing them to create novel variations on a popular template.

Broadening the Creative Vision

In our taxonomy, Portal (2007) is tagged with a data point named ‘environmental manipulation’, referring to the mechanic where you use a gun to shoot portals that instantly teleport the player or in-game objects to other areas of the puzzle enclosure. There are other, similar types of manipulation, however: in Control (2019), the player character can manipulate in-game objects with telekinesis. This is tagged as ‘physics manipulation’. The developer can create their own unique spin on game world manipulation by studying such games.

Moreover, in Portal, the mechanic and the narrative are not really linked: the portal gun is a mere utility, and Portal’s narrative is structured purely around the AI GLaDOS’s comical malice toward the player character.

However, Control ties its gameplay to its theme, setting and tone. The weird powers and items you can use seem to form an integral part of the eerie Federal Bureau of Control, which is tasked with containing and studying phenomena that violate the laws of reality. This close link between gameplay, tone and setting is reflected in our taxonomy. The developer can choose to make a game where the core mechanic and other elements are separate, or a game where the gameplay and other elements come together, and have a good chance of succeeding no matter what decision they take, because both Portal and Control are exhaustively analysed in the taxonomy.

One data point – environmental manipulation – can potentially transform a developer’s vision, making them seek other sources of inspiration to revise or even change their design goals.

Nailing the Souls-Like

When dealing with Portal or Control, the developer is working in a genre with a clear definition, allowing them to take calculated risks. However, the souls-like, or the rogue-like, are not core genres. The ‘souls-like’ was coined after the fact, when studios began to emulate the Dark Souls formula. How, then, can developers use our taxonomy to make such games? They can start with our exhaustive description of the souls-like.

What is a souls-like? A souls-like should contain all of these features:

The player cannot change the difficulty level of the game.
In combat, a few missteps lead to death. Moves like attacks and dodges cost stamina or some other resource, and leave the player vulnerable when this resource is depleted. The player will lose skill points and items on death, but may be able to reclaim lost resources by returning to where they died.
Players must memorise the enemy’s attack patterns and placements to stand a chance of winning.
The hazardous environment is difficult to traverse, and the player must also fight tough enemies placed in tricky areas.
The player respawns at set locations which they have to reach and activate, and this automatically respawns all enemies except for defeated bosses.
There is no direct narrative, it unfolds as the player explores the world.

The above is a precis of the full description in our taxonomy. Despite the difficulty of these games, Elden Ring sold 12 million copies within two weeks, and is still one of the most played games on Steam by concurrent players, proving that a masochistic gaming experience could actually be lucrative.

Our taxonomy contains more than a hundred games that fulfil the criteria mentioned above. A developer looking to emulate and innovate can study how each game delivered its own spin on the souls-like without compromising on its defining aspects.

For instance, Remnant: From the Ashes (2019) and its sequel are shooter souls-likes. The developer Gunfire Games seems to define the ‘shooter’ much like we do: you can’t fire a ranged weapon unless you are aiming, by pressing the gamepad left trigger or the right mouse button. If you don’t, you will swing your melee weapon instead. This makes for fast gunplay, and quick slashes simply by releasing the aim button.

In the Nioh games, your moves consume Ki, a magical substance, instead of stamina. In battle, you can perform a special move called the Ki pulse. This rapidly regenerates your Ki or stamina, but only if you time a button press perfectly, when blue lights coalesce around you after you perform an attack or other move. This encourages the player to remain in the melee, instead of dodging or running away.

The Star Wars: Jedi games feature a difficulty slider, and are hence tagged with the data point souls-like combat, indicating that they are not true souls-likes but take inspiration from the combat in such games. These games give the player the thrill of being a Jedi knight, but make them earn that title with challenging combat. Unlike many souls-likes, which tend to have a dark fantasy theme, these games are set in the beautiful and vibrant Star Wars universe, and can encourage the developer to create a souls-like without its characteristic themes or vibes.

The rulesets for souls-likes, metroidvanias and roguelikes show what all such games have in common. The full taxonomies of such games show how each souls-like or roguelike is unique. And tags like souls-like combat offer more sources of inspiration. A developer can imagine what a souls-like could be, while the taxonomy grounds them in the reality of what a souls-like should be.

Reinventing Game Discovery

Whether a store is selling games or a subscription to its game library, game discovery is vital. As genre influences buying decisions across media, meaningful genre-based recommendations can guide users to the games they will enjoy.

According to the Entertainment Software Association (ESA), shooters have consistently ranked among the top five genres for the past three years, meaning a user is quite likely to search for shooters. Our taxonomy allows the user to both narrow and broaden their search to find the game best suited to their preferences.

If the user wants to narrow their focus, they can be presented with games belonging to shooter subtypes, such as the puzzle shooter Portal or the Borderlands looter shooters. They will also find the stop-n-pop Call of Duty titles and the run-n-gun Halo games.

If the user wants to broaden their search, a toggle can populate the discovery queue with games that are predominantly shooters, but combine other genres as well (based on our four-value system), like Halo Infinite.

The taxonomy also deals properly with terms like action and action-adventure, which are applied indiscriminately as the industry lacks precise definitions for such terms. We have discussed how we deal with the action-adventure moniker in our blog on video game genres, we will provide a brief recap here.Action is a well-defined core genre in our taxonomy: these titles require quick reflexes and good hand-eye coordination, and test your proficiency at using an input device to achieve in-game objectives. As such, shooters, fighting games and even platformers count as action games because they test your manual dexterity. The adventure genre is also clearly defined: it features exploration and/or a strong narrative that gives the player a sense of participating in an adventure. So an action-adventure combines the skill-based mechanics of an action game with the narrative or exploration elements of an adventure game, both in good measure. But each action-adventure is distinguished by its core skill-based mechanic or gameplay loop, such as shooting or fighting, and the action-adventure label is appended to this core genre. No game is just an action-adventure – but it can be an action-adventure shooter, an action-adventure fighting game and so on.

If the gamer uses action-adventure as a filter, the storefront can choose not to display a single game directly under this term, and show action-adventure shooters, action-adventure fighting games and so on, under separate queues or carousels.

The user will not find the Call of Duty games under action-adventure shooters – while these games have basic story modes, they are primarily multiplayer player-vs-player games. However, he will see these games under action shooters. He will not find the Street Fighter games under action-adventure fighting, but will see games like Ghost of Tsushima (2020) or Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice (2019), as they have strong narratives.

If the storefront or platform feels that action-adventure is so well-known that the user should get at least a few results directly linked to the term, it can create a single discovery queue with a few top-selling action-adventure shooters, fighting games and so on. A prompt under each game can then take the user to other action-adventures that belong to the same core genre. In effect, the user can search with loosely defined terms, but still get relevant and precise results.

Ultimately, our taxonomy gives a game platform or subscription service a way to help the user find what they really want, rather than bombarding them with pages full of results under catch-all terms. The need for such an organised game library will only grow as more games are published and more people turn to gaming.

Conclusion

Some games create memorable endings by inverting their core gameplay at the climax. In Assassin’s Creed 2 (2009), Ezio literally casts off all his weapons to engage in a fistfight with the Pope: no stealth, no parkour, no hidden blade – just a punching match at the end of a revenge saga.

In Shadow of the Colossus (2005), the youth Wander finally turns into a shadowy Colossus himself, only to be defeated when the sword he used to kill 16 Colossi is hurled into an abyss. The former is exhilarating; the latter feels tragic: your actions have rebounded on Wander and sealed his fate.

It is unlikely that the developers would have taken such risks with the end-game without mastering their gameplay loop: the climax stands out because the gameplay until then had been so well-defined. Genre determines gameplay, and gameplay determines genre. Our genres can allow developers to nail down the core aspects of their game and create striking variations, inversions and more – in this blog, we have provided only a few use cases where our taxonomy can inform and inspire game design.

For game sellers or subscription platforms, being savvy about genres will only help them foster game discovery. Instead of wallowing in the genre muddle, they can use our taxonomy to great effect, populating their discovery queues with results that match search intent and give the user a plethora of games suitable to them.

Like any classifier, genre is only useful if accurate. For over a decade, we have defined and refined our genre taxonomy with utmost rigour, and this is why we can help gamers find games they love, boost e-retailers’ conversions, and empower developers to achieve and surpass their design goals.

