SuperData Research is inviting you to its new Arcade worldwide gaming data dashboard — no quarters required.
The digital gaming and media analysts will post summary data across platforms and markets for publishers, researchers, the media, and interested gamers to use without charge.
Chief executive Joost van Dreunen said in an interview with GamesBeat that this will be the first time cross-platform comparison sales including mobile, console, and PC will be available. He worked for Nielsen Research in games before founding SuperData.
“Having a multiplatform approach is key to understanding how well you’re doing,” he said. “If I see numbers go down in the social gaming market, is it going to mobile? Is it going free to play? That’s the value of it. You can see it side by side.”
Summary information will be available publicly for free; access to the original datasets for custom analysis will go to paying customers. The data will include conversion rates and average user spend in addition to monthly active users and total revenue.
“It provides you not just a pretty graphic, but people can download the data directly into a spreadsheet and tinker with it themselves,” van Dreunen said. “It starts a conversation for us. It also allows us to share some of the things that we’ve learned.”
Other data currently on the market focuses on a single country, platform, or subset of titles or markets, van Dreunen said.
“In my mind, those are stations we’ve passed, too. Should we only be doing free to play? But that leaves a whole lot of questions unanswered.”
The company focuses on digital game sales, working directly with publishers and developers to collect its statistics, he said. For an example of past public releases, see a sample blog entry.
“We capture paying customers. In a mobile space, you have hundreds of millions of mobile gamers, but only about 5 percent of them spent money,” he said, adding that in some markets, the company’s data captures one in five transactions.
“When I started five years ago, I had nothing. There was zero data,” he said, adding that he also does research as part of his appointment at the New York University Stern School of Business. “This has been a long time coming. I’m just a curious guy, I want to research this stuff, I need this data. This is a victory for me, and I’m so proud of everybody here. Today is a big day.”