Trích dẫn:
Now onto a subject a bit more controversial and emotive. Data capture.
Most things that you do nowadays, certainly in the UK, involves some kind of data capture.
Whether it be voting details per household, taxes, the health service, credit cards, loyalty schemes, your car, speed cameras, CCTV, a fishing license, the internet, email, your season ticket, buying tickets for a gig with a credit card, iTunes, forums, any online application, Xbox Live, Playstation network (I could go on for hours, so will stop now!) some sort of data is collected.
Some companies just use this information for data capture and collection. Others use it to email their customers. I suspect some use it for “dodgy” means.
We use the data to help us develop our games, and use the information to help us make decisions in a more informed manner.
There are 3 types of data collected by FM09. What I’m going to write about here is what info is actually collected, and how we use this information.
The first is the in game advertising in the game. As you know, the ad hoardings around the side of the pitch have changed a few times during the cycle of the game as advertisers have come to us with campaigns that they believe will appeal to our customers. Sometimes we agree and approve them, others we don’t, and reject them.
For our partner in advertising (IGA) to be able to get people interested in advertising in the game, they collect data on how long people playing the game for see the adverts. All that is recorded is the country information from an IP address (so that they know which country the person is in) and how long they’ve viewed an ad hoarding for (in other words, how long they’ve been watching the 2d or 3d match engine). They don’t know who you are, or where you are apart from country, and certainly helps us and them target campaigns, as advertisers don’t tend to do global campaigns, but do them per country.
Next up is STEAM. For those who installed the game using this system (for which you received automatic updates and the ability to play a game on any computer above minimum spec with no need to carry the DVD around with you) the only stats that they have collected and provided to me are stats on how many minutes people have played the game for and the amount of people playing the game via this system split down in total and per month.
This is how we got the stat used previously that the average amount of time spent playing the game per user was 240 hours, although this has gone up since those figures were provided. What was also really interesting with the stats was seeing that the amount of time being played each month hasn’t dropped month by month despite much smaller sales at the latter times of year compared to release, which shows us that there are a lot of people out there really enjoying the game, and playing it for very long periods of time. Stats like these are invaluable to us as you can imagine, as it gives us a proper balance between the highs and lows of different types of feedback that we get from very small samples of people, such as the forums (which tend to be more negative, as people tend to talk mainly when they have a problem, which is human nature) or the people in the pub telling you how much they love the game (although if they really loved it, they’d be at home playing it, rather than in the pub!).
STEAM do also store system stats for all of their users, and these are freely available for anyone to look at on their website. However, this information isn’t much use to us, as it shows a cross section of the PC gaming market itself, rather than the FM PC gaming population, which tend to have lower specs than the market as a whole.
However, those kinds of stats are very useful to us for our own game when we’re going through the decision making process on the features we’re going to work on, particularly if there will be a hardware requirement from it, and this is where one of Uniloc’s systems has actually been very good for us.
This system is pretty separate from their copy protection and authentication system, and collects information about your computer hardware specification. It doesn’t ask for, or store, any personal information at all – just information about the computer that is being used’s processor, graphics card, default screen resolution for playing the game in, OS language and operating system.
As an example of how this information is useful to us, and what it’s used for – there have been a couple of posts on the forums recently asking why the minimum resolution for the game hasn’t changed to a higher resolution, seeing as all new computers being sold have the option for a higher resolution, or quoting STEAM stats. We’d even looked at it ourselves when we were working on the new interface and saying how it would be a lot easier to design if we had a new default of 1280 x 800 instead.
However, when I then get a report done on the stats for people playing FM09, I can see that 32.94% of people play the game in 1024 x 768 and that makes the decision pretty easy, hence the minimum resolution has stayed the same.
I really wish we’d had these stats before we launched 3d (FM2009 was the first time we’ve had stats like this), as we could have been much better prepared graphics card wise, and done a lot more compatibility testing before hand. The most used graphics card whilst playing the game only has 3.74% of users and the breadth of cards used was way bigger than we had imagined. – this time SEGA are ensuring that a lot more compatibility testing is performed on a much wider variation of graphics cards to try and ensure that we don’t have the same problems as we had last year, where some people had to download a huge file to get the game up and running, even in 2d.
With FM2010, we plan to still be able to utilise each of these systems. It doesn’t matter what the copy protection decision from SEGA ends up being, as the Uniloc stats system is separate to their protection solution, so we can still utilise it, alongside a new system that we’ll be using to get some stats on certain areas of the game, and whether those areas are being used or not. If we’re able to see what areas of the game are proving popular, and which areas are ignored, it makes it a lot easier for us to make informed decisions and what areas need improvement or not, over and beyond that of the pubs and forums.
