How video game companies can “level up” their profits

The video game industry is growing at a phenomenal rate, generating a record $43.4 billion in revenue in 2018, an increase of nearly 20 percent from the year before. The largest area of growth within this industry has been in the online gaming community. But with players functioning at different skill levels and an even wider range of interest areas, how can companies ensure players remain engaged and their products continue to grow in popularity? Joining us for this episode to provide new insight into online gamer behavior is Yan Huang from Carnegie Mellon University, whose research which was recently published in the INFORMS journal Information Systems Research, tackles these questions head on. 

Interviewed this episode:

Yan Huang

Carnegie Mellon University

Yan Huang is anĀ Associate Professor of Business Technologies at the Tepper School of Business, Carnegie Mellon University. Her research examines the economic and social impacts of technologies and identifies effective designs and policies for technology-enabled markets and platforms, using economic theories, structural modeling, statistical modeling, machine learning methods, and an understanding of the underlying technologies. Huang is an early proponent of the use of structural econometric models to study the design and policy questions in the field of information systems.