12 JuneVideo Game Taxonomy

Video Game Taxonomy Can Transform Game Development: Here’s How

by Karthik Balasubramanian0 Comments

Every game is like a carefully prepared meal, where each dish, ingredient, spice and garnish are in the right proportions, and each course is served at the right time to create the perfect dining experience.

What if a system allowed you to identify the recipe of a game? What if you could create a gameplay experience with your unique blend of ingredients? Our taxonomy system enables you to do this, and more.

Video Game Taxonomy: An Overview

Our taxonomy is a classification system that has evolved over a decade, fine-tuned by our in-house experts. It allows you to understand every aspect of a game, from fundamentals, like genre, theme and gameplay mechanics to more subjective and nuanced elements such as its moods and vibes. It was built by tearing down games and identifying various elements, big and small, to see what made each game work, what features they possessed and how they emphasised or played down elements to create a distinctive gaming experience. In essence, it tells you what features a game has, and how prevalent any feature is in the game. Simply put, the taxonomy of a game is like its recipe.

Identify & Quantify: The Foundation of our Taxonomy

Most forms of entertainment, like film, television, music and fiction are passively consumed, and have been extensively classified based on the genre, the creator of the artwork, and other relatively stable groupings, especially as these forms of entertainment have matured over the course of decades and even centuries.

Classifying games presents a unique challenge because interactivity is fundamental to gaming. This means that what you will be doing, how important it is over the course of the game, and how often you will be doing it need to be considered if one wants to see what makes a game tick. A game classified without quantification will say little about the full make-up of the game.

That is why the four-value system is the lynchpin of our game taxonomy. It assesses the significance, prevalence and frequency of the various features of each game, creating a full picture of what to expect in any given playthrough, and how each game offers a distinct and unique gaming experience, with its own mix of interactions and features. Below, we discuss each of the four values that can be attached to a game’s features, in detail.

“All or Most” (Defining Features)

Actions or activities you will perform almost all of the time, and features that essentially pervade the game. In a first-person shooter like a Halo game, you will almost always be shooting your way through enemies, from a first-person perspective. In a role-playing game, which offers multiple viable playstyles (including shooting, fighting, magic etc), the descriptive genre of ‘Role Playing’ is the defining feature, and every single possible playstyle or build becomes a ‘key’ feature, discussed below.

“Major” (Key Features)

These refer to actions or activities that you may be performing most of the time, and features present in much of the game. They often distinguish games of the same genre from another. Halo has a great deal of vehicular combat and lets you drive and fly vehicles, whereas a Call of Duty game does not emphasise vehicular activities as much. Those who love the vehicle sequences in Halo may not find much use for a CoD title.

“Significant” (Notable Features)

These are actions or activities you will be performing some of the time, but are nevertheless required to progress through or finish a game’s campaign, and can also refer to features that form an important, if limited, part of the game. For example, boat traversal is the only means of going from one place to another in the God of War series and the game can’t be completed without using the boat. Some levels of certain games can feature locked off areas accessible only by exploring further.

“Minor” (Elemental Features)

Elemental features refer either to activities that the player seldom has to perform to progress, or to activities that are entirely optional. Some games have a single mandatory escort mission, and these count as elements because they form a very small part of the campaign. Cooking in Skyrim is entirely optional – you can cook food that improves your vital stats but potions do the job much better, and making potions (alchemy) is in fact an important part of the game, with its own skill tree.

Classifying Halo Infinite with our 4-Value Quantification System

So how does the four-value system help understand a game, or more importantly, make a new game? Simply put, it’s a quantitative and qualitative analysis that is necessary and sufficient to fully describe what a game offers, how it does what it does – and cloning this game, or making a viable competitor, or a worthy successor, should start first by breaking down the game that you are using as a base.

Using the four-value system to assess Halo Infinite provides vital insights about the game, especially as the system not only captures the differences between the single-player campaign and multiplayer mode, but also the mix of genres that can be associated with the game.

Today’s games often offer plenty of gameplay options, so much so that it becomes hard to pin down what genre they belong to. Halo Infinite is one of many such games. Its defining genres are shooter, action and adventure, while role playing, fighting, driving, flying and even platforming are significant genre elements. Such nuanced genre information is necessary, considering that many gamers choose a new game based on its genre: the more information developers give out about genre, the more likely they are to attract their target audience.

Halo Infinite is the first Halo game to feature a grappling hook mechanic and the hook rapidly grew popular with gamers, who found it very useful in both traversal and combat – it enabled them to move quickly, and also pull objects towards them and then hurl these objects at enemies.

This is a major element (i.e. a key feature) of the single-player campaign, but its use is restricted in multiplayer mode (it is a notable feature); it spawns randomly and is available only to the player quick enough to grab it, whereas the hook is always available to the Master Chief in single-player. In contrast, Doom Eternal’s grappling hook is a key feature in both single-player and multiplayer, and the Slayer, the unnamed hero of the games, can use it in both modes.

Breaking down the genres associated with a game, its various gameplay features, and the prevalence of features in various modes can empower game makers with an intuitive and explicit understanding of how a game works, informing their own creative choices.

Use Cases: How Taxonomy Can Inform Game Dev

Do you want to make a game that combines all the best elements of a certain genre? Do you want to see how some games went awry, and how some games flourish because they get the formula just right, creating an experience greater than the sum of its parts? Below are use cases of how our taxonomy can actually guide your design choices thanks to its nuance, depth, and breadth.

Gran Turismo vs Forza Motorsport and the Best of Both

The console wars were dominated by the platform exclusive, until recently, when both Sony and Microsoft shifted their focus from exclusives to a more open platform experience. But some exclusives still remain – like Gran Turismo (PlayStation) and Forza Motorsport (Xbox, PC), both of which are racing simulators.

It makes eminent sense, then, to see how they compare – especially if a gamer’s console buying decision rests on exclusives such as these. Offering a racing sim that combines elements of GT or Forza will appeal to a wider audience without restricting them to a platform. But if one is to compare two racing sims, one first needs to know what a racing sim is, just as one needs to know what a card game is if one is to compare poker to blackjack. The taxonomy system is more than capable of identifying all the elements that make up a racing sim, or a shooter, or even a collectible card game. Below is a look into the features that constitute a racing sim.

In terms of the four-value system, both Forza and GT are quite similar, both offer deep car customisation options, both feature real racing tracks and famous cars, both are highly replayable, giving players options to improve their records, and even collect cars.

But it’s in their differences that they stand out starkly. Forza Motorsport has a brilliant feature relating to AI. It learns from your driving style, creates an AI package out of it, and makes it a ‘drivatar’. Since the game has plenty of players, there are scores of drivatars based on real gamers. These AI clones race against you in multiplayer. Like many first-party Microsoft games, it also has multiple accessibility options, in line with the tech giant’s commitment to inclusive design. Both these features might make Forza seem very attractive – and for disabled gamers, it might well be the only choice.

But the case for GT is just as strong. For one thing, GT offers virtual reality racing, and the PSVR 2 has earned strongly positive reviews, with its OLED display featuring a 120 hz refresh rate, its eye-tracking tech, and controls with haptic feedback sensors. GT also offers 120 FPS gameplay on console and the PSVR 2, and Eurogamer’s gushing review of Gran Turismo 7 VR tells you all you need to know about the next-gen VR experience that the game offers with Sony’s latest headset. GT 7 also features the much-touted Sophy AI, which was trained using machine learning to compete on equal terms with human players.

Developers might find it impossible to combine all these enticing features into one all-encompassing racing sim. But tracking such trends – like the induction of machine-learning based AI to compete against humans – within the context of a constantly evolving taxonomy system, and a constantly changing game industry, will help them make the right decisions when comparing games, and prioritise what people are truly looking for.

Redfall: A Game That Lacks Arkane’s Distinctive Vibes

So far, we have discussed explicit, tangible features that games can offer – whether it’s Halo Infinite’s grappling hook mechanic or Gran Turismo’s 120 FPS gameplay on VR. But Gameopedia’s taxonomy even focuses on intangibles as well, like the moods and vibes that a game gives off. The moods and vibes category allows us, and developers, to understand how a game makes people feel. And Arkane’s Redfall ultimately failed because it did not evoke the sort of feelings, or achieve the sort of tone, that Arkane had become associated with.

Redfall’s developer is known for many well-received games, such as Dishonoured and its sequels, Prey, and Death Loop. None of these games are quite alike, except in certain key gameplay mechanics and the distinctive Arkane vibes they give off.

