Running the Platform Glossary · Gaming

Active (player): an account that sent at least one event from a named list of gameplay events on a day, so background pings and failed logins don't count (Game Metrics).
ARPDAU, ARPU, ARPPU: net revenue per daily active player, per monthly active player in a calendar month, and per paying player in a period; computed on gross bookings instead, the name says so ("ARPU on gross bookings"); vendors differ, with GameAnalytics counting in-app purchases only and Unity including ad revenue (Game Metrics).
Behavior tree: NPC decisions as a hierarchy of selectors and sequences over tasks, with a Blackboard holding its data and decorators that observe conditions and abort branches (AI in Games).
Bot standing in for a player: a match slot filled by a bot: a match_participants row with a bot_key and no profile, so ratings, reports and metrics leave it out (AI in Games).
Cabined account: Epic's restricted account for younger players, which needs a parent or guardian to complete setup before features such as AI conversations are available (AI in Games).
Calibration: whether matches predicted at, say, 60/40 are won by the favorite about 60% of the time, checked against the prediction stored on the match when it was made (Game Metrics).
Competitive ruling: a sanction on a person, roster or organization under a tournament's rules, provisional until final, linked to a penalty only when an account is also restricted (Esports & Spectating).
Concurrent users (CCU), peak CCU: players connected at one instant, and the highest count in a period, from fixed-interval samples with "connected" defined per tier (Game Metrics).
Considerations, EQS: utility AI's per-factor scores normalized between 0 and 1, and Unreal's Environment Query System, which applies the same scoring to candidate places and targets (AI in Games).
Conversion (payer conversion): the share of active players who made a purchase in a named window, daily (over DAU) or monthly (over MAU); GameAnalytics reports it per day, and a monthly figure is a different number (Game Metrics).
Crash rate: crashes per 1,000 sessions, and the share of daily actives who crashed; Google Play's bad behavior threshold is 1.09% of daily actives (Game Metrics).
DAU, MAU, stickiness: distinct active accounts on a day, across the 30 days ending on a day (rolling) or a calendar month, and their ratio (Game Metrics).
Digital replica consent: a performer's scoped, separate consent to a voice or likeness replica (which game, which characters, real-time or pre-generated), checked before generation, with every generated line counted (AI in Games).
Game AI, generative AI: deterministic NPC decision and movement code a designer tunes, against model-produced text, speech and art with their own latency, cost and safety problems; generative output is at most a request to the game AI layer (AI in Games).
Ghosting: relaying a live spectator feed, which shows both teams, to a player; prevented by a server-side delay past the time the information would help (Esports & Spectating).
LTV (realized, predicted): net revenue per cohort member to day N, which can be audited, and a forecast to a horizon labeled with its model version (Game Metrics).
Match intervention: a pause, resume, restore, remake or side swap in a competitive match, recorded as a ruling with the official and the reason (Esports & Spectating).
Match-fixing, integrity program: competitors not trying to win, often for betting, and the code of conduct, bet monitoring, investigations and published rulings a publisher runs against it (Esports & Spectating).
Navigation mesh: a simplified polygon map of where agents can walk, divided into tiles that rebuild locally, with area costs and a separate local avoidance step for crowds (AI in Games).
Observer: production staff driving the broadcast cameras from a spectator client connected live to the game server; Riot said in 2022 that its esports matches run with up to 20 observers, while the CS Major configuration caps a server's spectators at 10 (Esports & Spectating).
Official data feed: sequenced match events from the authoritative server for broadcasters, teams and licensed partners, corrected by new events and tiered by latency; Riot licenses one exclusive distributor (GRID), while Counter-Strike servers stream their match log over HTTP to an address the operator sets (Esports & Spectating).
Pre-generated, live-generated content: Steam's content survey categories for AI-made content that ships with a game and content an AI makes while the game runs, the latter needing a description of its guardrails (AI in Games).
Project Chronobreak: League's esports tool that lets officials rewind a live game to a chosen moment by replaying its Server Network Recording, typically restoring the 40-minute mark in under three minutes (Esports & Spectating).
