Author: mark_fridai

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AI Powered Gaming Assistant Gaming Assistant Video games

Making Red Dead Redemption 2 accessible with Fridai, the voice assistant

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Accessibility and making games more inclusive has always been a high priority for our team, ever since the first community engagement we had about how Fridai was really helpful for our members to access information for their favorite games. We even had a documentary video made about our approach as part of the Digital Defenders Series, if you are interested you can watch the video here:

Voice access for games – our journey

The underlying technology of Fridai has always been voice, the way we process audio streams and use them to control the games and provide guides or strategies made our software unique in the industry. 

This ambient technology however is capable of so much more than we initially thought. The original pain point we set out to solve was to provide a way for gamers to eliminate distractions from their gameplay, access guides and walkthroughs without opening any other apps, or looking at other screens. While it remained as a selling point of Fridai, the main focus has been shifted towards an even bigger pain point we know in gaming: accessibility.

 

The current state of gaming in terms of accessibility

After thorough research we have found that even though games today include accessibility settings, they are most of the time far from covering the angles gamers really need. We have seen games where the only accessibility setting you could access was the subtitle settings, if you wanted to increase or decrease the size of the fonts or their colors. There was no mention of customizing keybinds, using a special controller or even providing a different way of interacting with the actual game.

Going even deeper into the numbers (US market) we can see that around 10% of the population actually has a form of impairment that would stop them from playing games. More interestingly 92% of gamers play games in spite of their impairment. The question here of course is which games can they play?

There are currently several solutions for disabled gamers to get more information about games, if they can play them or not. There are game review sites, coming from the community who test games from the accessibility perspective and after reading through them it is possible to see if a game is playable according to one’s disability or not. One of many problems with this is that you get to read a review after the game comes out, so in case you wanted to pre-order any of the games you could but risk not being able to play it. There is a great article about game previews and the lack of these actually affecting disabled gamers by our friends at Can I Play That, I recommend you to read that, too.

We have come to a conclusion that in many cases accessibility feels like an afterthought for game studios and we simply can not accept that not every game can be played by anyone.

Our contribution: NLP powered voice control

The way we approached this problem was setting a north star or a vision for our features: a person who has at least access to a headmouse and can press at least 1 button should be able to play any game they like. This might look like a limited vision, however for the first set of features we wanted to develop this set the bar very high already – since we are talking about voice technology and not neural links or eye tracking – just yet.

We know three aspects of Fridai that can make it a very powerful assistant when it comes to accessibility tools:

  1. Fridai can understand many accents and can figure out what was said even with very noisy backgrounds, pays attention to mispronunciations and gets the intent right even if the sentence being said was just remotely accurate
  2. We already have applied voice control for FIFA 20 as a multi tasking tool, where you could change players by voice
  3. Voice provides a new interaction layer when it comes to the players and their PCs or consoles and the only thing you need is the ability to speak, therefore it could help a huge amount of players.

Naturally at first we took a look at how players use current voice solutions, to create macros, setup voice recognition and so on. We had interviews with many players who were using any of these to really dig deep into the user experience. What we have found is that current voice solutions use a technique that can be described as strict match, so only if an exact word is understood will the associated action activate. In comparison, with Fridai, we could activate one action for a wider range of expressions, so as an example, you will not need to map “mount, mount horse, mount the horse etc.” one by one, once one of these is said Fridai can understand the intent of the player and work right then.

Once we saw how the natural language processing algorithm we build can aid users and can improve their gaming experience, compared to what services they use today, we set out to work out the weaknesses we had – again compared to the currently available solutions. One of these being the fact that Fridai needed to be activated using a wake word – so whenever you say “Hey Fridai” the AI wakes up waiting for the command. Now while this provides a hands-free solution, it actually can take a couple seconds to activate the action, hence might not provide a great gameplay experience. So we added keypress wakeup to Fridai, as a result you can quickly wake it up by pressing one key. (Remember our vision about only having to access one key and a head mouse? Now this is part of it.)