Arkane games foster a sense of discovery by rewarding exploration. They make you feel ingenious when you take out an enemy or target with guile and cunning. They make players feel liberated – offering much variety in gameplay – rather than railroaded into a repetitive set of actions. And players often ruminate on their actions and the impact they have on the game world thanks to Arkane’s deft handling of narrative and atmosphere.

So when the developer promised a true Arkane experience in Redfall’s promotional materials, expectations were not only high, but quite specific, in that gamers expected a title where gameplay, narrative and many other elements would cohere to evoke distinctive feelings. What they got was a game with repetitive missions, cookie cutter worldspaces and technical glitches packaged as a looter shooter with co-op gameplay (which was itself half-baked, with no matchmaking online at launch).

Redfall did not make you ponder – the world was too simplistic. It did not make you feel liberated – there wasn’t much choice in terms of gameplay or exploration. It certainly didn’t make you feel ingenious, because the missions didn’t need you to employ cunning or tactical thinking, like in Dishonoured or Death Loop.

In fact, Redfall’s developers have stated that the game’s development suffered due to the studio’s unclear direction and high turnover – Arkane had less than 100 employees working on Redfall, many of whom abandoned the project. Parent company ZeniMax pushed the studio into making a live-service title, and few were clear on just how the promised Arkane experience could translate into a GaaS game.

Detailed taxonomy on live-service games and data on moods and vibes could have helped the developer make the game its paymasters wanted and get the tone just right. However, Arkane lacked such data. Redfall failed as a co-op looter-shooter, and also failed at being recognizably Arkane: gamers did not feel the way they expected to feel when they played it. With our taxonomy, however, developers can experiment with new genres even as they maintain the distinctive tone they are known for.

Conclusion

Making a video game is such a risky venture that a company has made an AI-based tool to de-risk game development. Ludo’s market analysis tool can give studios a sense of how their game concept might perform in the market by comparing it against a vast database of games, and determining if a given idea has already been thought of before.

Imagine if this sort of de-risking tool was used with a taxonomy that covers every little aspect, every single detail of a game. With the use of taxonomy, developers can iterate on a certain game idea’s features to create either a decent clone, a worthy successor, or even an entirely new take on what the market offers.

The wider adoption of game taxonomy can inform game development, helping studios prioritise their tasks and prevent problems like buggy releases and day-one patches. Taxonomy can also help sell games when used by e-retailers – the more details there are on the store page, the sooner it will attract the fans of its genre.

But all this can be achieved only if the taxonomy is sufficiently versatile – usable by retailers, developers and publishers – and comprehensive, so that each developer has the best chance to make the game they want to make for the target audience they want. This, in essence, is the promise of Gameopedia’s taxonomy.

Gameopedia’s taxonomy has many applications. To read more, visit our taxonomy page. Contact us if you wish to use our taxonomy for game design.

27 DecemberVideo Game Data ServicesVideo Game DatabaseVideo Game MetadataVideo Game Taxonomy

Case Study: How Metadata and Understanding Gamers Can Drive Conversions

by Karthik Balasubramanian0 Comments

In this study, we discuss how a user survey of an online gaming store yielded actionable insights about improving game discovery for gamers across various demographics.

Why do customers play games? What makes them hate or avoid a game? How do they select a new game to play? The response to such questions revealed that coupling game metadata with a nuanced understanding of user attitudes and preferences can foster game discovery and drive more conversions in a scalable, consistent and user-focused manner.

About the Survey: Key Findings

Our survey respondents were all customers of a budget-friendly online gaming store that makes use of our game metadata services. The survey population skews young – 70% were less than 35 years old and 26% of the population – the largest single chunk – was between 20-24 years of age. Female participants were overrepresented in the youngest age group (under 25 years of age), but underrepresented in the survey population as a whole. Many of our more nuanced insights about driving conversions are derived from how user preferences change based on demographics. Our survey responses allow, but do not require, multiple responses, helping us understand the many factors that drive user decisions.

A majority of respondents – about 60% – seek to take their mind off things by playing games (though 26% may also want to experience something beautiful, while taking their mind off things), and many customers avoid games with aggressive monetisation. Genre is the foremost decision driver in selecting a new game to play – 56% choose a game based on its genre – and nearly 75% of the site’s users are prompted to start a new game based on favourable critics’ reviews, user ratings, and friends’ recommendations.

In the following sections, we add nuance to this basic gamer journey by delving deeper into the survey responses. We detail how game metadata can be harnessed to refine game discovery based on definable concepts such as game genre, setting, theme, and gameplay elements. We also discuss how stores can leverage even subjective attitudes about game aesthetics and monetization when directing key demographics towards games they would enjoy. Where possible, we link to relevant content such as blogs and other pages on our website, so that our insights into user preferences can be understood in a wider context.

Each section below is entitled with the questions we asked in our survey, and contains insights we gleaned about user preferences from our survey respondents.

Why Do You Play Games?

While a majority of the respondents play to take their mind off things, a fourth said they want to experience a beautiful game, and 14% said they used games to unleash their creativity.

In fact, female respondents are 18% more likely to prefer games based on their visual appeal, and are around 60% more inclined to use games as an outlet for their creativity: both aesthetics and expressing their creativity matters to them.

Given that female respondents are even more likely to play games with appealing visuals, retailers can drive conversions among their female customers (and even attract more women gamers) by curating games that are universally praised for their beautiful visuals, and adorning such games’ store pages with attractive screenshots. Stores can also feature games with a strong creative element – such as Minecraft (2011) and other similar sandbox games – to achieve the same effect.

Only 14% of all respondents cited graphics quality as a decision driver for buying a game, and only 13% said they seek out games with a specific art style. Our store’s customers are not necessarily looking for state-of-the-art graphics, or for a specific ‘look’, but good aesthetics, and to learn more about how videogames can be beautiful, read our blog on the hunt for photorealism.

What Makes You Hate or Avoid a Game?

Respondents cited aggressive monetization, an unfriendly player base and poor performance (bugs and technical issues) as the three main factors that make them hate or avoid a game. For this question, any one of the responses can serve as a deal breaker – customers who cite multiple factors do not mean they will put up with some, but not all, of the problematic aspects of a game. They will abandon a game if it has even one of the features that displease them, and our sentiment analysis can help gauge user attitudes about a game’s monetization strategy, its performance, user experiences with a game’s multiplayer base, and even perceptions about whether the game delivers value for money.

Players younger than 25 – who form a significant chunk of our survey population – are 15% more likely to tolerate aggressive monetization, though cost plays a greater role in their buying decisions (around 35% vs the average of 30%). Younger players want to be convinced of the value a game offers before parting with their money, and the freemium/free-to-play, or live-service game model is ideally suited to their preferences – they can assess the free base game and decide whether premium content will be worth the price, and can also satisfy their need for social engagement through such games.

Stores can drive conversions among younger customers by selling premium content for prominent live-service games and other games that adopt the free-to-play or freemium business model. Such a strategy can be highly lucrative, as such titles can keep gamers engaged for years.

Older respondents are 20% less likely to play with other gamers. In fact, for older store customers, forced interaction with other players is a deal-breaker. When compared with younger players, customers aged 25-40 are 25% more likely to avoid games with forced interactions, and respondents over 40 are 50% more inclined to abandon such games.

Customers over 40 are 60% more likely to play games to solve problems with careful thinking and planning. For such users, gaming is a solitary pursuit and an opportunity to flex their brains. Featuring single-player games that emphasise puzzle-solving can attract more older players, and drive more conversions among them too, and our game metadata framework can help identify games of this sort, which serve niche interests.

What Makes You Start a New Game?

More than 70% of our respondents start playing a new game based on critic reviews, user ratings and friends’ endorsements. Our metadata framework provides details about critic reviews and user ratings, and player sentiment can be gauged to see if the game is likely to be recommended to others. Stores can feature favourable reviews and user ratings and use sentiment analysis to establish a game’s bonafides.

About 30% also start a new game if it resembles what they have played before. But what exactly does the customer mean by resemblance? Is the similarity in gameplay, visuals or something else?

The store could make educated guesses about resemblance through the customer’s purchase history, but guesswork is not scalable. The best insights about user preferences and game discovery will emerge from a rigorous metadata framework which categorises store titles by gameplay, visuals, or any relevant video game feature.

Suppose a customer has bought several Assassin’s Creed games, all after a year of the game’s launch. The user may not buy the latest release because it’s not yet on sale and they are at the store for a bargain.

