Icejam wants to make big waves in the mobile community, starting with its newest initiative. It recently raised $3 million in an effort to back its Playable Data platform, promising it would be just as vital a “transformative technology” as virtual and augmented reality.

To get better clarity on just what Playable Data will bring to gaming, [a]listdaily sat down with founder and CEO Stuart Duncan, who previously worked with the likes of Bight Games and EA Mobile Studios before starting fresh with Icejam.

“Playable Data is our Big-Data collection and processing environment that enables us to integrate real-time, real-world data streams into our games to really enhance gameplay,” said Duncan. “Data streams, for example, can be collected from a wide variety of global, local or personal sources (e.g. devices and wearables) and interjected throughout our games providing personalized context and a constantly changing game environment. Are games that use our platform more fun? We think so.”

But how exactly does this into gameplay sessions? “Playable Data provides a dynamic, living, breathing situational context that the game designer can draw on to interact with players.

“Our platform utilizes big data to solve the notification problem for example,” Duncan continued. “There is a tendency for mobile games to deliver too many notifications to the point where players begin disabling or ignoring them. Constant notifications can become an annoyance to players. Instead of players being prompted to interact with their game through notifications, the real world can provide players with cues to open their game based on what is going on around them. Thus live real world events become entangled with the game play itself – prompting users to engage and take advantage of the situations that arise in the game based on the real-world data feeds. It’s really quite cool.

“We built a Playable Data platform that is independent of the game client and communicates with it. The platform gathers local, global and personal player data in turn making it available to the game designer to use as triggers in the gameplay.”

The team isn’t in any rush to get it to market, though. “Like all other high quality game publishers, we will only bring the game to market when it’s ready. We are working towards our soft launch to begin in the spring with the global launch to follow when we know we have it tuned just right,” Duncan explained.

“Our platform has progressed to the point where we’ve taken a seed investment from Build Ventures. They are investing in our technology and the exceptional team we’ve assembled to bring it to life. Their recent $3M investment will allow us to continue to expand our team across a variety of disciplines, including marketing and product development, enabling us to further advance our platform and deliver our first game to market.”

As for the mobile gaming market in itself, Duncan simply concluded, “Everyone talks about the high cost of user acquisition and only those with bundles of cash being able to survive. I think they have taken their eye off the ball. While others look to consolidation and ever bigger marketing spends, we believe that this trend toward consolidation has everyone forgetting why we are all here. That is to engineer amazing new ways to have fun with mobile games. That’s what the players want, that’s what investors are looking for and that’s where we come in…creating new ways to engage players. We believe that F2P mobile games can be better, and while others are focused on consolidation – we are focused on making games more engaging and fun to play in ways none of us have ever seen before.

“F2P needs innovation and Icejam has been attracting attention due to its visionary approach to integrating real-world data into the free-to-play mobile game experience.”