Once both of these were completed we set out to find a game that a lot of people want to play, but were previously unable to thanks to the complexity of the controls.

For a better explanation of how NLP works in games, here is one of our videos for the Witcher 3. It shows how different expressions activate the same intent.

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SpecialEffect and Red Dead Redemption 2

Our approach about picking a game was simple: we asked ourselves, which game is the one that tons of people would want to play but they can not for some reason. So we started reaching out to accessibility focused organizations, to understand their needs and ask them to provide feedback about Fridai from their users’ perspective.

This is how we’ve found the team at SpecialEffect, who responded to our query right away. We focused first around collecting their feedback about voice control and current solutions out there and we got a great overview of the market and needs. Even during our first call, we saw that bringing our NLP into the world of voice control, could provide the seamless interface to games that we set out to build and more importantly what service users of SpecialEffect were looking for. We have settled on building the first version of voice control powered by Fridai for Red Dead Redemption 2, as that is a game that is as complex as it gets from the control perspective and many in the audience of SpecialEffect were looking forward to a solution that enables them to play this game.

Now it was about time we built Fridai into Red Dead Redemption 2, with the goal of making it playable and enjoyable through voice access.

Implementing voice control for Red Dead Redemption 2

We already have laid the foundations for supporting voice control with Fridai, therefore it did not take us a long time to implement the actual voice based game control into the game. The first task we had to do was going through the keyboard settings and current keybinds and assign intents to each one of those.

Once it was completed, we started playing the game and constantly followed the instructions on the screens during mission and free roam gameplay, so we could capture the actions and understand what users would say as voice commands while playing. As an example, when it comes to the player interacting with the horse, we added the following intents that Fridai would later recognize:
Mount horse, dismount horse, call horse, hitch horse, brush horse, feed horse etc.

All of these commands activate a corresponding intent and thanks to our NLP engine even different variations of these work when players are speaking to Fridai, so we completely removed the necessity of having to remember exact commands.

Even though we received constant feedback from SpecialEffect as we progressed with development, we made time every week to check-in for a live testing of Fridai. Each of these sessions resulted in more patterns and expressions we needed to teach Fridai, however we got closer and closer to a solution, when it finally looked like this:


As a summary, now we are proud to say you can now play through most of the story missions and do free roam using only your voice. You only need access to a piece of hardware that can control your camera – but we will fix this soon, too.

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Categories
AI Powered Gaming Assistant Gaming Assistant Video games

Rethinking gaming guides with GPT3 – Fridai and the Witcher 3: Wild Hunt

The basic idea behind Fridai has always been to build an AI that behaves like a friend sitting with you while playing your favorite games – because we all remember how much fun it was to play together with our friends as kids. With an AI friend, of course, the experience will be different, but if we can make even a slight resemblance of how that felt, we will have built a truly amazing helper for games.

On the user experience side of this, our goal is to help everyone who enjoys gaming access information in a different way, without having to Alt+Tab out or even look at other screens. The first versions of the assistant delivered on this promise, however as we wanted to add more and more games, we seemed to have hit a barrier in how we could scale it efficiently to other games.

On our journey to find ways to accomplish a constantly improving, more human-like Fridai, we needed the answer to 3 questions:

  1. How can we create a better personality for Fridai?
  2. What is the most efficient way to keep Fridai’s knowledge updated?
  3. Can we make Fridai provide more native advice while gaming?

In this post we will only discuss our answers and methods to the last 2 questions, as they are related to the engine we’ve built and its connection to GPT3.

This post is not going to cover GPT-3 and how it works, so feel free to go to openai.com or read the actual whitepaper here

Ever since the first use cases of GPT-3 I have seen demos for, I’ve been thinking about how to apply the technology to reimagine gaming walkthroughs – and more importantly how gamers can access them today. So let me just insert a little sidetrack here, to explain how I think about game guides.

