Affogata Release Notes for September
July 2025 Release Notes
April 2025 Release Notes
March 2025 Release Notes
Beyond Reviews: Unlocking Hidden Insights from Unstructured Customer Data
October 2024 Release notes
Rambhatla Dhananjay Kumar
Player experience Manager at Scopely
April Laws
Lead Social Media & Community Manager at Wooga
Claudia Pons
Community Manager of Monopoly GO! at Scopely
Explore Jeff Parsley's journey as the February Player Insights Champion, recognized by Affogata for his data-driven approach to game improvement through player feedback.
Jeff Parsley
Global Community Manager of EA Sports
Art imitating life? Life imitating art? Or in the words of one commentator on Youtube: “It is not a graphic engine…this is art!” This was one typical reaction to the latest generation of Unreal Engine, issued this April by developer Epic Games. As seen in the short Unreal Engine 5 trailer, the scenery and images look artistic but also way too real. The 5th edition of this game engine, which debuted in 1998 and was first showcased in the Unreal video game, has been further improved, as it continues to serve a variety of 3D games as well as film and television projects.
The gaming industry did not stay silent about the Russian army’s invasion of Ukraine. With fundraising efforts such as Fortnite's maker Epic Games’ $144 million collections in aid of victims serving as a leading example, many gamers also voiced their opinions about the war and aid-related issues. Affogata tracked what players had to say about aiding Ukraine on Twitter, during the March 14th-April 17th time frame. As shown by the data tracked and analyzed, many gamers either helped or participated in charity streams and crowd fundraising events, aimed at supporting the Ukrainian victims. Simultaneously, they tweeted their support by cheering the Ukrainian people and by displaying dissent towards the global community and the Russian gamers.
Companies trying to generate leads make all kinds of efforts to publicize their products and services. Finding an audience, via marketing organic or paid campaigns, and creating a leads pipeline, is the intent of every business. Converting those leads into customers is next on the list. Having potential customers and prospects buy a product or service is the successful endpoint of the marketing and sales pipeline. Lots of marketing efforts are invested by businesses in content marketing, namely the marketing strategy aimed at distributing consistent value content to attract and retain an audience. It is the hope that creating content would drive leads for your business, and they would later convert and generate revenues and profits.
As mobile applications exponentially grow, with over 3.5 million of them on the Google Play store and over 2 million on the Apple App store, so does the need to better understand user behavior. In order to better understand user engagements and to correctly track user behavior, companies must use analytics tools to comprehend their customer interactions. Getting to know your users through analyzing the way they operate applications becomes a challenge when addressing millions of actions. When aiming to analyze such user experience and user behavior, a business must take into account that they are multi-faceted, constantly changing, and ever-more challenging.
Trying to describe the amount of data we produce is becoming more complex. We are now talking in petabytes, an extraordinary unit of digital data (with one petabyte equaling 1,000 terabytes). There are estimates that one petabyte equals 500 billion pages of standard printed text. Imagine that. “We live in a post-corona world of data hyper-acceleration. 59 petabytes were consumed in 2021 worldwide alone. Everyone creates data, every day and all the time”, claims Ronit Atad, General Manager at Microsoft Israel. In a recent Calcalist business magazine conference, she mentioned that every minute, 6 million online orders are being made, 100,000 Microsoft Teams' conversations are taking place and 500,000 tweets appear on Twitter”.
There’s lots of talk about what makes for “Product led growth” companies, but at the same token, similar attention should be given to “Customer obsessed” organizations. Or is it actually the same thing?
The simple cycle of a customer buying products and services, and then commenting about them on one of the many online platforms for companies to analyze his voice, continues all the time. Data tracked from a customer experience, or the many customer interactions, turns into an analysis of customer sentiment. So customer sentiment tells a company how customers generally feel about the brand, specific products, and services or about the business's social media presence. A customer sentiment analysis shows in the brand sentiment score, which is calculated as the percentage of positive comments, at a defined time period, out of all positive and negative comments. Such analysis takes place via an AI and machine learning operation to evaluate real-time millions of customer conversations all over the open web as well as internal sources such as ticketing systems or chats.
“There’s no such thing as bad publicity, as long as they spell your name right”. That famous quote is credited to American showman and circus owner P.T. Barnum (1810-1891). A similar saying came from Irish poet and playwright Oscar Wilde (1854-1900) who claimed that “there’s only one thing in the world worse than being talked about, and that is not being talked about”. Such a need to get free (or paid) publicity served marketers and advertisers for decades. However, there is one major issue with both of these quotes: they became famous in an age with no digital platforms. While both sayings were already debatable in a day and age with much fewer media outlets, since bad publicity could destroy a company or a man’s reputation even then, in today’s world such a situation is a lot more complicated.
Every game studio wishes to increase its player base, but now there are new directions and opportunities to achieve just that. Player insights data analysis helps businesses in a variety of ways. Understanding the user experience based on what exists vs say helps the research process of trying to improve games and features. Insights and data from those players can additionally help the conversion of new prospects into paying users.
How does a lawsuit and a war-related incident affect a company’s business? And what can it learn from what consumers have to say about it? American freelancing platform Upwork, being named recently to Time’s list of 100 Most Influential companies of 2022, allows clients to interview, hire and work with freelance agencies through its platform. In 2017 alone, for example, the company had over twelve million registered freelancers and five million registered clients.
