Snowplow at GDC: why gaming companies don’t need to build their own event data pipeline

We at Snowplow were very excited to be invited by AWS to this year’s Games Developer Conference (GDC) in San Francisco. We both presented at the AWS Developer Day and demoed Snowplow at the AWS stand.

Snowplow presentation at GDC

Alex Dean, my cofounder, and I were delighted to speak at the AWS Developer Day. You can view our presentation, “Open Source Game Analytics Powered by AWS”, below.

And the slides by themselves:

In the talk, we introduced ourselves and gave a bit of history on Snowplow (including our early gaming influencers) before discussing the types of analytics we see our gaming users performing on their Snowplow data. We ended with some recommendations for games companies looking at developing their anaytics capability and corresponding analytics stack.

Snowplow platform demo

We also got a chance to demo Snowplow at GDC and presented some of the work we’d done with the awesome team at CodeCombat.

Our demo included a ‘level analytics’ dashboard that the CodeCombat team uses to inform level design and development decisions. You can find out more about this in another blog post we wrote about How to develop better games with level analytics. Below you can see a video of that demo.

Closing thoughts on our GDC experience

It was my first time attending GDC and what an awesome experience it was. The Games industry is very lucky to have a single event that brings together so many practioners all over the world to share knowledge and collaborate together: it really is a model for other industries and deserves at least some of the credit for the level of innovation that we’re seeing in the sector. I look forward to attending future events!