Player-First Gaming: Playside Studios' Data-Driven Game Development with Snowflake

I'm a big gamer myself, and there's massive untouched opportunities to bring data into video games.

One of the goals of Playside is player-first. So by using the data, we can align ourselves to that and create the best games for gamers.

Broadly, Snowflake is being a massive benefit to the business, both internally for our team. It's allowed them to drive the insights that they find useful for games. And then for the business, we get a far, far faster return on investment for what we're doing.

I'm all over Snowflake in every angle, I guess. I build a lot of the ETL all the way through to analyzing the data and delivering insights on the results, even managing warehouses, building Streamlit apps.

One of them is a platform which uses automated test data from bots that play the game and report back to us. It gives the developers a responsive tool to go, "Are the resources I'm putting into this game adequate? Is it going to perform well?"

One of the reasons that we chose Snowflake is the data share ability. Using that gives us real-time analytic data, which is something that we hadn't had in a company before. Snowflake made a very seamless transition, and we were able to get up and running in a very short amount of time.

The whole business is enabled, basically. So everyone's been really impressed by the speed that we've been able to kind of adapt and roll out features, and also the timeliness of the data, whether it's something they want once a week, or if they want it within the next 10 minutes.

It also allows us to connect to a number of different visualization tools and present to whether it's an artist who needs to kind of see how their frame rate is performing in the game, or if it's a GM just to see how the game is performing in the market. Snowflake enables us to present that quickly and efficiently.

With Snowflake, we can have a lot of complex security, which is really crucial for compliance with our games, and also making sure that the gamer's data is secure and protected, and they feel confident in Playside.

Very passionate about representing players how they want to be represented and respecting that privacy. If you tell us, "Hey, don't collect any information," Snowflake has allowed us to build tools that allow players to have all the control over what they share.

Our relationship with Snowflake is more of a partnership than as a customer. We feel that we can get access to the right people at the right time when we need guidance and support, which has been incredibly important.

Snowflake is moving so fast in the industry, at such an exciting pace, that it's nice to learn from it and see where the industry is going as a result. So that's pretty exciting.