WGT, the maker of sports games like WGT Golf, saw its usage go through an interesting pattern during yesterday’s Super Bowl.
Yuchiang Cheng, chief executive of WGT, shared a chart that showed how much people played his online and mobile golf title during the football game. As you can tell from the image, game-playing was high before the pre-game activities. Once those started, it started a steady slide. It started a brief recovery during the cute Budweiser dog commercial and saw a stronger comeback during half-time. It started to decline again during Katy Perry’s appearance at half-time, and really plummeted as the Patriots eked out a 28-24 victory at the exciting close of the game.
Then it started the road back to recovery as the game ended. It’s interesting to see these kinds of analytics change on a minute-by-minute basis in a major sporting event. It tells us that when we’re watching TV, we have our mobile devices in our hands. The second the TV show becomes boring, we pick up the mobile device.
If only the football game had been more boring, WGT’s audience might not have taken a hit at all.