Big Viking Games acquires Gallop Labs to mashup casual games with data-driven science

Free-to-play game development is all about having intelligent analytics, and one developer in this space has made an acquisition to help it get important data.

Big Viking Games, the developer of the casual game YoWorld, has purchased Gallop Labs, a data-science startup. Gallop works with companies like The New York Times, Accuweather, and the Royal Bank of Canada to help them understand how their web audiences are behaving. This data is crucial for tuning an app or website to see what features are keeping people engaged — and to see what’s turning people off. Big Viking bringing that kind of data research in-house means that it can now quickly build and adjust its games to the tastes of its players, and that could help the company as it looks for new ways to capture a larger slice of the casual-gaming market.