Let's Talk Player Feedback 🎮🎙️ Season 4 | Episode 37 🎙️🎮

Join us for a another great episode of Let's Talk Player Feedback, as we delve into the intricate process of sunsetting games. In this episode, we are thrilled to have Alysia Sanders, an industry expert from Kongregate, sharing her insights on:

🌅 From Dusk till Dawn: Sunsetting a Video Game and the Impact in its Community 🌅

We'll explore the decision-making process behind sunsetting games, the challenges faced by community managers, and the strategies employed to ensure a smooth transition for the gaming community. Key discussion points include:

👥 The Decision to Sunset Games - Understanding the circumstances that lead to this crucial decision.

📣 Communicating the Decision - How to effectively communicate the sunset decision to the game's community.

💪 Preparing the Community Management Team - Insights on team preparation and their roles during the transition.

🚀 Managing the Community During Sunset - Navigating challenges and maintaining engagement.

🎮 Transitioning for the Community - Strategies for those who wish to continue engaging with the game.

🌟 Unexpected Outcomes and Learnings - Surprising positives and key takeaways from the experience.

🔍 Looking Back and Lessons Learned - What could have been done differently and the support needed.

💡 Advice for Fellow Community Managers - Expert tips for those facing a game sunset in the future.

Join us in this thought-provoking conversation with Alysia Sanders as we uncover the complexities of sunsetting games and its profound impact on gaming communities. Tune in now for an in-depth exploration of this essential topic! 🎉🔊

Let's Talk Player Feedback is available on all major podcast platforms.

#VideoGameSunset #CommunityManagement #GamingCommunityInsights #PodcastEpisode #ExpertInterview

Let's Talk Player Feedback 🎮🎙️ Season 4 | Episode 36 🎙️🎮

Join Itamar Rogel, CPO of Affogata and Greg Posner, Director Solution Engineering at Helpshift while they walk us through the importance of a 360 degrees view of player feedback to create exceptional player experiences.

About Affogata

Affogata is an AI-Driven Player Feedback Analytics Platform, that allows world-class video game studios to understand their player community feedback and harness it to make better decisions when building games, new levels, features, characters, and more. Affogata gathers all the unstructured player feedback from the open web and combines it with internal player data to provide a full view of the player community voice. Multiple stakeholders such as product managers, player insights professionals, player experience teams, data analysts, and more use Affogata to make better business decisions. Affogata was founded in 2019 by Sharel Omer and Itamar Rogel.

To learn more about Affogata, visit: https://www.affogata.com/

Helpshift is a consumer-first digital support platform, made for companies that want to meet the rapidly evolving needs of their customers.

Helpshift combines smart segmentation with conversational AI to understand customer intent, facilitate a guided modern support journey, and quickly resolve their problems across today’s immersive channels like mobile apps, gaming consoles, and the metaverse.

Within weeks you’ll demonstrate ROI with our easy-to-implement SDK built with customizable automation that drives faster response and resolution times.

To learn more about Helpshift, visit: https://www.helpshift.com/

In this episode we had the pleasure of hosting Agatha Bejan, Director of CRM & Subscription Optimization at Phiture to talk about the role of a CRM professional in a games company and how they leverage player feedback for retention and monetization.

What will you listen to in this episode?

1. Minute 05:37 - Agatha introduces herself and talks about her current role at Phiture, and her previous roles at EA, Jagex and Zynga.

2. Minute 08:38 - Agatha, a CRM specialist and manager for many years, explains our audience what does a CRM manager exactly do, and why is it such an important role in the gaming industry.

3. Minute 10:14 - She talks about how player feedback influences her day-today job as a CRM Manager.

4. Minute 11:49 - Agatha dives into what is the type of data that she searches for when doing player or user research and what are the metrics she looks at to optimize performance.

5. Minute 13:24 - Our guest shares some effective CRM strategies that add value to the customer experience and drive revenue.