The idea started from a personal experience and problem, where whilst playing games, I actually enjoyed looking up guides and doing research on certain points (especially items and builds) – to be honest I needed to do this more than I can confess.

From all the content out there, I have found two types to be actually useful – longer websites where I can see the guides for my questions and of course videos with playthroughs. I am not going to go into explaining how much I hated having huge ad banners on the sites or even the fact that I had to wait 15 seconds even for a video to actually get started, we all know this (except of course, Youtube Premium subscribers, kudos).

The way I found these guides to be useful was when I was actually playing the game, for example in the Witcher 3 while collecting the griffin school gear, I constantly switched back and forth and alt+tabbed out so I would be able to find all the pieces. 

Research took time though and even if we disregard the actual search process or having to read multiple sites when looking up these pieces of information, I still had to read the actual content even the parts that were completely irrelevant to my current situation in the game.

And you guessed it right, in the meantime the game was on pause, running in the background. Then when I found the content, I started the process of switching back and forth between the game and the guide. I’ve been doing this for years and with so many games I’ve lost count.

With Fridai and GPT-3 however, I knew we could find the right way of recreating these guides in a way so it would give me filtered through content, only relevant to me, without having to leave the game – or even using my keyboard or mouse.

The marriage of these two products, would result in a human-like conversation that is tailored to the actual problem I would be facing in the game. Is this the answer to question number 2 and 3 above? Well, partially.

GPT-3 is a super creative technology and it has already been trained for usage, but putting it into an actual product requires a lot more than just connecting to it. In a way, you need to tame its creativity to make sure it works with your product. Therefore the first action we needed to take is to figure out an architecture that would serve the right content to GPT-3, so when it parses the unstructured content, it would be able to digest and produce the right piece of advice.

Then we needed to figure out where to get started, in terms of which game we should go after first. A game’s knowledge base can be very complicated, with hundreds of items, monsters, characters, quests and the list goes on. In order to make the experience work, we would need to dissect the game into the smallest parts, so whenever a user requires guidance about a monster or alchemy, we could provide the best possible response. Therefore we needed a game that we all knew, had little upcoming changes to its knowledge base but also had users who could then test it for us. This is why we picked the Witcher 3: Wild Hunt.

After really taking the game apart, in terms of content we identified the moving parts of how many elements exist in the game of which we will need to provide some form of content to the engine.

We had:

  • 132 monsters
  • 521 characters
  • 250 alchemy items
  • 304 pieces of armor
  • 30 witcher contracts

And more…

We collected individual pieces of content of all the elements of the knowledge base we have identified – either by having gamers in our community write something or looking up an actual guide and reformatting it. Then we saved all these pieces, made them searchable and tagged them.

Afterwards we needed to make sure, when the user’s query comes in about a given situation, we find the right piece of content, parse it and generate a response with GPT-3, format it to fit the game experience and feed it to the text-to-speech engine. Thus providing a real time, filtered piece of information about the game to the end-user.

This made us start working on an NLP (Natural Language Processing) layer to understand the user’s query, connect it to elasticsearch to find the correct file and then feed it to GPT-3, where we could take the most advantage of its creativity to craft the best response after parsing the unstructured data. (Note: I will make a post about the architecture of Fridai in a separate post).

And you can see the results in this video below, step by step:

This is a video of Mark playing the Witcher 3 with Fridai

At the end, user experience speaks for itself. GPT-3 works its magic on content that we can feed to it, however if there are no filters or NLP layers preceding the engine, it would just start crafting stories or irrelevant content for the user’s query.

The question of building a scalable, efficient way to keep Fridai’s knowledge base have been solved by the elastic engine that constantly updates itself from online guides and community generated content, while GPT-3 allows users to work with different queries, therefore getting different responses for “List the weaknesses of the griffin” or “Tell me some tips about defeating the griffin” – just the way you would ask your friend about how he solved certain problems while playing.

