[rdouble]

The fact that your job exists is kind of the creepy part. Games that are just made for fun don't have teams of analysts trying to optimize games in order to modify player behavior. That said, your comments have been pretty interesting. How did you get the job in the first place?

[physcab]

Well, analysts aren't exactly new. Do a search for business analyst and you'll see lots of jobs posted at hundreds of companies. The difference is that mobile game companies deal with extraordinary amounts of data so they actually need people who not only have statistics knowledge, but programming knowledge as well. So I don't think its creepy (obviously), I just think this industry is so new that a) people are unfamiliar with the role and b) the business model is (apparently) controversial and in constant flux.

I came from a web company. I was a data analyst there too. But I really wanted to work in the mobile industry and figure out how to deliver insights on a completely new platform also at massive scale as well.

[rdouble]

I have worked in mobile e-commerce analytics but on the engineering side. It seemed like the analysts we had usually had a business background but I was always too busy to ask them how they got into it.

[hythloday]

It's weird that you think that "traditional" (whatever that means) games don't have analysts looking at player behaviour: in the games industry we call them "game designers" or "producers". Some game designers do some creative work but there is a lot of metrics-driven design in most games.