6. Minute 16:20 - What are the top three user insights that bring Agatha's team the biggest impact?

7. Minute 17:58 - Agatha talks about how she intertwines player insights qualitative and quantitative data.

8. Minute 20:05 - In Agatha's opinion, what is the best way to retain players?

9. Minute 21:53 - If there would be a dream insight you could get from your users, what would it be?

We had the pleasure of hosting Joshua Johnson, Director Solutions Architecture at EdgeNext.  Josh began his technology career in his mid-20s. His work experience includes 10+ years in broadcasting and live event industries as an audio/video engineer, stage and production manager producing news segments as well as live broadcasts. He moved to working in the networking and computer industry during the Internet's infancy, which eventually resulted in his landing in the CDN industry in the year 2000. Within the CDN and Cloud industries, Josh has held positions running Support, Operations as well as Service Architecture and Streaming Media Service groups while also performing as an individual contributor.  He currently serves as the Director of Solution Architects at EdgeNext.

What will you listen to in this episode?

1. Minute 05:09 - Joshua shared with us what are the main pain points he perceives in the games industry from the game development and performance perspective and how can EdgeNext help gaming companies combat these issues.

2. Minute 09: 10 - Joshua explains how important is got game studios to have solutions for accelerations and data enhancement so games don't lag. He shares an example of how in Esports for example, milliseconds are the difference between winning and losing a competition and if there is a lag, that can decrease exponentially the game experience.

3. Minute 14:28 - We shared with Joshua how Affogata did a report analyzing the 4 biggest Battle Royale games: Fortnite, PUBG, Call of Duty Mobile, and Apex Legends and we found that technical issues appear to be a recurring topic in the negative mentions of all games examined. Common complaints include server connection issues that cause lag and freezing throughout gameplay,  and more and we asked Joshua what were his thoughts regarding these main complaints.

4. Minute 19:23 - Joshua shares how Game Studios could utilize both EdgeNext and Affogata to provide the best experience for their players, optimize their games with all of this data and achieve their maximum potential.

In this episode, we had the pleasure of hosting Ayush Gupta, Analyst Team Lead at Sciplay Games. Ayush has a decade of experience in data analytics, about 6 years of that time has been in gaming. He started his career in an analytics consultancy, working for various clients across industries and leading projects ranging from descriptive & prescriptive analytics to building machine learning models. During this time, he got to work for Call of Duty in Santa Monica. Him being an avid gamer, he was amazed at the opportunity and it propelled him to a career in gaming. After a year, he joined Ubisoft Pune, where he got to work on a bunch of mobile games. During the course of his career, he got opportunities to work on mobile, console, and PC games, all being in different phases of their releases. 

What is this episode about?

1. Minute 06:46 - Ayush shares with us his amazing experience in the gaming industry, working as an analyst in places and games such as Call of Duty, Ubisoft, RedHill Games, and Sciplay.

2. Minute 10:41  - Ayush discusses the types of metrics you should look into in every phase of the game.

3. Minute 13:11  - We asked Ayush what is the insight that brings his team the biggest impact and he said that for free-to-play games, the most important insight that you would like to know is what actually converts a player into a payer.

4. Minute 15:20 - Ayush tells us how as soon as you start asking the right questions, you get an insight. As an analyst, you come up with a lot of hypotheses that constantly need to be approved or disproved and that's how you come up with insights.

We had the pleasure of hosting Mafalda Duarte in this episode. Mafalda is the Studio director and producer at Nerd Monkeys. Mafalda helped launch titles like Out of Line and Short Games Collection into the world. In addition to being an ambassador for Women in Games, she works for the organisation as Ambassador Coordinator and teaches project management classes at Lusófona and ETIC´s video game courses. She´s a founder of the Game Dev Lisbon collective and has been organising events such as Game Dev Camp since 2020, among other community projects.

What is this episode about?

1. Minute 06:41 - Mafalda shared with us how she entered the games industry and what she likes most about it: the community.

2. Minute 12:41 - Indie Studios can have difficulty gathering player feedback, but Mafalda shared with us a story on how Nerd Monkeys asked the public which character they connect with the most, and because of the players, they changed the way their main character looked in their game.

