Players Are People Too

[Music] awesome okay uh so what we're talking about today uh the topic of the conversation today is players are people too uh and what we're talking about is how you can better Engage The Players in your game uh with your company and actually stop treating them like dollar signs instead of people um so I'll give you a little bit of background on myself just so you sort of know who I am where I came from uh I'm a senior producer at Big Viking games I've been a big Viking for uh give or take the Last 5 Years um I started off working in QA uh as well as other player facing roles uh at dice back in the early 2000s uh and I've been in Mobile and casual for about the last eight years um one of the big things about me is that uh I love games I've Loved games my entire life that's why I've been in the industry for 13 years uh when I was a kid my parents would always say to me you know go outside you you got to go outside where you can't

just stay inside and play all day so I would come home every day and I'd go to my bedroom and I'd grab my Nintendo and I'd grab my TV and I'd take them outside and play the Nintendo on the back porch uh and it's that passion that's sort of driven the last 13 years of my career and that's sort of where I'm coming from today um so as I mentioned uh I did start in triaa back in the early 2000s um a lot of QA work to start uh which is pretty much the normal production track for most people uh and then I moved into production from there um this is a look at our team at Big Viking games uh big Viking is a company that was founded back in 2012 uh we just recently uh 2011 sorry we both recently celebrated our 5-year anniversary uh and this is our current team um as of right now I don't have an exact count today because we are in a lot of flux we're sitting at about 110 people uh when I started about 4 and a half years ago we had uh 11 uh so

we've seen rapid growth uh and a lot of that is due to all of the wonderful people that you see up on the screen right now uh we couldn't have done it without them um and a lot a lot of that growth is actually built on our commitment to creating relationships with our players um from day one one of our founding principles has been make fans and we use make F fans as a touchstone for the company both internally and externally uh what that means is that people who work for big Viking games should be very big fans of the work that we're doing and the players that play our game should very big fans of the work that we're doing as well so this is just a quick look at y World um y world's an online social decorating and dress up game as of right now we have around 75,000 daily active users uh about 200,000 ma obviously the numbers shift month-to month based on current market trends but uh that's our general average number uh the game was actually created by one of our Founders back in 2011 uh and had been in operation for about a year and a half when it was sold off to Zinga uh and after years of

success um Zinga did a wonderful job with it the game was no longer a priority for Zinga um as the owners of the game and it being a smaller title they had basically bigger fish to fry it wasn't turning the profit that they would want it to turn didn't make sense in their portfolio perfectly logical conclusion for a large company but what they didn't necessarily anticipate was that they had a highly engaged rabid and vocal fan base so what happened for us is that when they were going to Sunset the title uh uh the players reached out to us and what they said was we love this game can you do anything to save us because we are desperate to keep playing this game we have years invested in Social relationships and money and just friends and everything else uh and so we did so falling on deaf ears uh is part of the important takeaway uh for our talk today um one of the things that happened when dealing with the previous owners is that players sub submitted

numerous complaints over and over again um but the developer chose not to listen to them uh partially because they weren't a priority and partially because they had their own agenda um one of the major things that happened was security vulnerabilities are a very real thing anybody who deals with flash games knows it's flash it has security vulnerabilities what are you going to do uh so malicious cash injection actually became a very big problem for the game um malicious parties actually managed to get into into the game put hard currency into the game and at that point what is the purpose of a player supporting the game why would you buy currency when you can just get it from some random guy out the internet for free right um one of the secondary results of that is that item quality took a dive uh and in a massive way as a hugely content-driven game uh your world depends very much on its content economy uh so because the profitability of the game was diving they were looking for ways to cut cost on item creation one of the ways you can cut cost on item creation is Outsourcing

this is not I want to be really clear that I'm not bad mouthing Outsourcing there are a lot of great Outsourcing firms in the world but there are also very inexpensive ones and you tend to get what you pay for uh and that was the case that we had with Y world uh so it started becoming a self fufilling prophecy um as a result of the item quality going down the malicious cast injection players started to leave when you have players leaving you have less players supporting you make less and less good quality items because it can't be justified monetarily and this is where we get to the point of not listening to players can kill your game uh it's really important to recognize that players have a voice um and that they matter they're really the lifeblood of every single game that we work on um so listening to them is the most important thing that you can do uh the lack of listening and response is actually one of the biggest reasons that yville now your world almost died so players are people too um