By the time I am writing this, we will have released Fridai’s version with full Witcher 3 support and I cannot wait to share more of our experiences in how people use this different, more interactive format of a guide or walkthrough to play with the Witcher.

Categories
AI Powered Gaming Assistant Gaming Assistant Video games

Top 10 Searched Minecraft Recipes

Minecraft has been around for over a decade now and it continues to be one of the more popular games on any platform today. That’s because Minecraft is constantly changing with new recipes and new things to do. There’s no shortage of Minecraft recipes with over ten years of existence under its belt.

The JAVA edition of the game (and later the Bedrock edition as well) even added a Minecraft recipe book that made it easier for players to find the hundreds of available craftable recipes there are in the game. Of course, it’s still better to learn some of the often-searched Minecraft recipes instead of relying on a Minecraft recipe book and commit these recipes to memory.

You don’t need a crash course on how to craft in Minecraft when you can take a look at this quick guide of the top 10 Minecraft recipes you should keep in mind.

Crafting Table

The crafting table is the heart and soul of Minecraft. You can craft certain recipes such as a torch or wood planks without one but every advanced recipe requires a crafting table. You don’t want to get caught underground without one. Creating a crafting table requires 4 wood planks placed in the 2×2 crafting grid taking up all the slots.

Crafting Table recipe

Enchantment Table

The purpose of the enhancement table is in the name itself: enchanting items. You can enchant tools, books, armor, and weapons. You can enchant your tools to break blocks faster, your weapons to add a knockback effect, your armor to have extra fire protection, and much more. You’re going to need a book in the second box of the first row, obsidian in the middlebox of the first row with diamonds in the first and third box of the second row, and obsidian filling the entirety of the third row to craft the enchantment table.

Enchantment Table recipe

Torch

A torch is your light in the darkness in Minecraft. Torches are used to light your way through dark caves, keep your village safe from monsters of the night, and light the interiors of your creations. Torches are relatively easy to make as all you need are two items in the JAVA edition. You simply need to place a stick under coal or charcoal. You don’t even need a crafting table to do so and it creates four torches per craft.

Torch recipe

Fishing Rod

If you’re stuck on an island in Minecraft with no cows, sheep, pigs, or chicken, don’t panic because the ocean around you contains an abundance of edible fish. However, just because some are edible doesn’t mean you should eat them. Consuming a pufferfish in Minecraft causes nausea and poison effects. To craft a fishing rod in the JAVA edition of Minecraft, you need to place a stick in the third box of the first row, a stick in the second box of the second row, a stick in the first box of the third row, a string in the third box of the second row, and a string in the third box of the third row.

Fishing Rod recipe

Bow and Arrow

Some monsters in Minecraft are just too much to handle up close and personal. Sometimes you need a good bow and arrow to take down the likes of skeletons, ghosts, and other monsters that are more effective to fight at range. Crafting a bow in the JAVA edition of Minecraft requires three sticks and three strings. You place a stick in the second box of the first row, a stick in the first box of the second row, a stick in the second box of the third row, a string in the third box of the first row, a string in the third box of the second row, and string in the third box of the third row. There are different types of arrows you can craft in the JAVA edition of Minecraft. The basic arrow recipe is a piece of flint in the second box of the first row, a stick in the second box of the second row, and a feather in the second box of the third row. This creates four arrows per craft.

Arrow recipe
Bow recipe

Fences

A fence is great to section off a farm, put a nice fence around your house, or just have a barrier you can see through but not jump over. You can also use fences for supports for other blocks to create archways. There’s no limit to what you could do with a wooden fence in Minecraft. You can make any number of different fences in Minecraft but keep in mind you need to have matching planks if you’re going after a certain color. In order to create a fence in the JAVA edition of Minecraft you need to put the plank in the first box of the second row, a stick in the second box of the second row, a matching plank in the third box of the second row, then repeat this for the third row. Make sure all your planks are of the same type of wood. Each craft makes three fences.