What if the store uses metadata to suggest a parkour-style exploration game, or an open-world game with stealth mechanics? Ghost of Tsushima (2020) – like the Assassin’s Creed games – is a gorgeous open world with stealth mechanics, and could resonate with an Assassin’s Creed fan.

But if the customer wants games that resemble Assassin’s Creed in terms of parkour traversal, then Sunset Overdrive (2014), would be a good match, and Mirror’s Edge (2016) and Dying Light (2015) would be a novel experience because of their thrilling first-person parkour mechanics.

Only by using a metadata framework for defining features like visuals, gameplay and traversal can the store identify multiple titles ‘like’ Assassin’s Creed. Such a framework is also scalable as it covers the store’s entire catalogue rather than a single franchise.

What Drives You to Select a New Game?

This question is vital to retailers because of its direct insight into what drives conversions.

Cost is the third-most cited factor and customers may well be conservative in their choice of games, especially considering that they tend to stick to a certain genre.

The second-most important factor – a strong story – is cited by 30% of the respondents, but only 17% abandon games with bad or weak stories. Players may likely put up with this flaw if the game is otherwise appealing. Games whose stories have resonated with gamers can be identified using sentiment analysis and given more prominence.

Only 17% cite good performance as a factor behind buying games, but 27% of the respondents will avoid games with poor performance. Good performance is expected – publishers won’t get brownie points just for delivering a functional game – and a bug-ridden release will attract few users. Consequently, stores can feature titles that are making a ‘come-back’ from bad and buggy launches.

Genre is the foremost decision driver, with 56% citing it as a factor in buying games. Stores could identify the most popular genres amongst its users and give popular game genres prominence, but how would it define ‘game genres’?

Sites like Metacritic do provide genres, but many games fall into multiple genres: Skyrim’s genres are ‘Role Playing’ and ‘Western Style’, to distinguish it from Japanese Role-Playing Games (RPG). A store using borrowed genre classifications might present open-world RPGs to customers who enjoy linear RPGs (if its metadata does not distinguish between the two), resulting in few conversions.

A comprehensive metadata framework would define genres precisely and help identify the most popular genres amongst users, after which the store could play up the most prominent games in popular genres. A sufficiently granular metadata framework can give gamers the exact type of game they want within the foremost genres as well.

Suppose the shooter genre is one of the most popular amongst store users. One customer has purchased several less-known shooters, and is unlikely to buy the more popular titles.

Just as the metadata framework can be used to categorise a franchise like Assassin’s Creed by game features, a descriptor like genre itself can be sliced and diced into subgenres based on combat, visuals, camera perspective and more, to find a match for the user who buys niche shooters.

Like a detailed map, a store whose pages contain granular information about genre, setting and other descriptors can speed up the user journey, steering gamers toward the title they want, and propel conversions. Such pages can also lead more people to stay on the site, instead of abandoning it.

Our metadata framework is wide, covering a multitude of games, and deep, covering each game with detailed descriptors and dividing games into precise sub-groups. It can hence consistently drive conversions in a scalable manner, and this is why we do what we do. To learn more about how we do it, visit our pages on video game metadata and game taxonomy.

Conclusion

Our survey respondents depend on trusted sources to start playing a new game and prefer specific genres or settings over others. Some of the reasons they play, or avoid, a game can be considered subjective – a game cannot be defined as beautiful with rigour, nor can its monetization be objectively characterised as ‘aggressive’. Game retailers can use sentiment analysis or trawl news outlets to gauge the prevailing opinion about aesthetics and monetization, and give prominence to certain games accordingly.

But our survey also indicates that many gamer preferences require a robust metadata framework – genres need to be well-defined if a store sets out to play up popular genres to all players, or specific genres to some of its clientele. Gamers who like to play something resembling a previous game need to be given suggestions using descriptors that can identify similarity precisely. A nuanced metadata framework can also identify the subtle but significant differences between two largely similar games, giving the user a better idea of what to expect from their new purchase.

Ultimately, the most robust game discovery or personalisation system will emerge when we understand why customers have the preferences they do, and we at Gameopedia are working to codify what drives user preferences. It is difficult to imagine that more than half of our client store’s customers prioritise genre for the same reasons. Some may like shooters for the adrenaline rush of its fast-paced action, and others may like interactive adventure games because of their strong narratives. If gamers prefer certain genres over others for specific reasons, game retailers can suggest other games that boast similar qualities to coax users into trying new genres.

Our survey results thus indicate the need for a game metadata framework, and a deeper understanding of a user’s preferences, not only to improve conversions, but to truly understand, and satisfy, customer needs.

15 DecemberAAA GamesVideo Game GenreVideo Game Taxonomy

AAA Games: A Comprehensive Guide

by Kaavya Karthikeyan0 Comments

This is Gameopedia’s Game Terminology and Taxonomy series, where we talk about the different kinds of game categories and aim to give our audience in-depth knowledge about them. This blog covers everything you need to know about AAA games.

In the gaming industry, the classification of games into categories based predominantly on the games’ budget, scope, and the like can be done into AAA, AA, and Indie games. These classifications are informal and used mostly by game developers and publishers for marketing purposes as well as e-retail portals to categorize game pages. They also provide information to customers about the games’ potential.

The video games industry generated almost $180 billion in 2020. While exact figures for all AAA game-related revenue is hard, Free-to-play (F2P) Triple-A games make up for a major chunk of income, with Fortnite: Battle Royale alone contributing a massive $5.1 billion revenue in 2020.

AAA title games have always been an eagerly anticipated bunch of releases by gamers around the world. What makes them so significant to the gaming industry though? Let’s dive in.

How do we define AAA Games?

We need to start with defining what exactly a AAA game is. Triple-A games are generally classified as those which have a significant budget for production as well as marketing, and which are conventionally developed by major studios and publishers. As a result of this, these high profile games are expected to be of excellent technical and graphical quality with top notch mechanics, minimal bugs, and high production values. The term came into existence in the 90s.

Below are some examples of AAA title games, where we also go into what makes them so. The characteristics we’ve noticed are:

Development budget: These games have a massive budget, usually ranging upward of $50 million. For example, The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt had a development budget of $81 million. It is estimated that GTA V cost over $137 million just to develop.
Team size: The production teams for AAA title video games are huge, with at least 50 to 100 employees working on it. For instance, at Ubisoft, AAA game development involved 400 to 600 staff for open world games, split across multiple locations and countries
Game scope: These games usually have several features and modes and are narrative based.
Genres: Action, Adventure, Shooter, RPGs, and Sports are the most commonly seen genres.
Graphics quality: They are expected to be high quality and have the latest in graphics technology such as real-time ray tracing, particle effects, and detailed textures.
Technology usage: They tend to use the latest technologies like game engines, custom development tools, and more. These studios often develop their own proprietary game engines, such as Epic Games’ Unreal Engine and use expensive technologies like motion capture to render gorgeous cinematics and smooth character movement. These games are made for newer generations of consoles and a higher calibre of PCs.
Marketing push: Marketing budgets can also be similar to or even higher than the development cost. An example would be Final Fantasy VII, which cost around $45 million to make, and had a U.S. marketing budget of around $100 million, back when it was released in 1997. Marketing often focuses on generating hype for the game through a large number of campaigns, sponsorships, collaborations, and the like. An example would be Madden NFL 2002 buying Super Bowl ads. Beautiful cinematic trailers and bonuses on pre-orders are other ways these games have improved marketing.
Level of game polish/number of bugs: Triple-A games should ideally be well polished and have a small number of glitches or bugs due to the large number of people working on it and budget. Hiring famous and established voice actors and character models is a well-established process for these games.
Franchise release: These games are usually intended to become a franchise post-success. For example, Skyrim, Dragon Age Inquisition, and FIFA.
Studio size and whether they’ve made AAA titles before: These games are usually made by large, established studios or talent experienced in making them.
Higher threshold for success: Ideally these games sell upward of 2~ million copies to break even if not be profitable, though this depends on their total budget. When The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt launched in 2015, it sold nine million units that year. In May 2020, the developing studio CD Projekt Red announced it had sold 50 million units in a tweet.

Let’s look at an example.