Provenance (asset_provenance): a record at import of whether shipped content was made by people, AI or both, with which tool and any performer replica consent, used to answer store surveys (AI in Games).
Queue time: from ticket creation to a match, reported as p50, p90 and p99 per queue, region and skill band; FlexMatch separates time to a potential match from time to successful placement (Game Metrics).
Remote production: producing a broadcast from a central facility, with venue cameras, observer feeds and audio encoded on site and sent to it (Esports & Spectating).
Retention (D1, D7, D30): the share of an install cohort active exactly N days after its first gameplay day; an unbounded variant counts day N or later (Game Metrics).
Sample ratio mismatch (SRM): an observed split of players across experiment variants far from the configured one, often caused by a treatment that crashes or breaks logging; a bug alarm before any result is read (Game Metrics).
Server tick health: the share of server frames that finish within the tick budget, per build and player count; VALORANT reported 99.3% or more since patch 5.07 (Game Metrics; the numbers are in Game Servers & Hosting).
Spectator delay, spectator relay: the server-side buffer that releases a public spectator stream only after what it shows is stale, and the relay tier that holds keyframes and deltas and fans the stream out without exposing the game server (Esports & Spectating).
StateTree: Unreal's hierarchical state machine that combines behavior tree selectors with states and transitions (AI in Games).
Stomp rate: the share of completed matches decided by a margin above a game-specific threshold (VALORANT's is a win by 8 or more rounds; Call of Duty's Team Deathmatch equivalent is a score delta over 30), read beside queue time (Game Metrics; VALORANT's smurf figures are in Matchmaking & Ranked).
Tournament license, VRS: a publisher's permission to run events for its game (Valve's Limited Game Tournament License and above), and the Valve Regional Standings that ranked Counter-Strike 2 events must invite from in order (Esports & Spectating).
Tournament server: a server local to the players with fixed performance settings on a protected network, trading density for predictability, with pauses and every admin command logged (Esports & Spectating).
Utility AI: scoring every option from considerations normalized between 0 and 1 and picking the highest, for characters with many competing needs (AI in Games).

Active (player): an account that sent at least one event from a named list of gameplay events on a day, so background pings and failed logins don't count (Game Metrics).
ARPDAU, ARPU, ARPPU: net revenue per daily active player, per monthly active player in a calendar month, and per paying player in a period; computed on gross bookings instead, the name says so ("ARPU on gross bookings"); vendors differ, with GameAnalytics counting in-app purchases only and Unity including ad revenue (Game Metrics).
Behavior tree: NPC decisions as a hierarchy of selectors and sequences over tasks, with a Blackboard holding its data and decorators that observe conditions and abort branches (AI in Games).
Bot standing in for a player: a match slot filled by a bot: a match_participants row with a bot_key and no profile, so ratings, reports and metrics leave it out (AI in Games).
Cabined account: Epic's restricted account for younger players, which needs a parent or guardian to complete setup before features such as AI conversations are available (AI in Games).
Calibration: whether matches predicted at, say, 60/40 are won by the favorite about 60% of the time, checked against the prediction stored on the match when it was made (Game Metrics).
Competitive ruling: a sanction on a person, roster or organization under a tournament's rules, provisional until final, linked to a penalty only when an account is also restricted (Esports & Spectating).
Concurrent users (CCU), peak CCU: players connected at one instant, and the highest count in a period, from fixed-interval samples with "connected" defined per tier (Game Metrics).
Considerations, EQS: utility AI's per-factor scores normalized between 0 and 1, and Unreal's Environment Query System, which applies the same scoring to candidate places and targets (AI in Games).
Conversion (payer conversion): the share of active players who made a purchase in a named window, daily (over DAU) or monthly (over MAU); GameAnalytics reports it per day, and a monthly figure is a different number (Game Metrics).
Crash rate: crashes per 1,000 sessions, and the share of daily actives who crashed; Google Play's bad behavior threshold is 1.09% of daily actives (Game Metrics).
DAU, MAU, stickiness: distinct active accounts on a day, across the 30 days ending on a day (rolling) or a calendar month, and their ratio (Game Metrics).
