i think data is only going to become more and more valuable as time goes on, not just for things like marketing, but for decision-making in general. it interests me a lot, but i don't know that much about it right now.
i play a first-person shooter called valorant made by riot games, and they have an api that you can pull data from. this includes stats on each game you play, which can be useful to understand your gameplay and how you can improve, but it also includes data on player positions at certain times of the game.
a company called runitback gathers all this data from the api and presents it to paying customers in a way that helps them understand typical gameplay in professional games.
this tweet, for example, is a heatmap they created and shared during a professional event that happened in september of last year. in it, you can see where every defender died, as well as the most common locations a defender will die. they also made heatmaps of player locations in the first 15 or 20 seconds of each round, which shows valuable information about how spread out teams like to be, as well as how aggressive each team likes to be so that analysts for each team can be better prepared for their opponents.
that's just one example that caught my interest. i look forward to learning more about how data can be used for strategic purposes in other areas.
