Overview

The games industry is increasing adoption of the Games-as-a-Service operating model, where games have become more like a service than a product, and recurring revenue is frequently generated through in-app purchases, subscriptions, and other techniques. With this change, it is critical to develop a deeper understanding of how players use the features of games and related services. This understanding allows you to continually adapt and make the necessary changes to keep players engaged.

Player usage patterns can vary widely and a game’s success in the marketplace can be unpredictable. This can make it challenging to build and maintain solutions that scale with your player population while remaining cost effective and easy to manage. Turnkey user engagement and analytics solutions, such as Amazon Pinpoint or third-party options, provide an easy way to begin capturing analytics from your games. However, many game developers and game publishers want to centralize data from across applications into common formats for integration with their data lakes and analytics applications. Amazon Web Services (AWS) offers a comprehensive suite of analytics solutions that can help you ingest, store, and analyze data from your game without managing any infrastructure.

The Game Analytics Pipeline solution helps game developers launch a scalable serverless data pipeline to ingest, store, and analyze telemetry data generated from games and services. The solution supports streaming ingestion of data, allowing users to gain insights from their games and other applications within minutes. The solution provides a REST API and Amazon Kinesis services for ingesting and processing game telemetry. It automatically validates, transforms, and delivers data to Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) in a format optimized for cost-effective storage and analytics. The solution provides data lake integration by organizing and structuring data in Amazon S3 and configuring AWS Glue to catalog metadata for datasets, which makes it easy to integrate and share data with other applications and users.

The solution provides fully-managed streaming data analytics that allow game developers to generate custom metrics from game events in real-time when insights and Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) are needed immediately. The results of streaming data analytics can be used by Live Ops teams to power real-time dashboards and alerts for a view into live games, or by engineering teams who can use streaming analytics to build event-driven applications and workflows.

The solution is designed to provide a framework for ingesting game events into your data lake for analytics and storage, allowing you to focus on expanding the solution functionality rather than managing the underlying infrastructure operations.

Cost

You are responsible for the cost of the AWS services used while running this reference deployment. At the date of publication, the cost of running this solution depends on the amount of data being loaded, stored, processed, and analyzed in the solution. Deploying the solution in developer mode (Dev) mode and sending events to the pipeline with the included demo script will cost approximately $10.00 per day.

If you customize this solution to analyze your game dataset, the cost factors include the amount of streaming data that is ingested, size of the data being analyzed, compute resources required for each step of the workflow, and duration of the workflow. For a more accurate estimate of cost, we recommend running a sample dataset as a benchmark.

Prices are subject to change. For full details, refer to the pricing webpage for each AWS service used in this solution.