How data science and AI have evolved gaming technology – Business Today

The year 2021 has been an exciting year for the Indian gaming market. This year, the online gaming sector has progressed and seen a paradigm shift it is because of a multitude of encouraging factors such as young and tech-savvy young population, feature-packed smartphones, affordable data connectivity, and overall technological development.

According to a KPMG report, India's online gaming market collected revenues of Rs 136 billion in 2021. With people spending more time online due to the pandemic, the gaming industry received a massive push.

With this growth trajectory, the industry is expected to advance at a compound annual rate of 21 per cent to Rs 290 billion ($3.84 billion) in the next five years.

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The growth was backed by the development of technology i.e. availability of high-speed data, digital payments, huge device penetration, and expansion in supply and quality of games.

With all these key driving factors, it is expected that Indian online gamers will rise to 510 million in 2022.

Data Science Backing the Growth of the Gaming industry

Data Science and Artificial Intelligence (AI) have changed the face of the gaming industry. While the competition is high in the gaming industry, the companies are racing to attract and engage their audiences through diversified models.

To achieve this, Data Science helps gaming companies to analyse different factors that affect the behaviour of the users such as consumption pattern, time spent on the platform, interaction time, quitting point, preference, outcomes, and scores.

Gaming companies are leveraging technologies such as photogrammetry techniques that use photographic data and convert them into realistic digital models.

On the other hand, motion pictures/capturing is a technology that helps in creating characters with more human traits. Data analytics also helps in improving the content based on data insights.The role of Data Science has seen an interesting growth in the development of gaming models. Along with that, there was an indicative development in analysing and identifying optimisation points, making predictions and empowering machine learning algorithms, identifying patterns and trends to guide service maps and improve gaming models.

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The focus behind analytics and Data Science is to develop profitable games and engage users. For instance, developing better scenarios for gamers so they don't feel irritated or bored while playing.

Many companies also use data to detect the cases of fraud and cheating in the games and to resolve this, AI has come to the rescue for the gaming industry.The amount of data to be processed has started increasing as the number of users is now mounting at an exponential rate.

Hence, some of the key data such as users' playing time, interaction time, quitting point, preference, outcomes, scores, and other data are playing an important role in user acquisition.

Due to technological advancement, various data sets can now be put into AI and machine learning systems to provide gamers unique information and going forward this information can be used to understand and even personalize the users' expedition across the platform using clickstream data.Responsible AI in Gaming Technology

The AI-powered interactive, responsive and adaptive experiences in gaming are created by non-player characters (NPCs). The AI engines define the behaviour of these characters in the gaming world.

AI enables developers to deliver console-like experiences on different devices such as laptops and smartphones. Studies have shown that AI is somehow able to trigger the behaviour of human beings, which creates a huge need for responsible AI in the gaming industry.

This puts a huge responsibility on the companies to design, develop, procure, deploy and responsibly use technologies. The tools built with AI techniques enable the operators to analyse the needs of players, identify possible marketing opportunities, with odds compilation, and also with responsible gaming initiatives. While processing huge data created on the gaming platform, responsible AI also ensures a fair and safe gaming environment. Responsible AI in gaming is required to protect users and companies from the potential risks (including cyber risks) that may cause physical and digital harm.

To be fair, data scientists must be cautious and account for data bias while constructing models. For establishing a healthy gaming culture, maintaining ongoing user engagement while generating a safe, healthy online gaming arena, a well-structured AI/ML model will be critical.

This will further lead to an exponential growth of the gaming industry and will also attract international players to invest in the Indian gaming market.(The author is CEO & Founder of Witzeal Technologies Pvt. Ltd.)

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How data science and AI have evolved gaming technology - Business Today