Casual Games SIG/DataReportingInitiative
International Game Developers Association
Table of contents |
[edit] Introduction
Welcome to the home page for the Data Reporting Standards Initiative.
The goal of the initiative is to create a standardized electronic format for sharing sales data between partners in the casual game space. It's hard to believe, but even though nearly 100% of all sales transactions in our industry occur electronically over the Internet, most royalty reports are still exchanged on paper.
At all companies in this space, every month dozens of paper reports arrive from partners which must all be manually entered into a sales database one at a time. The process is extremely inefficient and prone to errors, but has to happen before any company can know how its business is doing or generate its own royalty reports.
Here is an illustration of the way things work today:
It's crazy to think about all those databases out there spitting out paper reports, so they can be manually typed back into other databases. Instead of generating a paper report, why not generate an electronic one that can be imported directly into another database? For this to work, what is needed is both a standard data format, and for companies to adapt the format broadly.
Furthermore, there are other benefits to having a common format beyond just processing reports more efficiently.
For one thing, data can be shared more frequently than once a month or once a quarter. Checks may not get issued more frequently than that, but there's no reason why unofficial sales data can’t be exchanged once a week or even once a day once it becomes all electronic. This is important to companies at all levels of the value chain, since everyone can benefit from real-time information on how their business is doing.
For another thing, a standard data format can collapse the time it takes data to propagate down the distribution chain. Imagine a common scenario with four levels: a website, a distributor, a publisher, and a developer. With paper reports, it would take months for sales data to make its way down to the developer, and like the old game of telephone there are multiple places where errors can be introduced.
[edit] Participating in the initiative
Participating in this initiative is easy. If you are a reseller or distributor and you generate sales reports, then begin generating sales reports that are compliant with the XML standard (described below). If you are a developer or an aggregator and you import sales reports, then build functionality for your database to import a compliant sales report. Sample code demonstrating how to import a report is provided in an Access database.
The set of documents that make up the standard are provided below; a history is provided describing changes to the document as it evolves. We suggest that anyone involved in implementing the standard join the Data Reporting Initiative mailing list for up-to-date implementation suggestions and to participate in a discussion around changes to the document.
To join the mailing list, email IGDA_DataReportingInitiative-subscribe@yahoogroups.com.
To send a messsage to the list, email IGDA_DataReportingInitiative@yahoogroups.com.
To view previous messages posted to the mailing list, visit the Yahoo Group page.
[edit] Document History
| Version | Documents | Description |
| 0.1 |
Complete V0.1 File Set |
Version 0.1 files for the Data Reporting Initiative. There should be enough information in here to allow anyone to get started with implementing this standard, as either as data provider or as a data receiver. The ReadMe provides a detailed description of the files. |
[edit] FAQ
Some frequently asked qustions:
Q. Every distributor might refer to my game with a different name. How do I make sure when I import a sales report that it all lines up?
A. Eventually we may try to introduce the equivalent of an "ISBN" number for the casual game industry so that everyone can refer to a given name by the same uniform identifier. In the meantime, that's what the transform files are for -- they allow you to transform any sales report you import into the format your database needs. The idea is that you would create a different transform file for each partner. Then whenever you import a file from that partner you apply the corresponding transform.