Fences Recipe

Furnace

Are you walking around with iron you’ve dug up and have no idea how to smelt it down into iron bars? Have you killed a cow for raw meat but don’t know how to cook it? Then a furnace is the perfect item for you for smelting and cooking. Crafting a furnace in the JAVA edition of Minecraft is easy as all you would need is eight pieces of cobblestone (or combination of blackstones and cobblestones) around the outside of the 3×3 crafting grid while leaving the middle box of the second row empty.

Furnace Recipe

Sponge

You’re probably wondering how a sponge could be such a popular block in Minecraft. Well, that’s because there are a lot of situations where you just want to remove water. Fortunately, that’s what a sponge does. It helps dry up unwanted water. The best part about sponges is they’re completely reusable simply by smelting them with any fuel source in a furnace. Simply open up your furnace, place the sponge at the top, and any fuel source at the bottom.

Sponge Recipe

Diamond Sword

Your starter sword made out of wood is great for basic defense and all but if you want to face a bigger badder monster, you’re going to want to upgrade to a diamond sword eventually. When upgraded with the right enchantments, a diamond sword can be one of the best in the game next to a netherite sword. Crafting a diamond sword requires two diamonds and one stick. Place a diamond in the second box of the first row, a diamond in the second box of the second row, and a stick in the second box of the third row.

Diamond Sword recipe

Pickaxe

A pickaxe is the most commonly used tool in Minecraft because, well, you mine with it. You can’t expect to go down into a mine and punch your way into resources. A pickaxe is one of the first tools you want to make when you start a new game, so you’ll need to have three wood planks and two sticks on a 3×3 crafting grid. Place wood planks across the whole first row, then create the handle by placing one stick in the second box of the second and the second stick in the second box of the third row.

Pickaxe recipe

Categories
AI Powered Gaming Assistant Gaming Assistant Video games

Personalize to Monetize in Gaming

Did you know that the average human being has an attention span of just 8 seconds? It’s not easy to keep someone engaged with something, especially for long enough to gain an income from it.

Gaming is no exception. In fact, with gaming, it’s even more important to keep a customer engaged, because that is the entire goal of the game’s creation.

However, a personalized customer experience, as shown by various studies and articles so many times, can significantly increase revenue – but how does this translate to the video game industry?

How Personalization Leads to Improved Engagement & Better Monetization in Video Games

When you’re treated as a person rather than merely a “number” or “customer,” you feel a lot more compelled to engage further with that particular company or business.

It’s like going to the bakery each morning, and they know your name (or perhaps even a nickname) and your exact order without you needing to tell them.

THIS makes people feel good. It gives them an emotional connection to that business or company – or in this case, the game.

Personalization in gaming also leads to improved engagement, and, ultimately, better monetization. If you’re a game publisher or developer and you’re looking for ways to maximize your revenue, you can utilize 3rd parties to do so.

For example, Fridai, the gamer assistant.

Fridai can help you with hyper-personalization to monetize with its highly intelligent gaming assistant system – essentially “AI-powered gaming.”

You can use it for your game in a variety of ways, including:

Setting Challenges

Set challenges for players to improve engagement & increase their “desire” to play your game. When a game is challenging, it can encourage people to want to defeat it. You can use Fridai to make them want to play your game.

Engagement-Based Messaging

If you have a new skin or artifact on sale, for example, Fridai knows the right time to show it to the right audience, whether this is before or after gameplay. (Obvoiusly not in the middle of a heated deathmatch.)

Game Intelligence & Tools

Get valuable data on how gamers perceive your game, the challenges they encounter that you didn’t anticipate, and what tools they use to overcome those challenges.

Gain Valuable Insight

Fridai is a voice assistant. Gamers can ask him various questions, and these can ultimately reveal pain points your player base actually has. Thanks to this approach, Fridai’s analytics not only leads to enhancing the user experience on the voice assistant-side but can also make the games much better.

