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The attraction for the tech industry, especially gaming, has grown exponentially from the 1980s and still goes on. In the early days, we used to walk to the nearest newsstands and buy the latest issue of our favourite magazine; nowadays gamers visit Reddit and other forums on a daily basis, discussing about the most powerful armor of the game they are currently playing or asking how to build the perfect spaceship. Whether it's purposely done or made just out of pure passion, players meet data every time they press start.
From Software
From Software was born in November 1986 in Tokyo. As other Japanese developers born in the 80s, it started out as a PC software developer. From Software broadened its business towards the videogame industry only in the 90s. Unfortunately, PC gaming was not yet popular in Japan and the project did not give positive results. Luckily, the PlayStation release in 1994 brought visibility to the developer. From Software was successful in its homeland thanks to King's Field but failed to land on the western market. Until the late 1990s, From Software developed the sequel to King's Field and other titles, including the Armored Core series, which allowed the studio to open up to the West and debut on Microsoft and Nintendo consoles.
In the 2000s, thanks also to the arrival of the future president Hidetaka Miyazaki, From Software gave birth to the game that will pave the way for the company's success, the birth of a new genre and the impressive media impact: Demon's Souls.
Souls-like
The predecessor of the Dark Souls saga – and the follow-ups Bloodborne, Sekiro and the recent Elden Ring – is the spiritual son of the King's Field saga, the developer debut title, which already featured every key element that makes the Japanese studio works apart: the game world has a dark fantasy setting with medieval flavours; the game difficulty is very hard compared to the standards to which the industry has accustomed the players, a side that has split critics and community. Death is at the core of the gameplay, the “trial & error” philosophy is From Software's trademark; the RPG (role-playing game) style and the detailed character customization are just the icing on the cake. The From Software’s clear and fascinating interpretation of the videogame medium makes its products unique, thus nowadays we even talk about a new genre, featuring those aforementioned elements, trademarks of the Japanese studio's game design: the Souls-like.
Dark Souls 2 Inventory
Character planners & calculators
The latest chapter, Elden Ring, is From Software's most watched game on the streaming platform Twitch, surpassing 215 million hours in about five weeks. The Souls-like huge success has led players to group together on many forums and chats, Reddit and Discord above all. The character progression, the game levels’ multiple interpretations, the abundance of abilities, modifiers and equipment: all these factors can be hardly traced if not included in a database. The players’ demand for a systematic classification of the game elements increases as the growing success of From Software titles. By browsing the web, you will find various calculators, character planners, game loot encyclopedias (materials, armors, items, etc.), quantitative and qualitative research essays, damage calculation tables & charts of the many character classes. The amount of data is huge and, thanks to the community work, simple scripts and relational databases help players in the difficult task of character creation, a decision that drastically changes the whole gaming experience. With a few mathematical functions and an Excel worksheet, you can create minimal but effective calculators that allow players to view dozens of statistics and percentages with a click. Thanks to these tools, the replayability of From Software titles is limitless.
Gaming for everyone
The gaming experience has been able to adapt to the needs of the market and user requests over the years. Whether it's mobile, online or console gaming, the video game market is constantly growing and it is estimated that it could reach a market value of around $240 billion in 2026. Furthermore:
- People between 18 and 34 years represent 38% of global players.
- About 14.1 billion mobile games were downloaded in Q1 2021.
- Approximately there are 3 billion gamers in the world.
Furthermore, the rise of the gaming industry increases not only the demand for game developers but also data specialists'.
Don't live the future as a sidekick... be a superhero! Discover Geeks Academy’s training offer in Gaming & Metaverse and AI & Big Data:
Play-to-Learn with Data is an in-depth series about the surprising relationship between the world of data and video games. Below a comprehensive list of the cases we have been talking about:
Sources:
https://www.theloadout.com/elden-ring/twitch-hours-watched
https://mugenmonkey.com/