Analysis of the causes of project management in an online game company

In the face of the company's repeated adjustments to the game market operation strategy, the previous BI (business intelligence) projects could not meet the current diversified needs. If secondary development, the cost would be high, it would be a pity to discard it.
"Pathological" of BI projects"
Since its launch in March 2006, a large online game of the Space Network company has received a good response from the market. Now, it has expanded to 6 groups of servers in 6 regions.

Li Pei, CIO of the company, was deeply impressed by the pressure to maintain the current good situation. Therefore, in March, after asking the boss, he decided to implement the BI (business intelligence) project.

The reason for preparing for the BI project is that Li Pei considers that in the early stage, online games require good creativity, planning, art, and programs, but after a certain stage, the main challenge is the balance of the game (role) and the mentality of the players. The balance determines whether the players will participate in the game for a long time. Improper handling may lead to the loss of a large number of game players.

Li Pei's idea is to use BI to regularly collect historical data of some players in the game. Extract and convert historical data into a data warehouse. Then, import the multi-dimensional database. Build an analysis platform with BI. Through the network, game manufacturers, or operators, you can view the analysis results at any time to obtain game balance statistics, monitor game behavior, and master player dynamics, analyze and adjust game bugs, balance issues, and regional marketing strategies.

Li Pei's plan was strongly supported by the boss, but what he did not expect was that it was the project that had seen many "pathological" problems in the future ".

First, project planning is at the early stage of game Operation. However, after the game enters the market, the operation strategy is adjusted repeatedly. During the planning, the project counts the players' behaviors based on the servers in a certain region and gets the analysis result, but the actual situation is that many players are concentrated in several popular server groups, and the boundaries of regions do not exist. For example, many players in different regions are concentrated in server groups such as Beijing and Shanghai.

This is a problem for the project module that analyzes and adjusts the marketing strategy plan for the region.

Moreover, the online game market is changing and its strategy is constantly adjusted. At first, the full charge mode has now changed to the free and charge-based method. In the past, there was no detailed distinction between project planning, and it was crucial to get different behavior analyses of free and paid players to adjust game operations.

In addition, the initial project planning and project establishment analysis focused on the game's own strategy and ignored other aspects, leading to some mistakes. For example, at that time, the company's business processing system was not perfect, and the data source and data quality became a problem. Other departments did not pay attention to the decision analysis system required by BI.

How to "cure"
Li Pei contacted the project development company for this purpose. If secondary development is conducted, the project cost will increase a lot, far exceeding the budget. In addition, the online gaming market is constantly changing, causing constant adjustment of operational strategies. What should we do in the future? If the company increases it r & D efforts, IT is not only a cost issue. The development company will only tell you the data process of the system and will not involve code content, this increases the difficulty for future development.