From here, you can take the appropriate steps to resolve these pain points and optimize the gaming experience. In games, Fridai can track data points such as activity, competency, spending, and progression – four key data points that determine your game’s success.

As with anything “entertaining” in life, there is also some threshold of engagement involved in gaming that essentially determines if the player will leave or stay.

If you can track those four previously mentioned data points and learn from them to keep players happy, they will continue to bond with your game and are more likely to spend money to maintain that “joyous” feeling.

This is where AI-powered gaming can make a huge difference for gamers. With it, they can feel like the game is a more personalized experience suited to them.

Since Fridai can help monitor how much a gamer plays, how good they are, their ideas, and how quickly they progress through the game, you can determine how to optimize the game for their enjoyment, thus leading to better monetization.

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AI Powered Gaming Assistant Gaming Assistant Video games

3 Ways A Gamer Assistant Can Help Fight COVID-19

taking down covid19

Late 2019 marked the genesis of a disease outbreak that would throw the entire world in confusion a few months later. As the COVID-19 (coronavirus) pandemic continues to wreak havoc across the globe, its crises, no matter how ugly and ruthless they look, they have a positive side. “Positive side? Are you crazy?” you ask. Well, honestly speaking, blessings can exist amid catastrophes. COVID19 calamities present one advantage: they lead to the invention of new solutions to problems prevailing in different spheres of life, especially as a result of coronavirus disease. People and organizations across the globe have joined hands to fight this pandemic and restore the world to normalcy soonest possible.

The gaming industry has not been left behind in this war, with gaming assistants playing one role or another in the fight. A gaming assistant automates the tasks that would otherwise need your input and effort in your gaming life. Take a screenshot of your game screen. Get information on how to make the best shot or even buy skins. All these tasks and many more don’t require you to press any button if a powerful game assistant such as Fridai is integrated into your gaming life. Powered by artificial intelligence (AI), the assistant can help the world fight COVID19 and other pandemics that might be coming in the future.

How can it assist?

Doubting if there’s any way in which a gamer assistant can potentially help fight COVID19? Well, it can in the following three ways:

1. Contributing decentralized computing power for research purposes

Lots of research is underway as scientists look for an effective and safe treatment or vaccine for the coronavirus. Researchers need more and more CPU and GPU cycles to help them carry out research to understand and describe the protein arrangement inside the virus cells. This process is known as protein folding. With the knowledge, biology experts will be in a better position to develop a treatment for the disease. Gaming PCs are among the highest-performing computers, which are much needed in such critical scientific studies. These Computers can contribute faster to the cause as compared to ordinary PCs.

A gamer assistant can use the idle CPU and GPU cycles from thousands of users’ computers worldwide to create a protein folding and computational drug design simulation. Unfortunately, this intervention is not possible with virtual assistants such as Alexa and Google Assistant because of their hardware limitations. But since Fridai lives in your PC, it can be counted on in this noble contribution without any disappointments. It can submit about 5% to 15% of the computers’ power to the coronavirus research laboratories to help researchers perform the calculations needed in the development of the COVID 19 treatment.

2. Providing psychological support

From job losses and restricted human interactions to dealing with the disease itself, there are many factors that increase people’s vulnerability to mental health issues during these troubling times. As such, mental health support and monitoring are of great importance to help people cope with the impacts of the pandemic. Fortunately, a gamer assistant can play a significant role in the protection of psychological wellbeing of its users through cognitive behavior therapy.

For instance, considering Fridai is powered by artificial intelligence, it is capable of doing many tasks that require human intelligence. It can recognize and respond to your voice and make the right decisions. With this ability, the game assistant can offer you cognitive behavioral therapy during this distressing time. This psychotherapeutic treatment involves talking to a person to help them recognize and change thought patterns that can negatively affect their behavior and emotions. It offers great mental relief to people suffering from anxiety or depression.

