Turiya Media: Data Mining Social Games To Find The Most Valuable Players

Can gamers be treated like shoppers - get sliced, segmented, and targeted? A year-old startup with offices in New York City and San Francisco called Turiya Media is building a business around applying data mining techniques to social, massive-multiplayer, and mobile games to help game developers figure out which players are the most valuable. As more free-to-play games become the norm and selling virtual goods becomes the way to make money, game companies are relying more and more on a small fraction of players (typically 1 to 3 percent) paying to level up or for that shiny new virtual sword. Finding that 1 to 3 percent of players or getting more to pay for virtual goods can have a big impact on game revenues.

"Every interaction with the customer is a chance for the game company to make or lose money, or gain or lose customers," explains Turiya founder and CEO Chethan Ramachandran. His background is in using predictive algorithms to identify online fraud for information security companies. WIth Turiya, his team is applying similar techniques to predict player behavior based on what they've done in the past and their style of play. Each player is segmented into one or more of 15 different groups, including collectors, explorers, social gamers, competitive players. Depending on the game, different kinds of players might be more likely to purchase virtual goods, and thus be more valuable.

Turiya's game analytics also tries to predict the lifetime value and revenue curve for each player. If the player is likely to stick around a long time, it is probably not a good idea to bombard them with offers to buy virtual goods every five minutes. If they are only likely to play a few times, then that might be the best way to maximize that player's revenue potential. Turiya looks at everything each player does in each game, tries to understand what motivates them, and who are the big spenders.

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