Destiny 2

Development budget and marketing push: According to Activision Blizzard’s CEO, it costs $500 million to develop and market Destiny games.
Team size: For Destiny, according to Butcher, the game’s lead engineer, “If you count all of the test and development and support staff then we’re over 400 people.” Destiny 2 has at least that many if not more, considering the new content they keep releasing.
Game scope: The game features a multiplayer “shared-world” environment with elements of role-playing games. Like the original, activities in Destiny 2 are divided among player versus environment (PvE) and player versus player (PvP) game types. There have been several massive expansions as well, with the latest being new Halo guns being released as a reward as Bungie celebrates their 30th anniversary.
Genres: It is a free-to-play online-only multiplayer first-person shooter video game released in 2017. It was originally a pay-to-play release but in 2019, was made F2P.
Critical reception: Destiny 2 received “generally favorable” reviews, according to review aggregator Metacritic. Its gameplay and story were both highly praised by several reviewers and publications. It was nominated for and won Best PC Game of 2017 at the Game Critics Award.
Graphics quality: The game’s graphics and gameplay were both highly praised by publishers.
Technology usage: It was released for the latest generation of consoles available then (the PlayStation 4 and Xbox One) as well as Windows, though you would need a mid to high range PC to properly play the game. Later, when Google Stadia was released, Destiny 2 was re-released as an F2P game by Activision across all platforms. It has recently been upgraded for the new generation of consoles (the PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X/S) as well.
Level of game polish/number of bugs: Destiny 2 was relatively free of game-breaking bugs and came well-polished. The game’s frequent patches and updates tend to ensure this is consistent.
Franchise release: This game is a part of the Destiny franchise, with similar gameplay elements and lore.
Studio size and whether they’ve made AAA games before: Bungie, the studio behind Destiny 2, is also responsible for creating the famous Halo franchise.
Threshold for success: In 2017, post-release, Bungie shared that millions of people had played Destiny 2, with as many as 1.3 million doing so at the same time. It was also the second highest-grossing console game of 2017 in North America, and was Activision’s biggest PC release based on units sold. Activision also said that Destiny 2 set a day-one sales record on the PlayStation Store.

Why are AAA Titles Important?

AAA games are vital as they historically have driven the industry and pioneered innovation. An example of this are the Triple-A titles produced during the late 1990s and early 2000s. They brought a shift towards more narrative-driven games that mixed storytelling elements with gameplay. With larger budgets, developers found new innovative ways to present narrative as a direct part of gameplay rather than as pre-rendered cutscenes. Half-Life was one of the first of these new narrative games to nearly eliminate cutscenes in favor of interactive storytelling mechanisms.

AAA title games are likely to continue in this manner. They offer recognition to their production and development teams which aids in getting talented personnel, epic entertainment experiences which attract large audiences, and access to new technology which fosters major innovations. Games and gamers will continue to evolve, but the scale and scope of Triple-A will continue to be vital to provide amazing opportunities.

AAA games can provide the resources, stability, and talent to make the games all of us aspire to play someday.

History of the AAA Game Industry

The term “AAA” started to be heard frequently in the late 1990s, when a few development companies started using the expression at gaming conventions in the US. The term was borrowed from the credit industry’s bond ratings, where “AAA” bonds represented the safest opportunity most likely to meet their financial goals.

One of the first video games that was developed at an Triple-A scale was Squaresoft’s Final Fantasy VII in 1997, which cost an estimated $40–45 million (post adjustment for inflation, $64–73 million) to develop, making it the most expensive video game ever produced up until then. It had unprecedented cinematic CGI production values, movie-like presentation, orchestral music, and innovative blend of gameplay with dynamic cinematic camerawork. Its expensive advertisement campaign was also a novel venture for a video game.

This spurred on future AAA title releases to have a strong emphasis on innovation and narrative-driven gameplay set amidst state-of-the art graphics.

The Most Famous AAA Studios

Now that we’ve examined what exactly makes a AAA game, below are some of the most beloved and prominent Triple-A studios with their popular releases. This isn’t an exhaustive list by any means- it is just meant to provide you with an idea of what kind of studios develop and publish these games.

Square Enix (Final Fantasy, Tomb Raider)
Ubisoft (Assassin’s Creed, Far Cry)
Riot Games (League of Legends, VALORANT)
Rockstar Games (Grand Theft Auto)
Nintendo (Mario, Pokemon)
Activision (Overwatch, Call of Duty)
EA (FIFA, Battlefield)
Bethesda (The Elder Scrolls, Fallout)
Capcom (Resident Evil, Street Fighter)
Sony Interactive Entertainment (God of War, Gran Turismo)

Prominent Genres and Trends of AAA Games

In one of our prior articles, we explored genre trends in the console market across the past five years for AAA, AA, and Indie releases. This graph below showcases the major variations in genre trends across the last five years related to Triple-A games.

AAA Genre Trends

You can see that two genres feature consistently at the top every year – Action and Adventure. Some of the popular games belonging to these two genres over the past five years include Uncharted 4: A Thief’s End (Action, Adventure), Red Dead Redemption 2 (Adventure), and Call of Duty: Black Ops Cold War (Action, Shooter).

Some of the most well-received Role-Playing Games of the past five years are all AAA titles. These include Final Fantasy VII Remake (Role-Playing) and Assassin’s Creed Odyssey (Role-Playing, Adventure).

Sports games have been consistently popular with AAA publishers as well. There’s a reason for this: licensing costs for these sports leagues go into hundreds of millions of dollars and only AAA studios can really foot this hefty bill.

There are a few annual sports franchises – FIFA, NBA 2K, Madden NFL, and NHL – which make up for the bulk of sales and media attention each year.

Franchises

Quite often, AAA title games are intended to be a series of games under a similar title or set in the same universe. Popular characters come back and/or are referred to, and the storyline may continue. The technical definition of a video game franchise would be an iterative series of game products developed around a demand for the services/value of the intellectual property. Once a new single and unique game is released and copyrighted, the brand is established with the first iteration consisting as the IP’s basis of design and definition.

AAA titles are unique amidst other game types because they are developed often with the intention of being a franchise. The massive investment these games require means that they become franchises if the initial game is successful. An example of this not occurring would be Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning. This was an action RPG game released in 2012 with a sequel planned, developed by 38 Studios and Big Huge Games. The studio secured a $75 million loan guarantee from the economic development board of Rhode Island for establishing 38 Studios within the state and promoting job growth. The initial sales within the first three months post-release were around 1.3 million. Though impressive, Rhode Island recognized that the title was expected to have hit 3 million units by this point for 38 Studios to pay back the loan.

38 Studios defaulted on one of the loan repayments, leading to a publisher to pull out of a US$35 million investment in a sequel. The studio managed to make the next payment, but could not make payroll or other expenses, and shortly later declared bankruptcy by May 2012. On the contrary, games like Call of Duty, FIFA, and the like, once successful initially, have continued being a great source of revenue for their developers and publishers.

Publishers like going for franchises because they already have a dedicated fanbase who would be interested in the game beforehand and this increases copies sold. It is also easier to build upon a pre-existing universe and lore. The most successful video game franchises have been made by AAA developers and publishers and remain popular till date because they have developed a large audience over time while maintaining a reasonable quality to their products to keep their players happy.

The Future of AAA Games

When AAA games started out, the focus was on pushing out innovative single-payment games with great narratives, gameplay, and state-of-the-art graphics. However, with budgets being so high for these games, they had to think out of the box to beat their competition and make a profit. One of the major ways they did this was after the release of the 7th generation consoles. Along with the internet capabilities of that time, these studios were now capable of releasing optional post launch content for games. Games received bonus content in the form of DLCs, which added new areas, quests, and storylines for the player to enjoy.

A lot of AAA games these days follow the GaaS- games as a service. GaaS is a business strategy while F2P is a revenue model. The most successful AAA titles which use this model ensure that they are transparent about what players get by buying a subscription or season pass, and that this is more than the cost of entry. Another thing to note when it comes to GaaS games is how they manage tie-ups and sponsorships. Whether it is Valorant’s Zedd x Valorant series of gun skins or Fortnite’s various collaborations with movies, shows, and musicians, they capitalize on several fanbases to sell add-ons to their players that make them happy.

However, microtransactions, loot boxes, and the like which necessitate additional payment from players for uncertain rewards, especially when it’s hard to grind these rewards which are almost compulsory for game progression for free, have proven unpopular. These questionable business tactics have led several gamers to boycott such games. It is however heartwarming to see games like Borderlands 3- a game where loot boxes and microtransactions can thrive- outright stating that there would be none of those. And they kept their promise. Studios which manage to successfully make and sell games without resorting to microtransactions and loot boxes continue to be well received.