Inspired by the cognitive behavior therapy framework, a gaming assistant such as Fridai can ask you how you are feeling and about your personal experiences during the outbreak. Based on your answers, the game assistant will use its artificial intelligence to determine and recommend to you the tools that can help you keep your mental health in good shape. You want someone to tell you that everything shall be okay soon and remind you how strong you are? Well, just say, “Fridai tell me everything shall be okay soon” or “Fridai, tell me that I’m a strong person”. Your AI companion is by your side to reassure you to feel better and more optimistic.

3. Supporting social distancing and minimizing physical contact

Social distancing is among the key measures that people are advised to observe to slow down the spread of the novel coronavirus. Everybody is urged to maintain at least a one-meter physical distance from the next person, especially in public spaces. Besides, people are encouraged to minimize physical contact with their touch devices as much as they can. A gamer assistant can help in this as well as it enables reduced touching of gaming devices by supporting voice commands.

Through the assistant, you can get nearly everything you need in gaming life without having to come into contact with touch interfaces. Whether you want to update your Steam status, share multimedia files, take a screenshot, get help with something, start a game or take notes, all you need is to talk to the obedient and intuitive virtual assistant, and it will get things done immediately without your manual input. As Fridai gets more and more features, gamers need to touch less and less stuff in their homes.

When it comes to social distancing, an AI-powered game assistant such as Fridai can help you to remain calm and comfortable even as you minimize close interactions with your buddies, colleagues and (some of) your family members. Besides providing cognitive behavior therapy, it can also give you various recommendations depending on your gaming behavior to spice up your gaming experiences. Therefore, you can have great fun in the comfort of your home.

There is an enormous potential for a gaming assistant to help the world fight COVID19 pandemic, thanks to artificial intelligence. It’s big time gamers and game publishers join the fight by embracing this revolutionary gaming technology.

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Video games

Maximizing Game Revenues with Fridai

The gaming industry has been experiencing a significant growth year by year. According to WePC, the value of the global video games market is projected to be more than 90 billion U.S. dollars by the end of this year (2020). But is this the ceiling? Well, definitely no. There are lots of opportunities available for game publishers and developers to increase their revenues. 

What Influences Game Revenues? 

The amount of revenue that a developer or publisher earns from the game is highly dependent on the number of hours that gamers spend actively on the game. The longer a player actively participates in a particular game, the more they are likely to spend money on the game and so, the higher the game’s revenue.

As such, game publishers need to establish the factors that are likely to increase their gamers’ active gameplay time (undisturbed access to their games while playing). As for any company who’d like to keep their customers, a game publisher or developer should also focus on  great customer experience as the main consideration. You need to understand why gamers would leave, pause, exit your game or look at other screens. Then, customize solutions to address those distractions.

You should bear in mind that player engagement is a function of motivation. The more you motivate your gamers by creating a good user experience, the more they are likely to engage in your game. On the other hand, anything that distracts gamers can really demotivate them from continuing with the game. They may even leave the gameplay forever.

For instance, if a player needs help to overcome a challenge while playing your game, the necessary assistance should be availed to them on time and within the game. If that doesn’t happen, the gamer is highly likely to quit the game forever without spending any coin (or diamond or whatever in-game currency) on it.

Therefore, any game publisher who wants to see a remarkable boost in their game revenue should do their best to keep gamers active in the game by identifying such distractions and addressing them appropriately.

Must-Have Information for Publishers

Any savvy game publisher ought to have a recurring revenue model showing different aspects of user engagement as far as their games are concerned. Particularly, user statistics like play frequency, average active playtime and the enrage number of ads the users see per play and average in-purchase behavior come in handy for the development of sales revenue maximization strategies.

Also, publishers should be able to establish whether their games are able to challenge their users according to their knowledge and skills. Otherwise, if a game is too complex for a user, they might opt to seek other friendlier options. Considering all these factors, game publishers and developers now have a reason to smile, thanks to Fridai.

