Understanding Gamers Through Data at EA

EA's adoption of Tableau Server enterprise analytics paid off in better sales reporting, improved game site health monitoring, and a clearer understanding of beta games. “We wanted to build self-service rapid reporting analytics in an enterprise platform,” said Venkatesh Shivanna, Analytics Architect for EA. With more than 6,000 views per day, the Tableau Server eco-system was chosen for its ability to reliably keep up with the traffic from EA customers eager to get their game on.

Electronic Arts, Inc. (EA) is a worldwide publisher of video games that run on consoles, PCs, and mobile devices.

“We wanted to build self-service rapid reporting analytics in an enterprise platform,” said Venkatesh Shivanna, Analytics Architect for EA. With more than 1,000 extracts running per day, the Tableau Server ecosystem was chosen for its ability to reliably keep up with the traffic from EA customers eager to get their game on to explore data.

Tableau’s High Availability solution provides automatic failover capabilities for the repository and data engine components. The EA Tableau Server configuration as it has evolved over the past three years is composed of load distribution approach where a primary server node serving as the gateway and load balancer with 4 additional worker nodes along with standby secondary gateway server node. Each node is rolled out to a separate server and plays a unique role in the system in a distribution fashion:

i.e. Data Engine and Repository
VizQL Server
Backgrounder

The adoption of Tableau Server enterprise analytics paid off for EA in better understanding of gamer data, improved game site health monitoring, and a clearer understanding of beta games. EA studios can use this information to tailor their games such as The Sims, Dragon Age, and EA sports franchises such as Madden NFL and FIFA for an optimal customer experience.