Neowiz boosts data-driven communication with self-service analytics platform Tableau

Neowiz services have over 80 games around the world, with ten to hundreds of thousands of daily active users (DAUs) for each game. In the process, they were faced with the challenge of collecting various types of original data quickly and integrating & analyzing the data which continues to grow at staggering rates.

“With Tableau, we were able to measure our business performance accurately, validate the hypotheses of our business analysts, marketers, and game planners with data, measure the marketing performance, and predict the customer lifetime value,” said Robert Kim, the director of the Information Analysis Office at Neowiz. “In the process of implementing a self-service Business Intelligence (BI), our staff were able to broaden their thinking when they were exploring the business data. In addition to the analysts at the information analysis office, frontline employees moved away from Excel and gained insights from the data. Less time was spent preparing the data and more time analyzing it.”

The Information Analysis Team at Neowiz wanted to reduce the number of resources used in implementing the report and help their employees to focus more on analysis. The former BI tools they had used were difficult to use and took a lot of time to develop visualized reports. Most of the analysis tasks had to be performed by the Information Analysis Team; the schema management was not flexible; the development process was dependent on the internal IT team.

To address the issue, Neowiz Information Analysis Team needed self-service BI solution with which they can connect, integrate and share data easily. They had adopted Tableau as it offered superior visual analytics functions, it was easy to share data and visualizations to others.

After adopting Tableau, Neowiz created an environment where not only experts but also general users can build games and business-related reports easily. Connecting to various data warehouses both on-premise and in the cloud, users could visualize and analyze data without coding, and draw insights instantaneously. In addition, when connecting to powerful analytics tools such as R or Python, Tableau enables Exploratory Data Analysis (EDA) through simple clicks and drag and drop.

As a result, Neowiz was able to reduce report implementation and sharing time by 50 percent, in comparison to the old analytics tool they used. Tableau also offered executives with visualized dashboards, not reports in a grid format, which helped them easy to understand the business status at a glance. These changes improved executives’ satisfaction in report and stakeholders could make better decisions with daily insight uncovered by Tableau.

Neowiz uses Tableau to create and publish reports for their enterprise-wide BI portal. When they began searching for a new reporting solution including Tableau, the company focused on reviewing enterprise-wide sharing functions as their top of mind. They had verified several facts such as the tool should provide enterprise-level data security and permission management; it should be freely connected to mobile app SDKs, Google Play Store data, and data collected from crawling as well as game service platform database. The UI should be user-friendly; and it should provide sufficient online learning resources.

In September 2018 when they first started using Tableau Desktop, it was mainly used by the Information Analysis Team. However within a year, most of the employees across the entire organization including the game business team were using Tableau for data analysis. Due to growing interest of Tableau internally , Information Analysis Team members who are leading to build dashboards at Neowiz started to provide internal training sessions on Tableau regularly.

Now Tableau has become the most important platform for sharing visual analysis of data mining results. In the past, Neowiz produced many reports using Excel, which could only be shared among a limited number of people. With Tableau, Neowiz employees are sharing insights and collaborating on the web. On the web portal with embedded Tableau, any users with permission can access the dashboards and teams can work together to make changes in central place. Employees who had previously preferred to prepare reports using Excel found the change to Tableau made it easier for them to analyze and visualize data. They are now actively participating in learning and using Tableau.

“Successful games are loved by users for many years, but many games don’t make it and disappear within several months after they are launched. Considering the nature of the gaming industry, it is essential to rapidly analyze data and implement reports promptly to assist in decision-making,” said Robert Kim. “Being able to implement reports easily and present them to internal stakeholders using Tableau can be a game-changer for the gaming company.”

Tableau allowed the data-driven decision-making to expand from the management to frontline employees. Employees in business and marketing teams were able to develop their ideas and gain insights while exploring the data by themselves. Before adopting Tableau at Neowiz, reports were shared and consumed within a specific team. But with Tableau in place, all the team members who develop and support a game can easily generate and share the results of analysis. The sharing of insights based on data enabled the teams to begin the discussion with a common understanding of the situation. This improved the collaboration among different teams dramatically.”

As the number of workers using Tableau to analyze data and generate reports increases, an increasing number of workers have become interested in data analytics and report implementation with Tableau. Initially, Tableau was implemented on a small scale, but the number of users has steadily increased. As a result, Neowiz has been providing its own Tableau training on a regular basis and running an active community for Tableau users. As each team creates and shares various analytics use cases, team members who use Tableau are improving their analytical reasoning and related skills. Neowiz expects that this will further reinforce its culture of data-driven decision making.

Neowiz (CEO: Mun, Ji-su) was established in April 2007 to develop and service competitive games as a spinoff of Neowiz Holdings. The company is focusing on penetrating overseas markets with outstanding in-house IPs and servicing online and mobile games in various genres. Neowiz’s mobile game “Browndust” is a big hit and is serviced globally. The company’s new console game ‘Bless Unleashed’ will be soon launched in the North American and European markets.