Digital replica consent: a performer's scoped, separate consent to a voice or likeness replica (which game, which characters, real-time or pre-generated), checked before generation, with every generated line counted (AI in Games).
Game AI, generative AI: deterministic NPC decision and movement code a designer tunes, against model-produced text, speech and art with their own latency, cost and safety problems; generative output is at most a request to the game AI layer (AI in Games).
Ghosting: relaying a live spectator feed, which shows both teams, to a player; prevented by a server-side delay past the time the information would help (Esports & Spectating).
LTV (realized, predicted): net revenue per cohort member to day N, which can be audited, and a forecast to a horizon labeled with its model version (Game Metrics).
Match intervention: a pause, resume, restore, remake or side swap in a competitive match, recorded as a ruling with the official and the reason (Esports & Spectating).
Match-fixing, integrity program: competitors not trying to win, often for betting, and the code of conduct, bet monitoring, investigations and published rulings a publisher runs against it (Esports & Spectating).
Navigation mesh: a simplified polygon map of where agents can walk, divided into tiles that rebuild locally, with area costs and a separate local avoidance step for crowds (AI in Games).
Observer: production staff driving the broadcast cameras from a spectator client connected live to the game server; Riot said in 2022 that its esports matches run with up to 20 observers, while the CS Major configuration caps a server's spectators at 10 (Esports & Spectating).
Official data feed: sequenced match events from the authoritative server for broadcasters, teams and licensed partners, corrected by new events and tiered by latency; Riot licenses one exclusive distributor (GRID), while Counter-Strike servers stream their match log over HTTP to an address the operator sets (Esports & Spectating).
Pre-generated, live-generated content: Steam's content survey categories for AI-made content that ships with a game and content an AI makes while the game runs, the latter needing a description of its guardrails (AI in Games).
Project Chronobreak: League's esports tool that lets officials rewind a live game to a chosen moment by replaying its Server Network Recording, typically restoring the 40-minute mark in under three minutes (Esports & Spectating).
Provenance (asset_provenance): a record at import of whether shipped content was made by people, AI or both, with which tool and any performer replica consent, used to answer store surveys (AI in Games).
Queue time: from ticket creation to a match, reported as p50, p90 and p99 per queue, region and skill band; FlexMatch separates time to a potential match from time to successful placement (Game Metrics).
Remote production: producing a broadcast from a central facility, with venue cameras, observer feeds and audio encoded on site and sent to it (Esports & Spectating).
Retention (D1, D7, D30): the share of an install cohort active exactly N days after its first gameplay day; an unbounded variant counts day N or later (Game Metrics).
Sample ratio mismatch (SRM): an observed split of players across experiment variants far from the configured one, often caused by a treatment that crashes or breaks logging; a bug alarm before any result is read (Game Metrics).
Server tick health: the share of server frames that finish within the tick budget, per build and player count; VALORANT reported 99.3% or more since patch 5.07 (Game Metrics; the numbers are in Game Servers & Hosting).
Spectator delay, spectator relay: the server-side buffer that releases a public spectator stream only after what it shows is stale, and the relay tier that holds keyframes and deltas and fans the stream out without exposing the game server (Esports & Spectating).
StateTree: Unreal's hierarchical state machine that combines behavior tree selectors with states and transitions (AI in Games).
Stomp rate: the share of completed matches decided by a margin above a game-specific threshold (VALORANT's is a win by 8 or more rounds; Call of Duty's Team Deathmatch equivalent is a score delta over 30), read beside queue time (Game Metrics; VALORANT's smurf figures are in Matchmaking & Ranked).
Tournament license, VRS: a publisher's permission to run events for its game (Valve's Limited Game Tournament License and above), and the Valve Regional Standings that ranked Counter-Strike 2 events must invite from in order (Esports & Spectating).
Tournament server: a server local to the players with fixed performance settings on a protected network, trading density for predictability, with pauses and every admin command logged (Esports & Spectating).
Utility AI: scoring every option from considerations normalized between 0 and 1 and picking the highest, for characters with many competing needs (AI in Games).