Another trend to notice: in the last decade, free-to-play GaaS AAA games have more than proved their mettle as revenue generators, with games like League of Legends, Apex Legends, and Fortnite generating billions of dollars in profit for their developers and publishers, while also driving a related industry up significantly- esports, which in turn improves their popularity and brings in more players.

AAA giant Ubisoft said that they would be “focusing less on AAA games” and more publishers seem to be heading down a similar route as mobile games prove to be the area of largest profit. More and more Triple-A studios are looking towards GaaS and F2P games to bolster their profits. This however doesn’t mean that Triple-A games are dying. AAA titles will always be a dependable bastion for gamers to return to for their preferred franchise, such as the latest FIFA or newest Assassin’s Creed release.

It seems likely that the future of AAA games will proceed in three major directions:

An increase in adoption of the Games as a Service (GaaS) model for games which are extremely rewarding for their players and generate a good deal of revenue.
The usual franchises remaining as popular as they always have been thanks to their dependable fanbases, as well as established AAA studios trying to make high-quality games for the new generation of consoles and computers.
New developments in technology such as VR and AR leading to games that are the first of their kind.

According to Harold Ryan, ex-president/CEO of Bungie, the studio that developed Halo and Destiny, “At their best, Triple-A games can be a generation-defining experience with an oversized cultural impact. They have the power to inspire and influence gamers to become developers.” While games at the end of the day derive their value from the enjoyment they provide to their players, AAA titles show no sign of losing their relevance now, or in the future.

We at Gameopedia have specialized in collecting and curating game information for the last 12 years and have been working with companies across the gaming ecosystem. From release dates, genres, and descriptions to in-depth game breakdowns, we strive towards providing the best to our clients. Reach out to us at [email protected] to learn more about our offerings.

09 AprilVideo Game Data ServicesVideo Game MetadataVideo Game Sentiment AnalysisVideo Game Taxonomy

Why Large Firms In The Video Gaming Ecosystem Rely On Niche Partners Like Gameopedia

by Abhishek2 Comments

The Current Demand For Video Games

The COVID-19 pandemic has forced a lot of people to stay indoors. One pastime that has seen a spike in interest as a result of this forced isolation is video gaming. This sudden increase in the demand for video games has been a huge boon for the Video Game industry. The number of gamers have increased on all platforms, be it mobile, console, or PC. Video game publishers and stores have also reported rapid growth during this period. Even better, this growth has been observed across all sectors of gaming, ranging from the big AAA market to the niche Indie/AA market.

This growth has led to increased collaboration between large companies and smaller firms to tackle the rapidly changing trends in the video game ecosystem.

Traditionally, large companies find it a challenge to be agile when it comes to decision-making. Their policies are controlled by a huge leadership team, which in turn is influenced by the interests of the company’s investors and shareholders. As a result, bigger companies turn to outsourcing to adapt to changing trends. They partner with smaller, boutique firms that can provide them with various services at a fraction of what it would have cost to set up the same in-house. These smaller firms are focused on a very specific niche in the industry, such as Game Teardowns or Sentiment Analysis of game reviews. This sharp focus allows them to become subject matter experts faster than most large firms. This is just as true in the gaming ecosystem.

Benefits Of Working With Niche Gaming Partners

Let’s see why using niche firms is a more attractive proposition as compared to setting up a new business unit in-house:

Focus – A niche market offering is all about solving those crucial time-consuming and error-prone problems faced by businesses. Niche players do not cast their net wide but are very specific about whom they serve and how they do it. This focus helps bigger companies as they get to take advantage of an expert team’s services without a huge upfront investment.
Scale – Large firms are often skeptical about collaborating with other larger players. Niche firms are a safe bet, as they are more focused on developing their expertise, and the smaller scale at which they operate negates the risk of competition, thus making them an ideal partner for larger firms to collaborate with.
Speed – Niche firms in general do not deal with a lot of bureaucracy and red tape. They operate with much leaner and faster processes, which enables them to constantly adapt to their clients’ needs. This in turn makes it possible to deliver results faster. This speed can rarely be found when collaborating with a larger firm.
Customizability – Expanding on the previous point, given that niche firms are more flexible with their processes, they are also able to offer more customized solutions without compromising on speed. Their clients are also comfortable discussing more customizable options, as they know that the dedicated team of experts will do their very best to meet the requirements. This is not to say that a larger firm would not be able to offer the same, but it would likely take much longer to get back with a similar offering, not to mention at a significantly higher cost.
Pricing – Speaking of costs, hiring niche firms remains profitable for most large companies, as the former have a small employee base. Every person hired in these firms is chosen after careful consideration and this reflects in the very reasonable pricing structure offered to clients. In these uncertain times, these firms place great emphasis on building relationships, so they are unlikely to increase their rates overnight. This makes them an economical choice to work with.
Dedication – While every service firm does its best to treat its clients with equal priority, the fact remains that the larger the firm, the more likely it is that the client will be given only as much response as contractually obligated. Smaller firms realize the need to treat their clients with utmost priority and can focus on delivering the very best customer experience.

Services that Niche Gaming Firms Can Offer to the Video Game Industry

Video Game Metadata – Metadata provides essential information about a game such as its developer and publisher, release date, age ratings, and so on, including custom game data as well if necessary. This data is essential to maintain several kinds of game databases and plays an important role in data analysis as well.
Game Teardowns – Looking into what makes a game successful can help other developers and publishers understand what makes a game tick. A game teardown offers a vast and comprehensive breakdown of what a game consists of and how all of its moving parts work. This work is best done by experts in the gaming ecosystem who do similar work on hundreds, if not thousands of games each year.
Game Insights – Part of the process of making a game involves understanding how the market is reacting to certain elements in a game. A proper analysis of multiple games which have already been released in the market can provide these insights, and not every developer can or will want to do this analysis in-house.
Sentiment Analysis – Another service that niche firms in the gaming ecosystem are best suited to offer is sentiment analysis. This involves analyzing the conversations and general sentiment about a game after its release. A game may garner varying opinions from critics and the public. As it is these reviews that influence sales in the long term, understanding these sentiments is important for developers of upcoming games.
Game Content For Reference Fingerprints – Automatic Content Recognition helps identify the game being played on a screen, be it a Smart TV or a Smart Device connected to a TV. ACR data is used by several players in the market, and for the recognition to be made possible, Reference Fingerprints of the game being played are required to match against the sample collected from the consumer.
Video Game Media – Some companies – especially stores – require specialized video game media to use on their portals. This includes custom box art, descriptions, short clips, and so on.
Customized Services – There are services which are unique to the company looking for them. These services may not have been defined by the industry yet. Resolving them requires a team of experts from the gaming ecosystem who are well-versed with the multitude of games coming into the market each year and can provide custom game data and solutions.

While the gaming industry has been fortunate to come out strong during the pandemic, the world economy continues to remain uncertain. It is also riskier for large firms to take new initiatives in these unpredictable times. In such a period, it is beneficial for large firms to entrust niche companies in the gaming ecosystem to help them adapt to the changing trends, instead of trying to develop new in-house capabilities from scratch.

Gameopedia is one such provider of niche solutions in the gaming industry amidst the video game ecosystem. For more than a decade, we have been building our expertise in providing game metadata, recommendations, and insights, which makes us the top choice for meeting these niche services. We offer a wide range of solutions in the gaming ecosystem that cater to various companies. Interested in what we have to offer? Reach out to us to learn more about our service offerings.

01 MarchVideo Game Data ServicesVideo Game DatabaseVideo Game GenreVideo Game Taxonomy

The Urgent Need For A New Game Taxonomy

by Abhishek0 Comments

As video games become more complex and have increasingly intricate features, there is a long overdue need for a new, comprehensive Video Game Taxonomy for 2021. In this blog, we will look at the need for a new taxonomy, as well the industries who need these levels of video game classification.

In the last decade, video games have become the world’s favorite pastime. With this massive expansion of the market, every member of the gaming ecosystem, from developers to retailers, now have a larger audience to build games for and sell them to.

However, selling to this audience can be tricky. Developers and publishers need to understand the complicated formula that works for successful games and then build on it. Retailers, who now have thousands of games to feature on their portals, need to correctly identify and recommend titles that a customer is likely to buy based on their preferences. This is where a comprehensive, flexible, and actionable taxonomy comes into play.

The Definitive Video Game Taxonomy

Today’s games are complex works of art that are designed to continuously engage a wide audience. To think that only one aspect of a game makes it special is definitely foolish. For example, Candy Crush belongs to the Match-3 Puzzle genre, but is this the mechanic what led to its enormous success?