players are a lot more than just dollar signs and data points uh one of the things that I noticed a couple years ago at GDC uh was I went to a monetization round table and the direction that the conversation went about players made me seriously question what I was doing with my career um because there were people talking about price anchoring and psychological matrices and how you can trick players into spending more money uh and I started questioning sort of what has happened to us as Developers when every single person who got into games got into games because we love games so why would we possibly treat people who share that love with us any differently than we'd want to be treated ourselves right um our players are unique and interesting people uh and they're all craving great experiences and we can deliver those experiences especially with the player input so how do we go about doing that well first of all we need to recognize that there's far more of them than there are of us uh and that can be especially at GDC that can be a tough thing to realize because there's so many devs here um but if

we're putting it into context uh and just a little bit of a visual aid so if we take a look at the size of the Y World development team versus what we like to call the player team uh if you put them side by side they look close to equal but then you realize that there's more players and there's more players and there's not another slide full of people because I could do it for about another 100,000 slides uh but there's so many of them why wouldn't we take advantage of that great information and feedback loop that we can use to improve the quality of our games and improve the quality of our work um so just to put the numbers into a little bit of perspective for you uh one tester in one day of work can do about eight hours of testing exposure uh and we're not going to get into ideal man hours or anything like that let's just assume that one person Works eight hours in a day for the sake of Simplicity um but 50,000 players playing your game in the first five minutes can do over 4,000 hours of testing right so that that's a powerful thing because that's 520 workday of testing in the first 5

minutes so when you realize one you have people who are really engaged and really interested in helping improve the quality of your game and two that there's a lot of them you can leverage that to actually help your business grow inexpensively while making the players happy because they have a voice in the destiny of the product it's a really powerful thing uh so I'm going to talk a little bit about what our first steps were when recovering the game um your world as I mentioned was a game that had some serious trust issues with the previous ownership um partially just due to lack of suns setting uh and players having sort of Gone Away in droves uh so the first thing that we did when we took the game back was we sat down and we had a conversation about how we were going to re-engage this group of players and how we were going to have this conversation with them what could we possibly do to re earn the trust of people who felt like they had been abused for years right that's a very hard thing so the first thing that we did was we set sat down and we created

what you see up on the screen there which is our three pillars uh and our three pillars for our players are number one safe and secure number two Community engagement and number three player made experiences and I'll go into those in a little bit more detail safe and secure is fairly straightforward when you think about the issue of malicious cash injection into a game especially a game that is a virtual economy that thrives on the buying selling and trading of goods it becomes very important to realize that the Safety and Security of that system is Paramount it's higher than anything else if you can't sell people goods and allow them to support the game the game's going to die secondarily as a highly social game it's really important to recognize that people who are playing in a social context especially Facebook or any other social network are deeply concerned about their own security and privacy you need to be able to guarantee that security and privacy for them otherwise they're not going to trust you and they're going to find somebody or someone else to go to so the second of our pillars is community engagement also fairly straightforward but very very important

um we made a commitment to our players from day one that we would engage them in the conversation every step of the way uh that they were always going to be part and what this means for us is that we've created uh forms of feedback and different Avenues of communication so that players always have a say in the direction that the game's going which sounds very very scary to a lot of people because who's steering the ship right well as the develop you are ultimately steering the ship but you have to remember that the players are the waves on which your ship crests right they are the Crux of everything that you do so you can't forget that and finally player made experiences um this one's a little bit more tricky in in the way that it works uh but essentially the way that y World works as a game because it is a design and dress up game and a social game players rely very much on the ability to build things and show them to other

players it's very important for them to be able to activate their own creativity and show that to the rest of the people who are playing the game uh so what this means for us is we create things uh quite often feature-wise roughly 60% of the way uh and we let players fill in the other 40% so whether it be um a feature that allows for user generated content to be piped in and then shared with other users or a first iteration of a feature that goes out to players gets feedback and then we build another 20% based on that feedback we bring them along the journey every step of the way so in terms of regaining players trust um the pillars were really important for us in that they created a touchstone for us uh and that Touchstone has been important for the last three years of owning the game essentially um we refer to them very frequently in our player discussions we refer to them very frequently in our in house discussions

