Graph Technology Enhances Gamer Engagement on Faceit
The Challenge
Online gaming is a hotly contested and fast-moving market.Audiences are typically young and hungry for an ever-better experience, so platform providers must be agile, creative and responsive – always adding to the experience with something new, challenging and exciting.
To grow communities and keep gamers coming back, Faceit and game developers need to create high levels of active engagement among users – by letting them find and create their own competitions and gaming leagues.
“We want to provide the best experience to both gamers and game developers,” says Faceit’s VP of engineering, Emanuele Massara.
The Solution
Faceit first partnered with graph technology company Neo4j two years ago: Emanuele and software engineer colleague Victor Balanica had first-hand experience of the technology from their time at other companies.“We wanted to be able to model and do more with social relationships, and Neo4j is well known for this,” Emanuele explains.
Initially using Neo4j to let gamers follow competition organizers, Faceit now also models and harnesses friend relationships to recommend tournaments.
“We have been experimenting in bolder and more creative ways,” Victor says.
“Now, any user of our platform can get recommendations based on mutual friends, or friends of friends. “We’re modeling a broader range of users’ social characteristics, too – where they’re based, what they follow and their previous competition activity. We’ve had such good results, that we now include competition recommendations on our web home page.”
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