3. Minute 17:20 - Mafalda discusses how at Indie Studios you need to be more creative to gather feedback and sometimes it is a matter of going with your gut because you don't have enough data from the communities.

4. Minute 22:06 - we asked Mafalda what insight brings the most impact to her and her team and she shared how engagement is critical for her to understand how much players enjoy the game.

In this episode, we had the pleasure of hosting Jinesha Gandhi. Jinesha has been in the gaming industry for over 9 years. She currently works as a producer at Redhill games in Helsinki and she has worked on several AAA games. Making games is her passion and profession. 

What you'll listen to in this episode:

1. Minute 08:18 - "player feedback is very important for any gaming company to survive" - Jinesha shared with us and how does player feedback influence her day-to-day position.

2. Minute 10:30 - Jinesha shares with us the metrics and things they look at to create and optimize games such as market trends and technology. And once the game is released, what players like the most, monetization performance, etc.

3. Minute 14:35 - We asked Jinesha what insights bring the most value to her and she told us they always look for performance insights, specifically how smooth is the game when players start playing it. Also, how many people are encountering problems in the game. "Usually, players are very vocal about such things. They write it on the community chats, and they let the company know because the players are not going to be easy on us."

4. Minute 18:15 - Jinesha has worked in several gaming companies, both mobile and console and she shared with us what are the main differences she was seen between these 2 categories and also the way they collect and utilize player feedback.

We’ve had an amazing year and 3 great seasons in the Let’s Talk Customer Feedback Podcast by Affogata. During season 3, we had awesome interviewees from companies such as Activision Blizzard, Playstudios, Wargaming, Mytona, and many more. We’ve talked about the importance of inclusivity in the games industry, how to balance player needs with the company’s strategy and vision, the influence of the community on game development and optimization, and everything in between. It has been an awesome season and we can’t wait to see what 2023 brings.

Although we’ve talked about multiple topics in the games industry, one question we asked all our guests was: “if there would be a dream insight they could get from your players, what would it be?” and we bring you here a compilation of all of these answers to end 2022 on a perfect note and hoping that we can bring these insights for next year!

So find here the 10 answers we had to this question from incredible player experience experts.

Caro Solari, the Head of Marketing at Affogata was the host in this episode and she had the pleasure of interviewing Mickael Dell'ova.

Micka is a Senior Player Experience Designer, currently working on Alan Wake 2 at Remedy. Micka has a strong belief in what video games should be: a safe place for all, a refuge where everyone must be represented, be themselves, and enjoy the same quality of experience beyond their gender, their sex orientation, their culture, their social background or their physical and mental abilities. Micka has 15 years of experience in different fields like graphic and web design, ergonomics, accessibility, Game Design, UX design, Diversity & Inclusion.

What will you listen to in this episode?

1. Minute 06:16 - We asked Micka how he became an accessibility diversity and inclusion specialist and Micka shared his background with us. He also mentioned that the video game industry is making progress in this regard, but still, the main problem is unconscious biases and preconceived ideas.

2. Minute 10:50 - Micka shared with us games that are doing a good job of representing minorities such as Last of Us, Overwatch, or Dead by Daylight.

3. Minute 14:21 - Micka also emphasized what the LGBTQ+ community is looking for in video games. "The idea is to move away from the usual stereotypes that have been served to us for years and I'm not saying that we should all represent gay men in this way. Just that is refreshing to be reminded that identities are diverse and that stereotypes and unconscious biases are frequent."

4. Minute 15:14 - We shared with Micka a few mentions that we found through Affogata from people talking about inclusivity in video games in the open share and we asked Micka his thoughts about these comments.

5. Minute 20:26 - Lastly, Micka told us about a new event he is working on for everyone around the creation of video games but integrating all the ethical and social topics in the design process. "The name is the 'Vertical Game Jam', and the goal is to bring together participants to create a video game around an ethical theme by including constraints of inclusion, representation, and accessibility and the teams will be guided by mentors and final jury members, who are prestigious diversity champions from the video game industry."