SEGA Europe builds on the Databricks Lakehouse Platform to improve the player experience and empower data science team
Databricks, the data and AI company, today announced that SEGA® Europe, the worldwide leader in interactive entertainment, is using Databricks’ Lakehouse platform to personalise the player experience and build its own machine learning algorithm to help target and tailor games for over 30 million of its customers.
As house-bound gamers looked to pass the time during the first lockdowns of 2020, some SEGA Europe titles, including Football Manager™, saw over double the number of sales during the first lockdown compared to the year before. Furthermore, a number of SEGA titles saw over a 50% increase in players over the course of the COVID-19 pandemic. With more anonymised data being collected through an analytics pipeline than ever before, the team needed a dedicated computing resource to handle the sheer volume of data, extract meaningful insights from it and to enable the data science team to improve general workflow.
Databricks’ Lakehouse platform has transformed the player experience for SEGA Europe customers by:
- Tracking key metrics, allowing SEGA Europe to cohort users by different play styles which leads to more personalised communications and interactions with players
- Using real-time data to drive community activities, improve the player experience and offer more personalised interactions
- Enabling the team to build its own machine learning algorithm to help tailor games to a player base
“Improving the player experience is at the heart of everything we do and we very much see Databricks as a key partner, supporting us to drive forward the next generation of community gaming,” says Felix Baker, Data Services Manager, SEGA Europe.
Databricks is now core to SEGA Europe’s data environment and its lakehouse platform has made life simpler for its data science and studio teams, as it makes data sets available in one centralised environment. Through Delta Lake, an open format storage layer that is the foundation of a scalable lakehouse, the SEGA Europe team has been able to auto schedule jobs and deliver more efficient and streamlined workflows from raw data to output.
Stanley Wang, data scientist, SEGA Europe concludes, “With the help of Databricks, we have been able to completely transform the data science role here to be a key pillar of decision making for the business. The notebook environment has encouraged a strong level of collaboration not just within our own data team, but also with data teams around the studios allowing us to easily pool together ideas and solutions. The powerful ML-focused clusters are useful for quickly setting up and managing environments for specific projects.”
Databricks’ Lakehouse Platform helps organisations accelerate innovation by unifying data teams with an open, scalable platform for all of their data-driven use cases. From streaming analytics and AI to business intelligence (BI), Databricks provides a modern lakehouse architecture that unifies data engineering, data science, machine learning and analytics within a single collaborative platform.