The answer is no.

The leaderboard, new level additions, timer, move-limit, and reward systems are some of the other attributes of the game that incentive the player to keep returning to the game. More screen time means more ad impressions which translates into more income for the developer, publisher, and ad networks.

As you can tell from the example above, there are multiple factors that play a part in the success of a game. To identify the importance of these aspects in the game is what matters. And this is where Gameopedia’s Values System comes into play.

The Values System

Gameopedia has been delivering insightful game data to some of the biggest companies in the world since 2008. In the last 12 years, we have created detailed video game breakdowns for over 180,000 games. Over time, we have come to realize that while a genre, feature-set, mechanics, and graphic style may be useful in providing a high-level description about the game, it does not do justice to describe what the game has to offer.

To help with this, we introduced a rating system that assigns a value to feature-sets and mechanics to help evaluate their importance within the game. Going back to Candy Crush, here is how our video game classification framework would break down the game:

This unique view into the anatomy of a game can reveal information that otherwise would have gone unnoticed. For example, although Puzzle is the main genre of the game, there are certain important attributes of the game like the Beat the Clock mechanic that is more prominently seen in Action games. Clearly, to exclude Action as a Genre would be foolish but it is definitely not more important than solving the Match-3 Puzzle when it comes to game progression.

This extra layer to the data allows for a more comprehensive look into the game and its offerings. Additionally, you can identify exactly what makes the game popular among its audience and how it can be improved or modified to appeal to another demographic.

The Importance of Detail in Video Game Classification

Starting with Pong in the 70s, video games have evolved from a simple digital game with a couple of controls into more complex entities with multiple characters, storylines, mechanics, and so on. In this multi-billion dollar industry, game developers and publishers are innovating daily to engage a community with a goldfish-like short-lived memory.

To break into the market, it is important that studios understand market trends, analyse their competition, and identify popular features to gain video game insights. But with thousands of games hitting the shelves each year, it is difficult to recognise what a new game can offer. This is where a well-defined, in-depth, and flexible Video Game Taxonomy can help.

A comprehensive Game Taxonomy lets you deep-dive into every, single aspect of the game and decode where each feature and mechanic fits in the overall scheme. It also gives you insights into how the developer has designed the game to make it not just enjoyable, but profitable as well.

How Gameopedia does Video Game Breakdowns using our Game Taxonomy

Let’s take a look at two of the most popular open-world games in the market today: Grand Theft Auto V and Mafia II. Both are relatively well-known but one is clearly more popular than the other. The reason for the crowd loving Grand Theft Auto V more than Mafia II is because of the well-thought out, vast world. Our video game breakdown reveals that Rockstar Games created a dynamic open-world environment with multiple side-missions, heists, and DLC content that immerses the player thoroughly, keeping them in a trance. Mafia II on the other hand, serves the purpose of delivering a more linear story experience, while still allowing the player to explore the open-world.

Both games have been successful in their objective and have proven profitable for their respective publishers. But for someone looking to replicate this success, it is necessary to understand what made each game tick.

Industry-Defining Game Taxonomy Designed With A Purpose In Mind

A comprehensive Video Game Taxonomy has use cases for a wide range of beneficiaries. Gameopedia’s Taxonomy has been created while keeping the pain points and requirements of the gaming ecosystem in mind.

Retailers – They can help their customers find better results for the kind of games they are looking for. For example, a customer may want to purchase a shooter game. This is a huge genre that has drastically different games that can show up in a search result. A single-player game like Metro Exodus and a multiplayer title like Halo 5 are both shooters, but they are each meant for a different target audience. A well-defined taxonomy can help narrow down the results to suit the customer’s preferences, thus helping the retailer maximise the chances of a sale.

Advertisers – Advertisers can benefit from a good Video Game Taxonomy by having access to better ad targeting tools that are built by measuring trends in the community. Understanding the current mood towards popular genres and using these video game insights can help advertisers focus their attention towards maximising returns from markets that are highly receptive.

Developers/Publishers – In order to ensure that their in-development game will get a strong start at launch, developers and publishers need to understand the market and analyze their competition. Releasing a game in a particular genre when there is negative sentiment in the market towards that genre can be bad for business. Similarly, releasing a game that is too similar to the competition can also be bad news. Therefore it is essential to do the research beforehand in order to come up with a strong launch strategy. This can be achieved by making use of a comprehensive Video Game Taxonomy and game classification to understand the competition as well as the market.

Conclusion

A good Video Game Taxonomy should ideally be consistent, flexible, and most importantly, up-to-date to keep in touch with evolving market preferences.

At Gameopedia, our team of experts are constantly at work analyzing the changing trends in the video game market. Our taxonomy is well-researched and built to ensure that the most important aspects are covered accurately. It is vital that you have a good video game classification system such as ours to provide accurate video game breakdowns and get high quality video game insights. If you have a business problem that requires a customized solution powered by a comprehensive Video Game Taxonomy, get in touch with us to start making better business decisions using game data.

30 DecemberVideo Game Data ServicesVideo Game DatabaseVideo Game GenreVideo Game MetadataVideo Game Taxonomy

How e-Retailers can boost Game Discoverability with Quality Game Content

by Valmik Kumar0 Comments

The ability to collect from and analyse vast pools of information is expected of all enterprises with a digital footprint. This represents an increasing number of businesses and operations every year.

With more than one-third of all global retailers selling the majority of their products via digital platforms, and the rest expecting the gap between physical and digital retail to shrink ever further in the coming years, it is becoming ever more imperative for e-Retailers and App Stores to streamline their data usage in order to improve uniformity, efficiency, and cost.

In order to take advantage of the ripe condition of the digital retail market, there needs to be both a mechanism for sourcing large quantities of data, as well as the ability to analyse, categorise, and easily communicate what that data means.

This is especially true in the video game industry, which is growing exponentially, both in terms of overall sales, but also in terms of how many of those sales are switching over to digital retailing.

PC gaming has steadily been shifting from physical sales to digital sales, with the ratio being 4:1 in favor of physical sales in 2009 in the US, to an almost directly inverse 1:4 in favor of digital sales by 2018. Gaming app download revenue was responsible for $20.9 billion, or 72.3% of all app revenue for Q3 2020, across both iOS and Android app stores.

As a result of the current global pandemic, which has led many customers to turn to digital options for their needs, Sony has seen the digital sales for their console games grow by 154% this year alone, in comparison to their physical sales growth of 1%. In the same year, for the first time in their history, more than 50% of all their gaming revenue came from digital sales. This trend tracks similarly for other major game developers. A major reason for improved digital sales is good usage of video game taxonomy and metadata.

What is Video Game Metadata?

Game metadata consists of descriptors about the game that not only give you an overview of the game like the developer’s name, publisher’s name, release date, game description, and so on, but it also allows the people who use this data to easily understand what the game has to offer and game content without having to purchase or play the game yourself.

How Stores Benefit from Quality Metadata and Game Content

Video game metadata can be vital in increasing product discovery, as well as providing an enhanced customer experience for discerning customers keen to know more about a product, especially via a digital platform. This increases the transparency offered by a digital retail platform, further increasing the likelihood of a purchase, as well as the customer returning. Video game taxonomy helps in classifying and organizing games which makes it easier for your customers to find what they need.

The presentation of certain keywords regarding genre or gameplay specifications will also greatly enhance a platform’s SEO, allowing visibility across search engines, while simultaneously increasing visibility of related products on the app store or e-retail platform. Powerful video game taxonomy allows retailers to bolster their in-house personalization and search solutions.

Good metadata and game content is capable of guiding the customer from when they arrive at the app store or e-retailer platform till the point at which they make a purchase. During the discoverability phase, keywords, SEO classifications, and relevant images help the customer along this journey. A varied database improves the targeting of a wider array of customers, leading to increased conversions.

An estimated 65% of users barely swipe or scroll beyond the first images and text they see. The remaining users, however, prefer to examine their products in detail. Access to well-organised video game metadata and game content caters to both types of users. In addition to this, the smart deployment of a well-curated database can keep customers engaged for longer periods, improving website traffic.

Despite the rapidly growing state of the global digital market, the presence of high-quality video game metadata remains minimal. In 2020, most e-retailers and app stores rely on data provided to them by suppliers, and their own in-house collection and sorting. This is an expensive and cumbersome process, with supplier data varying in its quantity, quality, and clarity.

