Dovetail Games
Who’s new, who’s returning? Making player history clearer with Databricks
Game & Studio Context
Dovetail Games builds simulation games for people who enjoy getting into the detail. Best known for the Train Sim World franchise, the UK studio puts players in the driver’s seat of locomotives on real-world railway routes. Its games have evolved through successive versions, with plenty for both long-time enthusiasts and newcomers to explore.
That makes player history important to understand. When a new version comes along, some people already have an earlier release in their library; others are starting from scratch. As Dovetail prepared to release a new version of one of its games, it wanted a clear view of those different journeys.
The Challenge
The question was easy to ask: who had come from an earlier version and who hadn’t? The answer was less straightforward. Dovetail wanted to distinguish people who’d moved from older releases to the free version from those who owned the paid version without owning an earlier one.
Dovetail already had some familiarity with Databricks, but the queries needed to organise players into those groups were proving tricky to build. What the team needed wasn’t a sweeping overhaul; it was a practical way to make those player cohorts visible.
That was the brief for Code Wizards: take a specific, awkward data question and turn it into something Dovetail could see and understand.
Enter Code Wizards
When Dovetail needed a hand with its Databricks cohorts, we kept things simple. From September to November 2025, Code Wizards stepped in to focus on one problem: create the player groups the studio wanted to see.
Our team included a project manager, a solution architect, and an engineer; together, they tackled the cohort-query challenge and delivered the requested groups in Databricks without turning a specific ask into a mountain of busywork.
The Outcome
The result was the clear picture Dovetail had been looking for. Where the team previously couldn’t see users’ histories across different versions of the game, they could now identify cohorts based on which versions players had owned.
That meant distinguishing players moving from older releases to the free version from paid-version owners with no earlier version in their history. For a studio releasing a new version of a game, that extra visibility helped put its playerbase into context.
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