SuperData introduces a new tool to track digital game performance

Video game industry analyst group, SuperData, has announced a new tool to help publishers and developers track the performance of digital games across several key metrics. The Arcade Forecaster will provide subscribers with statistical information such as a game’s revenue, monthly active users, and in-game spending across a 24 month period.

“As media becomes more personal and interactive, SuperData Arcade serves as a guide to understanding and winning in this next generation revolution across digital games research and interactive media intelligence,” Joost van Dreunen, co-founder of SuperData told GameDaily.

“The launch of the Arcade Forecaster represents an exciting milestone in digital game research,” Sam Barberie, VP of Business Development and Product at SuperData said in a statement. “The pace of game innovation and player preferences has never been faster, and clients will now have a comprehensive understanding of how current trends are likely to affect the future performance of top console, PC and mobile games.”

SuperData’s Arcade — which now includes the Forecaster — is a suite of metric tracking tools meant to help subscribers track industry trends and the macro and micro levels. With the Forecaster, analysts can get ground-level data on the industry’s fastest growing sector: digital game sales. Van Dreunen said that the industry will benefit from the Forecaster because it offers the most updated view of a variety of different aspects of the gaming landscape, including performance outlook for major digital game franchises. The Forecaster will also monitor top competitors, games gaining popularity, and “evaluate the addressable market for new titles and identify trending genres and titles.”

According to van Dreunen, the Forecaster has been in development for around two years, but discussions about such a tool go back much further. “Publishers and developers have always been interested in using our data to forecast the trajectory of a title they had released, or planned to launch in the future, so this type of conversation was common from the beginning,” he said. “We had already been sitting at the nexus of several interesting data sources that all contained some predictive power for the future performance of games, such as streaming and trailer views and pre-orders, as well as our own proprietary historical sales archives.”

SuperData used this data to create custom forecasts for publishers, but as the datasets grew, van Dreunen said he saw the potential for a broader tool that could include ever major current and upcoming title across every platform. “For us [the Forecaster] was the logical next step after already providing subscribers with a comprehensive way of analyzing the current and historical state of the gaming industry,” he said.

The digital games market has been booming, especially over the last few years. According to SuperData, revenue from in-game spending is expected to hit $4.9 billion in 2020. It also anticipates that revenue from digital full game sales will hit $8.9 billion next year. With numbers like this, it makes sense that developers and publishers would want to keep a careful eye on the trend. SuperData, as a provider of analyst tools, saw the potential for a tool that more closely tracks the digital market. It’s not just smart analytics, it’s smart business.

“The data from Arcade represent the world’s most robust and comprehensive quantitative insights on the vast and growing playable media market,” van Dreunen said. “With Arcade Forecaster, access to market-level and title-level forecasts will only help our subscribers stay ahead of the curve.”

For van Dreunen, the hope is that access to the metrics that the Forecaster provides will result in innovation within the games industry. “This is an opportunity for the major publishers and developers to better understand what is most compelling for the audiences that play their games,” he said. “The hope is that it will lead to smarter decisions which result in better products.”