EEDAR Launches Biz-Facing Fact Service ‘GamePulse’

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EEDAR Launches Biz-Facing Fact Service ‘GamePulse’

Wed, Oct 15, 2008

Today, Electronic Entertainment Design and Research (EEDAR) has announced GamePulse, a online service that allows industry professionals to access and analyze a wealth of data -- from individual game facts to high-level sales and trends -- all from the convenience of their web browser.

A couple weeks ago, I had the opportunity to witness the system in action, and speak with EEDAR co-founder Greg Short about how it might work... and while I can't offer the same measured opinion as a game publisher might, I can tell you right now: GamePulse is a journalist's dream.

In April, I had the pleasure to interview the founders of EEDAR, a relatively new firm specializing in video game statistics. Though my original aim was to discover more about the pair's timely and groundbreaking study proving a solid correlation between Xbox 360 achievements and game sales, I soon became fascinated by the company as a whole.

EEDAR, they explained, was not merely a firm that crunches sales numbers. Rather, measuring 15,000+ data points per game -- including everything from the number of achievements to the game's marketing budget -- and then combining that "game DNA" with sales numbers before performing statistical regression, it was a firm that could predict with some degree of accuracy how a new game might perform based on the same real-world factors that affected similar predecessors. I remember listening in awe as they described the immense collection of game facts they had accumulated so far, and -- I'll admit -- imagining how much more credible and substantial my own minor news analyses might be if I had access to the same.

As you can see immediately above, GamePulse is starting to make that dream a reality.

According to EEDAR co-founder Greg Short, GamePulse doesn't quite offer 15,000 data points per game -- closer to 1000, and limited this year to US console titles -- but it provides those facts in a dynamic manner that allows game publishers, developers, investors, creative agencies and more to access answers to "the most common day-to-day questions," on demand, with just a few clicks of the mouse.

That's not just Short's sales pitch. I counted the clicks.

What kind of questions? Well, let's start with something easy -- say you wanted to know how many copies the average Xbox 360 title sold. GamePulse's Xbox 360 channel gives you that... and the average review score, and the number of titles in each genre, and sales of software and hardware over time, and a variety of other facts neatly arranged in bar graphs, pie charts and more.

But that's just the beginning, because every platform, company, franchise and individual game has their own GamePulse channel too -- and within a channel, data can be sorted, cross-referenced and sliced to provide a snapshot of what you're looking for.

In a whirlwind tour of Call of Duty 4 developer Infinity Ward, for example, Short was not only able to show me a host of details about the game's featureset, but also an analysis of the entire Call of Duty franchise, and of the company itself. I could see how much each individual game made, the percentage of the franchise each represented, the sales and average price point of each game over time, the diversity of Infinity Ward's portfolio in regards to genre and ESRB rating, their history of platform exclusivity, the deviation of several of these from the industry average, a graphical company hierarchy and a list of every firm each of those companies has ever worked with... and plenty more.

I was particularly impressed by the system's ability to pull up a list of competitors. Want to know what Tomb Raider: Anniversary had to deal with on its day of release?

Since EEDAR also collects data for confirmed upcoming titles, Short suggested this last might be useful for more than determining why a prior title did as it did -- it could also help predict future sales. "If two surfing games are coming out at the same time, how will we know which will sell better?" Find your two surfing games using this tool, then click through to see their individual featuresets and franchise history. Check out the historical performance of that developer in that genre, or on that platform. See how other games of that type did that same time of year. Starting next year, EEDAR claims you'll be able to have a look at each game's marketing budget.

If a company wanted to design a new shooter, Short suggested, they could look at the existing shooter landscape, sort the titles by sales and/or review score, and look at the individual games that were well received to develop a preliminary featureset of their own.

While Short admitted that a good portion of this data is available from other sources -- some of it directly from EEDAR's own partners for the service -- he was adamant that the integration of all this information into a flexible, easy-to-use interface would be well worth the while, and that EEDAR's own "game DNA" provides context to what otherwise is mostly a collection of sales numbers.

I agree, and as soon as EEDAR provides a pared-down service that a games journalist can afford, I'll be the first to sign up. For now, here's the official press release.

Carlsbad, CA., October 15, 2008 -- Electronic Entertainment Design and Research (EEDAR), a business intelligence and research firm specializing in the video game industry, today announced the launch of GamePulse™, its premier web-based information service providing insight into both macro-level trends and micro-level details for video game titles, publishers, developers and console platforms.

“Despite the video game industry being near recession proof, increasing development costs and overall competition in the marketplace demand that investors, publishers and developers intensify their due diligence if they wish to maintain profit levels”, said Geoffrey Zatkin, President and Chief Operating Officer of EEDAR. “With its extensive data coverage, detailed analytics and ability to converge numerous data sources into a single application, GamePulse delivers fast, accurate and meaningful insight to the many issues which must be addressed during the greenlight, development and marketing stages of a video game’s production.”

GamePulse contains information on more than 4,500 historically released game titles, 750 upcoming game titles, 800 developers and 150 publishers; GamePulse is updated continually with the latest industry data.

Through integration with the EEDAR game database, which identifies up to 15,000 unique attributes for every game title analyzed by the company, GamePulse delivers contextually relevant and actionable information for the day-to-day decisions facing the video game industry. GamePulse can provide information as broad as analyzing the historical and upcoming game titles for a specific company or be as detailed as examining the use of different multiplayer modes in Mature rated Action games on a per console basis.

Supplied as a web-based subscription service, GamePulse is the most accessible and extensive collection of objective facts and trending data for the video game industry commercially available. To learn more about GamePulse, download a detailed fact sheet or arrange for a personal demonstration visit http://www.eedar.com or call +1.877.88.EEDAR.