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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.
Timeless genre
FPS - First Person Shooter - is the most popular video game genre. Doom, Duke Nukem, Halo, Half-Life, Quake, the list goes on and on. Among the most loved games by users, at least one shooter is in everyone's heart. The simple and intuitive game mechanics, the immersion, action, every piece of game design has brought this genre on top of the video game Olympus. According to Statista reports, FPS is the most played genre for all age groups. This is also a result of the evolution of the videogame medium: the multiplayer experience is now the standard and FPS has perfectly adapted to the transition from single to multiplayer.
In recent years, industry leaders such as Blizzard and Riot Games have approached first person shooters for the first time.
Parallel universes
Blizzard Entertainment is an American video game developer and publisher, founded in 1991. Famous for brands such as Starcraft, Diablo and World of Warcraft, in the 00s it merged with Activision, forming Activision Blizzard. It was only in 2016 that Blizzard entered the world of FPS with the release of Overwatch. The game is a multiplayer FPS that revolutionized the shooter genre. In January 2022, Microsoft announced the acquisition of Activision Blizzard for $ 68.7 billion.
Riot Games is a video game developer company founded in 2006 in Los Angeles, United States. In 2015, it was acquired by the Chinese giant Tencent Holdings. The company is popular for League of Legends, the so popular MOBA released in 2009 for PC, one of the few products that, after more than a decade, still counts on a large and active community.
Valorant UI
Clash of titans
These products target the same user base, however they present key differences. Overwatch is a 6v6 team game and the idea is to evolve the shooter's old concept, where all players have the same characteristics. Each Overwatch character plays a role (three in total) and has unique weapons and abilities. Therefore, we are far from classics such as Call of Duty or Battlefield, where the skills of a single player has a significant weight within the gameplay. Blizzard's game is based on team composition and synergy, giving importance to each hero (Overwatch character) skill kit. Popularity and success led to the birth of the Overwatch League, an eSports circuit dedicated to professional Overwatch players.
Valorant was born in 2020, in a video game environment where game as a service is already an established reality. Overwatch is a paid product, Valorant is free to play. Valorant teams consist of 5 members, one less than Overwatch. The Riot service is simple and effective: the game concept progresses around seasons, and, within these seasons, the players compete to unlock aesthetic elements of the agents (the characters of Valorant) and climb the rankings of competitive mode. Unlike its competitor, the players are equipped with similar weapons, each suited to specific strategies. Valorant agents play roles as in Overwatch but the agents' skills are more similar to each other. The strength of the product lies in the company reliability, the frequency of game content updates and an enduring community.
It is no coincidence if the products affected each other. Where Valorant was able to draw inspiration from Blizzard's choices, Overwatch creating process takes advantage of the FPS genre evolution, actually drawing inspiration from Valorant for the second chapter of Overwatch, due out in October 2022.
Overwatch's hero selection screen
Statistics and numbers in FPSs
The aforementioned evolution of online FPS involves a thorough data-driven development. To keep the characters’ power balanced, developers need to compare game results and generate useful insights to avoid a disparity in strength between the players in game. Interestingly, the developers themselves provide useful information to the community regarding balance updates. Also given the rise of eSports, especially for Overwatch and its League, we understand the priority of creating a healthy gameplay that can be fun for the average user but also logical and challenging for a pro player.
The high level of competition led the fan base to explore statistics and numbers, generating real studies and in-depth analyses. Also, some portals made by the communities come to help: those are a sort of hub where data of games statistics are collected in colorful and captivating infographics.
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'.
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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://insights.gg/insights-pro
https://www.overbuff.com/#
https://www.valorbuff.com/stats
https://www.reddit.com/r/VALORANT/comments/gt5wuh/bored_without_valorant_so_i_made_some_data/