Fridai Got Game Publishers and Gamers Covered 

Fridai is a video game voice assistant that offers comprehensive game-related assistance and the tools they may need to stay continuously active in the gameplay for an extended period. With the access, gamers won’t have to pause or exit the game to look for assistance elsewhere as this voice assistance provides them with any help they need to remain engaged in the game more than ever before. As such, it’s no surprise that game publishers can increase their revenue by 8% to 19% by using Fridai. 

Here are the key areas that Fridai touches on:

Customer feedback 

With Fridai, gamers are able to send bug and error reports, among other information concerning various problems they might experience concerning a game, to the game’s customer support hassle-free and in seconds. They can submit the information in the form of a photo using the game assistant’s screenshot or short video recording functionality. Interestingly, the screenshot-taking is hands-free. All they need to do is to tell Fridai to take the screenshot or short video, and it obeys. Alternatively, they can send the information in the form of a note, again, by commanding the voice assistant to do the necessary. These voice commands help gamers to interact with customer support while keeping their hands on the game.

With this swift user feedback, a game publisher is able to act on various game issues promptly, thus improving user experience.

In-game purchase processing

At some point during a gameplay, a gamer may want to buy something, say, skins, DLC’s or credits to continue with the game. This is an opportunity that any prudent game publisher shouldn’t miss out on. However, recent research shows that over, 83% of online shoppers, including gamers, need help from sellers of the products they need to buy to complete their prospective purchases. The majority of them expect immediate help; otherwise, they might do away with the purchases. To avoid letting these revenue generation opportunities escape from them, game publishers should ensure that the required guidance and products are available for the gamers right within the game’s user interface. This is where Fridai comes in once again. 

With Fridai, gamers don’t have to switch to another screen to make the purchase. Publishers can avail to them all nearly everything they might want to buy and any assistance they require to continue immersing themselves in the game seamlessly. This strategy drives higher sales as well as greater customer loyalty and satisfaction, all of which are sales revenue factors. Therefore, this is a very effective way of increasing your game revenue. 

Upselling and Cross-Selling

Upselling and cross-selling can’t be easier for game publishers, courtesy of Fridai. Since it gets the gamer’s attention during and after gametime, this video game voice assistant gives you a golden opportunity to follow up on them with sponsored ads concerning game-related products even when they aren’t playing. Eventually, due to these sponsored ads, a gamer might end up spending more on your game than they’d initially considered. This is a great way to leverage Fridai’s power to maximize your game revenue.

Personalized Communication 

Publishers need to know how gamers behave and outside their games. The information comes in handy for upselling and cross-selling purposes to establish the right offers for every gamer. This is called hyper-personalized marketing. A  recent study shows that approximately 79% of consumers are likely to engage exclusively in offers that have been personalized according to their previous experiences with the respective brands.

The same case applies to online video games. The majority of the gamers who see ads that are personalized to their online behaviours are likely to respond positively to the respective calls to action. Considering this, Fridai helps game publishers to get information about the behavior of gamers within and outside their games. This enables them to develop ads that address the needs of every gamer (depending on their online behaviours) and display them at the right time. That’s why promotional messages sent via Fridai pride 35% higher conversion rate as compared to the ordinary game marketing ads. 

Apart from commercial ads, publishers can also use Fridai to create sponsored ads to motivate gamers to stay longer in the gameplay, depending on their motivational levels. For instance, a publisher can tailor a sponsored ad or content encouraging a gamer who has just lost a game to soldier on and perhaps give them tips on what they can do to win in the next round.  

Final words

Fridai is a game-changer in the gaming industry. Its intuitiveness and voice control functionality offer gamers timely help in every step of the way without them having to switch windows or involve their hands. As a result, gamers feel motivated to stay longer in the gameplay and act favourably on the sponsored ads displayed to them before, during and after active gameplay.