It's been a busy 10 days since we launch the UK Games Map, the first real-time interactive map of the UK games industry. We've had an amazing reponse to the map, with some great feedback from across the industry, academia, government, gamesmap users, direct email and social media, so we thought we'd share a little of what's been going on behind the scenes.
Since launch, we've had over 3,500 unique visitors to the map and have seen over 550 tweets mentioning either the UK Games Map or gamesmap.uk. Over time, that those tweets look something like this:
The largest spike in coverage we saw was over 100 tweets during the map launch at the Ukie AGM @ EGX, but we've also seen some great mentions from Matt Hancock, Nesta, Wired UK and, perhaps suprisingly, Maplins.
Matt Hancock - Minister of State for Digital & Culture
Excellent stuff - @uk_ie & @nesta_uk launch 1st real-time & interactive database of UK #games sector games https://t.co/hzFZHdHu49 pic.twitter.com/oCtTmPtJZj
— Matt Hancock (@MattHancockMP) September 24, 2016
Juan Mateos-Garcia - Head of Innovation Mapping, Nesta
We think that Gamesmap, the interactive map of the UK games industry we launched w @uk_ie is a big deal. Here's why:https://t.co/bEPd6wjdYU
— Juan Mateos Garcia (@JMateosGarcia) September 22, 2016
Wired UK
Gamesmap is a data visualisation platform by @uk_ie & @nesta_uk that makes the entire UK games industry searchable: https://t.co/LS57SUzogb pic.twitter.com/VD77vDFh67
— Wired UK (@WiredUK) September 22, 2016
Maplins
Want to see the impact of the UK games industry? Gamesmap makes it easy >> https://t.co/E2aj2V5LsE
— Maplin Electronics (@maplintweet) September 22, 2016
You can see the impact of these tweets (and maybe find how you fit in) if we show the UK Games Map twittersphere as a network graph (try opening the image in a new tab):
Cool, eh? This kind of analysis can be reall useful when trying to find key influencers around events (such as game launches) and can be reasonably easy to do with tools like NodeXL.
We're also listening to the feedback we've been getting and reacting swiftly when issues are raised. In the last week we've resolved issues with busineses changing address, incorrect listings, login issues, URL formatting and particularly in regard to privacy concerns for smaller studios, removed the detailed view of address and location in the games company profile pages.
We're not out of the woods yet though, as we've had over 110 data submissions to the Games Map so far but also experienced a few early-days bugs in our admin system, which has slowed down our abilitiy to process them. Most of these issues are now resolved, so we're working hard to clear the backlog - data quality is of paramount importance to us, so we're doing our best to ensure things are working as intended when processing the data.
So it's been a hectic time since launch but we're really excited to see the response the map has had so far. We can see great information coming back updating our original data, as well as many new companies adding themselves. The improvements and bugs that have been fed back to us have either been fixed or prioritised. By working together like this, we can ensure that the UK Games Map is a comprehensive view of the size and scale of the UK games industry.