6 Things You Can Do To Become A Game Analyst

When I set out to become a Game Analyst, the biggest challenge wasn’t just the skills, but figuring out the route to get there. I was reading all this content about why game analytics is a fun and rewarding career, but I couldn’t find anything on what I should do to become a Game Analyst.

A good Game Analyst is typically strong in three areas: communication, technical skills, and domain knowledge. They digest large amounts of data with tools like SQL and Python, understand why it’s important for the business, and then sell the value to relevant parties through reports and presentations to drive improvements to the company’s KPIs.  

These skills are developed by doing:

• Breaking down how different games work.
• Learning and implementing analytical techniques in projects.
• Communicating your findings through data visualisations, write-ups, and presentations.

This post aims to provide you with some focus points to bolster your chances of landing your first job as a Game Analyst.

A look ahead:

1. Play and Deconstruct Games.
2. Consume Games and Analytics Media.
3. Learn Basic Technical Skills.
4. Learn the Basic Metrics.
5. Do Your Own Projects.
6. Write, Share and Explain Your Findings.

(1) Play and Deconstruct Games

This should be an easy place to start, I mean, hopefully, you’re already playing some games. But now, start thinking about why the game is designed like it is. Having an idea about what games aim to do with their different systems will be crucial to help answer game-related questions in interviews.

By playing and breaking down products, you begin to understand common systems, desirable user behaviours and monetisation loops in these games. This is incredibly powerful when analysing game data as it allows you to ask the right questions and provide clear suggestions with proven case studies. I’m constantly taking inspiration from other successful products – attaching screenshots to presentations and reports.

As a starting point, while you’re playing games, begin by being more aware of what is happening and by making observations. Write lists of features in each game you play, and you will start to notice some commonalities. Then start asking questions.

Why do we see Battle Passes across so many games, what are they trying to encourage? What behaviours are the in-game events trying to achieve? How are currencies used inside the products? How do the systems link to encourage players to spend?

Start to play titles from top-grossing lists. Apple and Google publish their top 100 titles, these games are worth playing as they are proven systems, effective at generating high levels of revenue. They will be well-known in the industry and offer you some easy talking points in interviews.

Some common interview exercises might involve explaining a system inside one of the games you play or explaining ways to improve this game.  

(2) Consume Games and Analytics Media

Reading around the company or industry is part of the classic recommendations any jobseeker receives. While you don’t need to read loads and loads, it’s a great place to start developing an understanding of the market and see the opinions of experts.

Being able to showcase up-to-date knowledge of the market will give you a competitive edge in interviews, showing you’re proactive and genuinely interested in the space. Keeping on top of industry trends is crucial for a Game Analyst as the market is fast-moving, where new trends could help your company differentiate itself from its competition or lead to it getting left behind.  

If you’ve been playing and deconstructing some of the top-grossing titles, there will no doubt be countless articles and posts written around the game. Use these to gather different perspectives and form a more well-rounded opinion. These are often written by industry veterans and provide lots of value.

I’d suggest looking at sites like GamesIndustry.biz for the latest industry news, and sites like naavik.co for market and product analysis.

(3) Learn Basic Technical Skills

One of the most obvious places to work on is your technical skills. Without them, you couldn’t begin to start analysing game data.

An analyst’s technical toolkit can be split into four: (1) a Spreadsheet tool (Microsoft Excel), (2) SQL for database querying; (3) a coding language (e.g. Python) and (4) a visualisation tool (e.g. Tableau).

To land your first job, learn a Spreadsheet tool and SQL as a minimum. They will enable you to be able to do most forms of analysis. A coding language is not strictly necessary for you for an entry-level position but will help you differentiate yourself. Vis tools are like coding languages, they’ll help you stand out from the crowd, but your time can likely be spent better elsewhere. Vis tools vary from company to company and can be usually learned on the job.

Spreadsheet Tool (Essential)

Spreadsheets, like Excel, are a great starting point and are widely used across most industries. They provide a great suite of tools to help you process, analyse, and visualise data. Learning one will help you understand the entire analytics report pipeline, as you can build out projects from start to finish.

Although you might think this advice is boring, I still use spreadsheets for a large amount of my tasks at work. Whether it features breakdowns, forecasts, producing visualisation or admin, spreadsheet tools often provide a quick and easy solution.

I’d suggest using Microsoft Excel, but if you don’t own a license, you can use Google Sheets. What you learn on Google Sheets will directly translate to Excel.

If you’re just starting, you can find countless courses for free on YouTube. Any problem you have will have been discussed millions of times on Google, probably with easy-to-implement solutions.

I quite like a YouTuber called Shashank Kalanithi, he has a short Excel tutorial here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TPBS-7OkSnM

SQL (Essential)

SQL is widely used as a tool to get data from a database. Companies will have other systems in place to help you access and export data, but this can be restrictive. Learning SQL will provide you with the flexibility to get the data that you want in the format you want.