uh when we're doing feature design the first thing that we do is we go back to that first pillar right we say okay is this feature going to be safe and secure is it going to be something that we can guarantee there's going to be no security flaws with whatsoever uh we've spent the last three years fighting off very persistent people uh who it's I don't know where they got this Mission from but it is their god-given mission to infiltrate the game uh and in the last 3 years we haven't had a single major security incident which is a point of Pride and that's because we use these touchstones um so every single time we do a feature we ask one is it safe and secure two how does it engage the community does it engage the community in a meaningful way or is it just paying lip service to that engagement and then how is it allowing players to generate their own experience now don't get me wrong not every feature can generate experiences for players you can't allow players to generate all of the content but allowing them to generate a lot of it uh is really important

um so one of the important things to remember is that the industry is evolving uh and player expectations are not what they used to be uh and that's something uh I I've been around the industry for a while and that's something that I've definitely noticed particularly in The Last 5 Years is that the savviness of players has gone way up players are on to us especially when it comes to pricing strategy and how we approach microtransactions and things like DLC there are goods and bads to this some players actually understand that yes ultimately we are running businesses and we have families to feed and that's a great thing but at the same time they will jump on top of you if they feel like you're taking advantage of them uh and the second thing here is that the marketplace is a lot noisier than it used to be um this is a good thing for a lot of Indie developers in that it's easier to be an entrant into the market but it's harder to succeed in the market because there's so many people who are now competing in all of these spaces whether it be the Google Play Store the app store steam there's

so many people doing independent development which is awesome and exciting but there's so many of them how do you break through so we need to find ways to cut through and one of the ways that you can actually do that is engaging your players directly and making them part of the conversation uh so I'm going to talk a little bit about some of the stuff that we do to engage our players um and get feedback from them in a meaningful manner that we can actually make use of uh the bread and butter for us quite frankly is the demographic survey um how many people here have used demographic surveys in their game okay so some not a lot uh if you've got a live Ops game um and you don't know the demographic of your game you need to really seriously reconsider the way that you're approaching your players because if you don't know who they are how are you possibly going to know what they want right you're just shooting in the dark um one of the really interesting things that we have learned by way of our demographic survey is that in your world 70% of our players are actually female which makes us have a very very unique

demographic um one of the challenges and lots of people can attest to this is the industry itself does tend to be very male-dominated right so how do we break through how do we break that barrier of having a highly female driven player base while still making sure that our people are making things that they want to make well one of the things that we do um internally is we actually make sure that we actively hire as many females as we possibly can and the reason for that is if you're dealing with a largely female base then you should have as many females on the team as possible the second thing that we do and this is really important is we never assume that any person fits a stereotype so if you say you know 70% of the players are female we need more female content what does that possibly mean right that doesn't mean anything that means that whatever assumption that you've generated about what female generated content is is what you're

going to push on them but what you should actually be doing is saying okay let's now that we know that there's 70% of the players that are female let's send out a survey to our female players and ask them what it is that they want and then when they tell you you can better deliver to them what they actually want the caveat here being our information is going to be different than your information no matter what game you're working on every group of players is going to be different and that's why you want to get to know them uh the really important other thing here is that 70% of our Spenders are female uh which means that they have a very powerful voice when it comes to driving the success of our game our female players are the by and large largest spending group of all of the players uh so their voice is very loud so this is just for the the visual Learners in the group uh it's sort of a re- representation in a quickly thrown together infographic to let you know some of the distribution data um so as I mentioned um I'll just point out that

the current demographic data was added a week ago the infographic was made a month ago so it shifts a little bit uh but we're sitting about 72% female players right now 28% male uh one of the interesting things for us is that we know that roughly 62% uh of our players are in North America um with a further 12% being in either the UK or Australia uh and what that means for us is that we actually know that our players are very driven uh by for a better terminology Western ideology they look at things through that lens which means that we can deliver things using that lens so how do we make that information matter how do we use it Australia Day um so using demographic data we learned that there's actually significant of percent of players that are in Australia interestingly when I say that 12% of the players are actually in either the UK or Australia what we found out on top of that is 6% of our paying players are actually a Australian so Australian

players really like investing in our game uh and knowing that information allowed us to listen to feedback from players because players told us that for the last six years they had been asking for some sort of celebration of Australia day but it had never been done because there never seemed to be any justification for it right it's a one-off it's sort of a smaller group of people why would we do it because you know nothing there's nothing wrong with Australians just why would we do it because we tend to as Developers Target our largest our largest groups first but your small groups can have a voice too and this is an instance in which we found out well if 6% of the players are Australian and they've been asking for something for the last six years the odds are very very good that it's going to perform well and even if it doesn't perform well we have run an experiment and disproven the theory that Australian themed content can work um so what we did is we put together uh very basic Australia Day bundles uh and you can that this is a tiered bundle um now I

