Changing the game in player retention
SEGA Europe uses Databricks to make data more accessible and actionable
User reviews analyzed daily via player sentiment analysis GenAI model
Faster time to insight with AI/BI Genie driving self-serve productivity
SEGA Europe has undergone a transformative journey with the Databricks Data Intelligence Platform, moving from overwhelming data challenges to unlocking innovative AI-driven capabilities. SEGA Europe previously grappled with extensive amounts of data and data sources, with over 50,000 events per second from more than 40 million players, making it difficult to capitalize on them. The adoption of Databricks allowed SEGA Europe to establish a single source of truth for data, ensure data accessibility across departments, and facilitate end-to-end AI lifecycle management. This led to innovations like the player sentiment analysis LLM that analyzes tens of thousands of user reviews daily to effectively identify and address gameplay issues. These advancements have set the stage for future enhancements in game development and marketing strategies.
Overwhelming data volume hinders innovative game development
SEGA, a vanguard in the video game industry, has evolved from its iconic '90s Genesis console and Sonic the Hedgehog franchise to a modern-day transmedia powerhouse. At its core, SEGA’s mission is to continually push the boundaries of technology to create immersive, interactive worlds for global audiences across games and entertainment.. SEGA Europe’s commitment to leveraging data spans across critical business functions aimed at maximizing player satisfaction and operational efficiency.
Felix Baker, SEGA Europe’s Head of Data Services, outlines three pivotal areas where data significantly impacts business value: player experience, customer retention, and sales operations and forecasting. “By analyzing gameplay data, we can adjust game mechanics to enhance playability and engagement. This will ultimately increase player retention,” explains Baker.
Before choosing the Databricks Data Intelligence Platform, SEGA Europe could not fully capitalize on its vast data resources. With data collection at an overwhelming rate of 50,000 events per second from over 40 million players across more than 100 video games, the organization struggled with data integration, quality, and accessibility. “The road to becoming an intelligent data business involved focusing on getting the data right, ensuring data accessibility and democratization, and advancing our capabilities in LLM building, training, and deployment,” adds Baker.
These were the three overarching use cases that encouraged SEGA Europe’s pivot to a more comprehensive data and AI strategy. Getting the data “right” meant establishing a single source of truth for data—essential for accurate, timely, and high-quality analytics and machine learning. Secondly, democratizing data would empower teams across the organization (regardless of their technological expertise) with immediate access to the data they need, facilitating quick decision-making.
Through the strategic implementation of Databricks, SEGA Europe consolidated its vast array of data to successfully build solutions for these three use cases. Here’s how they did it.
Enabling data democratization and rapid ML deployment with the Databricks Platform
In 2020, SEGA Europe embarked on a transformative journey with the Databricks Data Intelligence Platform, integrating all their data into Delta Lake. This integration marked a pivotal shift towards a comprehensive data environment, incorporating structured and unstructured data from a variety of sources including marketing, customer research, game analytics, and even game assets. Baker describes this phase as “an exciting time that set the stage for innovative data applications.”
SEGA Europe leveraged various components of the Databricks Platform to address their three overarching use cases. First and foremost, they needed to get the data right. By consolidating their data within the unified architecture of Delta Lake and using Lakehouse Federation, SEGA Europe could integrate data across global databases like Redshift, BigQuery, and SQL Server into one centralized environment.
This setup was governed with Unity Catalog, ensuring consistency and reliability. “It’s incredible that you can query over all these different data sources within the same network, with Feature Tables maintaining consistency for our key KPIs and features,” says Baker, highlighting the impact. “With Databricks, we have a single source of truth for engineers, analysts, and scientists around the business. Whether they’re looking for daily or monthly active users, churn rates, or retention rates for specific SEGA Europe titles, they know where to go and they know that everyone’s reporting from the same data.”
Next, data accessibility and democratization were achieved through Databricks SQL and the introduction of AI/BI Genie, which allowed users from various departments to access data in plain English. “Databricks SQL provided a lightning-fast experience for analytics workloads. With AutoML, we can try out machine learning use cases as we think of them—within minutes. And you don’t even need to be a data scientist to do it. This was never possible for us before.”
Meanwhile, Genie made data accessible to non-technical stakeholders, enhancing decision-making across the board. As Baker explains, “Engineers and scientists have notebooks for machine learning workloads and streaming use cases. Analysts can use the SQL editor for their analytics workloads. Meanwhile, executives and other leaders in marketing and finance can use Genie to access the data they need just using plain English. Absolutely incredible.”
10x faster time-to-insight with AI/BI Genie
SEGA Europe has experienced transformative results from the integration of generative AI into its operations, particularly in player sentiment analysis. By leveraging a generative AI model to translate and analyze tens of thousands of user reviews daily, SEGA Europe has been able to pinpoint and address game-related issues effectively. According to Baker, “This continuous sentiment monitoring loop has significantly increased player retention in certain SEGA titles.”
The AI/BI Genie tool has revolutionized decision-making within SEGA Europe, allowing executives, engineers, marketers, and managers to obtain instant answers to critical business questions. This tool's ability to provide immediate insights—such as sales performance comparisons between different time periods—eliminates the need for meetings and prolonged information retrieval processes, which traditionally involve multiple departments. Baker highlights an example of how efficient the process has become. “Executives can instantly find out how Game X is selling in China over the last three months compared to the year prior, and immediately get actionable insights without waiting for interdepartmental emails.”
The AI/BI Genie tool's flexibility to customize data outputs into various formats, such as spreadsheets, pie charts, or bar charts, using simple English commands significantly enhances user interaction with data, fostering a more data-literate organization.
The success of current AI applications opens new avenues for further automating other aspects of game development and marketing strategies. By continuing to evolve its data infrastructure and AI capabilities, SEGA Europe aims to maintain its competitive edge in the rapidly changing video game industry. As Francis Hart, vice president of data and AI succinctly summarized, “Our partnership with Databricks has been a game-changer for SEGA Europe. By unifying our data and making it more accessible, we've been able to drive real-time insights and accelerate machine learning deployment. We're excited to see what other innovations we can drive with Databricks.”
Click here to learn more about how Databricks is helping gaming studios build better games.