USE CASE:
Gaming brands and the hard part of platform detection
Read this if you need platform detection for gaming brands and you would rather see the real options than a pitch. The tools we name are Mamba Labs Apify actors, priced per row, and Ecommerce Platform Profiler is the one pointed at gaming brands.
The problem
Gaming brands and platform detection: the shortcuts stop working, for one specific reason. Gaming brands have audiences that dwarf their revenue, which breaks every audience based qualifier, and platform detection inherits that. Know this about gaming brands before any platform detection: a studio with two million followers can have eleven employees. There is 1 runnable example of platform detection for gaming brands below.
How we would run it
- Start with one of gaming brands you already know, so a wrong platform detection answer is obvious rather than plausible.
- Run Ecommerce Platform Profiler across your list of gaming brands, which carries 1 ready made setup for platform detection.
- Read ten rows of platform detection on gaming brands by hand before you trust the rest of the list.
Traditional Search Tools
- Steam and the app stores, for gaming brands. Free, and review counts are a better proxy for scale than anything firmographic.
- Wappalyzer. A browser extension that answers this instantly and free for occasional use. It has an API and a list price when you want it in bulk.
- BuiltWith. Deeper history and lists of sites by technology, which is the reverse lookup and often the more useful direction. Priced as a data product.
- Store directories. The app stores of the major platforms publish merchant lists. A ready made list of confirmed users, for free.
- View source. Open the site, view source, search for the platform's signature. Thirty seconds if you know the signatures, and they are all documented publicly.
Preconfigured tasks
A task is one of these actors with the inputs already filled in for a specific version of this job. Open one, swap in your own list, and run it without setting anything up from scratch.