How can e-retailers and App Stores gain the Competitive Edge in Video Game Metadata?

In place of these expensive and inconsistent options, e-retailers and app stores are better served seeking out services and products that specialize in providing metadata collection and curation.

This allows retailers to avoid the hassle and expense of organizing and maintaining their own databases, freeing up their time and capital to be invested elsewhere. It also ensures the accuracy and uniformity of game information across platforms. By utilizing a pre-existing and well-curated database for video game taxonomy, game content, and metadata, e-retailers and app stores will be able to improve existing personalization and product discovery with detailed descriptive tags and metadata.

With that being the case, an even wider, more varied customer base is likely to turn towards e-retailers and app stores for their video game needs. The ability to provide these customers with the most relevant information, organised and classified according to their individual search and spending patterns and quirks by using video game taxonomy, game content, and metadata, is a provably successful way of increasing the frequency a customer returns to purchase more.

With a database spanning 40 years of video game metadata across over 200 platforms, this is where Gameopedia and our products shine. We specialize in a niche suite of data services that improve game discoverability, enhance customer experiences, and increase conversion. Reach out to us for industry leading video game information for over 180,000 games.

23 SeptemberVideo Game ComparisonVideo Game Data ServicesVideo Game Taxonomy

Game Content and Feature Comparison: The Secret to Identifying Untapped Potential

by Kevin Cyriac Tom0 Comments

What Are Gamers Looking For?

Different people play games for different reasons. From wanting to feel a sense of competence to seeking an escape from real life, there are numerous motivations, desires, likes, and dislikes that need to be considered when making a game. A gamer’s needs are satisfied by a game’s various components; its genres, themes, art styles, and gameplay mechanics.

Game creators have to take all these factors amongst many others into account while building a game. Also, let’s not forget that each genre has a different set of features that are unique to it.

The Video Game Developer’s Challenge

Gamers know what they want and have always made their feelings clear.

We all remember Anthem. The game TechRadar described as “a fun game wrapped up in a dull story and a repetitive end-game.” Anthem’s failure to capture the market was a very good indicator of why we should always put the gamer first and not the consumer.

With repetitive gameplay, a weak storyline, boring NPCs, and messy combat mechanics, the game had everything and nothing. What was missing was a clear understanding of what needs to be included and what doesn’t. It did not understand what the gamer wants in their game content.

Enter Video Game Comparison.

The concept is defined in the name; comparing two or more games on a few specific categories like genre, price, platforms, ratings, and developer, just as you would compare products in any e-commerce store.

The limitation with video game comparison tools, free or paid, is they are mainly consumer-focused. The tools available today are merely skimming across an ocean of potential. And hiding in the depths are actionable insights and information that is useful to not just the consumer, but game creators as well.

All comparisons today are for the consumer and not the gamer. They compare generic criteria like the price, user reviews, platforms, and so on, which provide the consumer with important information but what about the gamer? Herein lies the need for a more robust video game comparison tool in the market.

Advantages Of A Video Game Comparison Tool

1. Understand Exactly What The Gamer Wants

The driving force behind any successful game is not the video game developer, publisher, or game designer, but the gamers who play them. The gamer who will advocate the brilliance of a game to their peers. We can all attest to the power of word of mouth.

No number of positive reviews, gameplay videos, or free merchandise, can ever take the place or provide the value that a “Hey. Have you tried this game? It’s awesome!” can. To leverage the power of word of mouth marketing, you need to understand your audience. You need to understand what the gamer wants from their video game content.

Here is where the power of video game comparisons comes into play. Putting two or more games next to each other, we can dive deep into what exactly led to a game’s success. We can identify the lynchpin (or pins) that made the difference; was it the narrative? The theme? The game content? The graphics? The gameplay? Or a combination of them all? As games get bigger and the market more competitive, an in-depth feature comparison analysis is not just a growing need but a necessity!

2. Identify Game Features & Mechanics That Work

While building a game, game developers have a plethora of features and mechanics to choose from. Granted, some video game mechanics and features are exclusive to a genre. For example, an MMO is defined by its massive online community and persistent game universe, without which the very essence of the genre would be lost. However, some game content and features are commonplace in most game genres like a leaderboard, a health system, enemies, and so on.

With a 360-degree view of the game’s feature-set in relation to others, game developers can identify the important and popular data-points that get the job done. They don’t have to rely on biased market analyses and unimaginative feedback from paid sources to understand what their game needs. They can look at the success of other studios and how they built their games.

3. Get A Holistic View Of The Competitor’s Offerings

You could build the best product in the world and become an overnight success but to continue doing what you love, you need to generate a constant revenue stream. This narrative is true in the gaming industry as well.

A truly successful game does not stop engaging its audience after the first playthrough. It continues to bring the player back again and again with new levels, characters, challenges, upgrades, and more- the list just keeps getting longer. Maybe it’s not the game content but the gameplay that is driving the player back to the game.

Let’s take the example of Candy Crush. Why is this Match 3 puzzle game so popular with audiences of all ages? They have created an experience designed to keep the player engaged. Everything from the bright colors and peppy background score to the life system is designed to keep the player matching cupcakes.

Throw in competitive triggers like the leaderboard and Beat the Clock mechanics and BOOM! You have a successful game in your hands.

4. Learn How To Stand Out In A Crowded Genre

A report published by Ars Technica in 2014 presented some interesting numbers.

“…out of the roughly 781 million games registered to Steam accounts,…only 493 million, or 63 percent, have been played even once.”

Ars technica

These numbers were true six years ago and they stand true today. The gaming industry is booming and every month hundreds of games are released into the market hoping to capture an already over-engaged audience. And truth be told, studios are struggling to carve a niche out for themselves in the crowd.

To truly succeed, you don’t just need a brilliant idea and big money, you need to know where to invest that money and how to execute that idea in a sustainable manner. Even large studios, with a large library of successful games and abundant resources at their disposal, get video game content wrong more often than they would like to admit.

Honestly, there is no right way to go about this. We can only choose the most effective way and if you have read this far, you probably know the answer; game content and feature comparison.

Looking into thousands of games individually is simply impractical. To truly leverage the power of video game comparisons you need to look at them in small samples with multiple factors coming into play regarding game content like the narrative, game design, game length, character development, and so on. It’s not just about the numbers but the feeling that each element in the game invokes in the player.

To create impactful games that sell, it is imperative to understand your audience, the competition, and the market.

Looking to create the next best-selling game? Reach out to us to learn more about how Gameopedia can help you do just that.

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Category: Video Game Taxonomy

Empowering Developers

Broadening the Creative Vision

Nailing the Souls-Like

Reinventing Game Discovery

Conclusion

Video Game Taxonomy: An Overview

Identify & Quantify: The Foundation of our Taxonomy

“All or Most” (Defining Features)

“Major” (Key Features)

“Significant” (Notable Features)

“Minor” (Elemental Features)

Classifying Halo Infinite with our 4-Value Quantification System

Use Cases: How Taxonomy Can Inform Game Dev

Gran Turismo vs Forza Motorsport and the Best of Both

Redfall: A Game That Lacks Arkane’s Distinctive Vibes

Conclusion

About the Survey: Key Findings

Why Do You Play Games?

What Makes You Hate or Avoid a Game?

What Makes You Start a New Game?

What Drives You to Select a New Game?

Conclusion

How do we define AAA Games?

Destiny 2

Why are AAA Titles Important?

History of the AAA Game Industry

The Most Famous AAA Studios

Prominent Genres and Trends of AAA Games

AAA Genre Trends

Franchises

The Future of AAA Games

The Current Demand For Video Games

Benefits Of Working With Niche Gaming Partners

Services that Niche Gaming Firms Can Offer to the Video Game Industry

The Definitive Video Game Taxonomy

The Values System

The Importance of Detail in Video Game Classification

How Gameopedia does Video Game Breakdowns using our Game Taxonomy

Industry-Defining Game Taxonomy Designed With A Purpose In Mind

Conclusion

What is Video Game Metadata?

How Stores Benefit from Quality Metadata and Game Content

How can e-retailers and App Stores gain the Competitive Edge in Video Game Metadata?

What Are Gamers Looking For?

The Video Game Developer’s Challenge

Enter Video Game Comparison.

Advantages Of A Video Game Comparison Tool

1. Understand Exactly What The Gamer Wants

2. Identify Game Features & Mechanics That Work

3. Get A Holistic View Of The Competitor’s Offerings

4. Learn How To Stand Out In A Crowded Genre

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