While you might be able to get around without SQL, I’d highly recommend picking it up as it’s so easy and quick to learn. It will appear on most Game Analyst job postings.

There are quite a few different versions of SQL out there, but most are highly similar with small differences in syntax. If you understand one version of SQL, you’ll have no issues with any others. Reasonable versions to learn are MySQL, SQLite or PostgreSQL.

Here is another video from Shashank, which can give a good intro into SQL: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gwp3dJUsy5g

Coding Language (Nice to have)

Coding languages are great as they help you do the sexier parts of analytics, like machine learning and automation. While these parts are cool, they are not strictly necessary for landing an entry-level job but will provide you with an edge. Normally people put this too high on their priority list – time is often better spent studying analytics fundamentals like statistics, building industry knowledge, or learning how to effectively use data visualisations to communicate insights.

The two main languages are Python and R. While both have their strengths, learning one is sufficient. I chose to learn Python for its versatility, and rich selection of data science libraries, and it sounded cool. Still, it might make more sense to learn R, especially if you already have a base knowledge.

Knowing Python helped me land my first job, as it was the backbone behind some of my main side projects.    

I learned Python using Eric Matthes’ Python Crash Course https://www.amazon.co.uk/Python-Crash-Course-2nd-Edition/dp/1593279280, but you can find plenty of high-value, free courses online.

Visualisation Tool (Future)

Tools like Tableau and Looker are fantastic, they make exploring, visualising, and analysing data effortless and speedy. Although they’re great, I suggest learning these at a bit later date! They vary between companies and are typically reasonably easy to pick up.

While I’m suggesting to de-prioritise learning purpose-built visualisation tools, do not avoid learning visualisation fundamentals in a spreadsheet tool like Excel. This will be one of your key assets in any entry-level position and will often be a significant part of any test during the application process.

(4) Learn the Basic Metrics

No one expects you to be an expert on the ins and outs of game analytics for your first job. BUT, it’s going to be really annoying when you’re reading an article and nonsense words like DAU, CPI or ARPPU keep coming up.

Take a read through this article by GameAnalytics, it will give you a reasonable starting point allowing you to navigate most news articles. (https://gameanalytics.com/blog/metrics-all-game-developers-should-know/)

(5) Do Your Own Projects

Personal project work can be a game-changer for your career search. They can help showcase your expertise; develop your skills and set you apart from other candidates. They gave me a lot of discussion points while interviewing for the Junior Games Analyst position.

Early on in your career, it can be difficult to have anything outside of your academic accomplishments. These projects allow you to bridge the gap between your theoretical knowledge and real-world experience. Showing interviewers your commitment, skills, and readiness.

I appreciate this can be very time-consuming, so pick one or two ideas that can help show your skills in different parts of the analytics pipeline. Areas to choose from could be visualisation, EDA, data modelling, data scraping or automation.

An ideal project will:

• Have a clear goal.
• Use appropriate tools/techniques.
• Contain thorough analysis.
• Have a strong interpretation of results.
• Display a clear understanding of how this generates value.
• Be game-related. (bonus, but can sometimes be harder to find)

Choosing a project can be difficult, so it’s often easy to choose one of the classics like analysing the Titanic data set or building a tumour classification model. While these projects do have their uses, I’d suggest avoiding commonly used datasets and instead, trying to think of something novel, and game-related.  

My best project ideas have come from reading books or taking courses on analytics and statistics. These ideas will often be highly relevant and come to you easier as you immerse your brain in the space. Try reading a book like Naked Statistics or taking a YouTube course on Linear Models.

Check out the datasets available on Kaggle as a starting point (https://www.kaggle.com/datasets).

Still stuck? Some project ideas could be:

• Analysing a game update’s impact on its in-game marketplace and economy and producing a forecast for its price.
• Video Games Sales Trends Analysis.
• Building a tool to understand the sentiment around different game launches/updates by scraping social media data.

(6) Write, Share and Explain Your Findings

As I mentioned at the start, communication is extremely important as an analyst. Being smart and technically gifted is great and all, but nothing happens unless you can explain and convince people why your work matters.

Reports and presentations are the last stage of an analytics project, and arguably the most important. Luckily, practising them is quite easy!

• Spend time typing up your notes on different games, industry trends and analytics projects.
• Explain your findings and share your notes with your friends and family.
• Experiment with different data visualisations and see what works best with your audience.
• Write a blog.

By doing this, you’ll be deepening your understanding of the topic and gaining more experience communicating challenging concepts to a variety of people. You’ll be better prepped for interviews and have resources to add to your CV to improve your chances of getting an interview.

Read more about this here: Essential Skill Analysts Often Neglect—Don’t Be One of Them.

Closing Notes

Getting into game analytics requires immersion in gaming, analytical skills, and effective communication. Engage deeply with games, stay updated on industry trends, learn technical skills and business metrics, pursue personal projects, and communicate findings effectively to forge a rewarding career in this dynamic field.