will note while I talk about how important it is to treat your players like people you will see pricing strategy up there it's it's a reality of the business so don't feel the need to call me out on it um but one of the things that we found is that they actually responded really well to tropes so we asked them what's Australian content and they were like give us whatever you think is Australian um they were very happy if you look at the Platinum pack that they got a drop bear so worked out really well for us uh the next type of survey that we do is an engagement survey um and we actually use engagement surveys to survey players on the effectiveness of how we're engaging them which is fairly simple to say but fairly difficult to do um we have a number of different engagement efforts that we actually make use of for our players um one of them is we do a weekly podcast uh where we just sit down and talk about the game chat and the players have an opportunity to get to know us better we also run in-game contests for allowing players to create their own uh content for us we

also run ingame parties once a week twice a week players can sit down with members of our staff and just hang out and game and socialize um so these are all sort of our engagement efforts but any of these things that you're doing you need to find a way to measure and make sure that they're actually being effective um one of the other things that we do for engagement surveys is we actually make use of quarterly report cards so once every quarter we send a report card out to the players and we ask them based on these criteria how are we performing this quarter are we better this quarter than we were last quarter or are we worse and they won't hesitate to tell you that you're doing a worse job than you were and it's a really good way of keeping you honest right and knowing what your flaws are um and these actually have helped to drive our engagement significantly one of the big takeaways that we had from one of our engagement surveys uh was that players liked the podcast but listenership was down and we couldn't figure out why the format hadn't really changed the quality hadn't really changed so we didn't know why so our our philosophy is generally

if you don't know why then ask cuz the players know they're they're going to tell you um we're very fortunate to have a highly engaged user base so what we did is we sent out a survey and we said what do you like about the Y World podcast and what don't you like and one of the things that we learned is that over time we'd gotten very comfortable with the longer format for the podcast um the podcast and the number sounds crazy to most people ran between 45 minutes to an hour uh which is a lot time invested in podcasting but they're a lot of fun to do so whatever but players provided the feedback that they wanted them to be shorter and this is where the use of secondary feedback came in really handy because telling us that they want them shorter isn't perfect so we generally leave an area for subjective feedback so players can write it in and the explanation that we got from players was brilliant and their explanation was I drive to work and it takes about 10 to 15 minutes to drive to work so I want the podcast to be between

10 and 15 minutes in length so when I get up the day that the podcast release I can get in the car listen to the podcast and drive to work awesome takeaway from players right because what they told us is one you're wasting your time uh you know you've got four people who were sort of involved in the whole podcast process so that's basically 3 hours of just lost work every week that we didn't need to be doing um but also that they would be high more highly engaged with with something that took them less time uh and that they listen to on their commute and what happens is they they listen to the podcast on their way to work and then they're thinking about the game throughout the day and you're keeping them engaged right so here's some examples of player generated content this is based on player feedback that we've received um what we actually do some of our players um and you guys will find this actually with your player bases as well a lot of players are remarkably talented uh and are able to actually put together decent quality content um your world

stylistically um look it shows its age we've been around for eight years however there are advantages to being an older game because our style is fairly simple to follow right so that means that players like amateur artists can create art that they want to see in game and then we can generate that art based on it um so this is all player generated content that was submitted To Us by different players um and what we found is that the player generated content that we receive is actually 20% more effective than any of the other content that we release now part of that is driven by exclusivity because it does tend to run for a shorter period of time but the other part is because players feel a sense of ownership and they have actually voted on these designs through the contest system they feel a sense of obligation to support the things that they've shown their support for up to this point uh which is really really awesome so this is one of our player report CS cards um and what you'll see

this is a very basic look at one of the player report cards but what you'll see here uh is we ask them how our customer service efforts are going and how effectively we're communicating with them now when you look at this survey assume that this survey is about 20 times longer than what you're seeing right now and the rest just won't fit on the screen um but what we do is we always measure the three values um you'll hear me interchangeably refer to them as yo values uh which is what we refer to them as players and pillars which is what we're refer to them as inhouse uh but we'll always measure those with players in the last 3 months do you feel like the game has been as safe and secure as you would expect it to be in the last three months how effectively have we been engaging you as a community and in the last 3 months how effective have you been in creating content and how can we help you create more content uh which is really really useful information to have so one of the big things with the engagement surveys uh is that coming up with new ideas isn't always easy but we have this awesome resource in our

players and we know a lot of potential content generators we know people who can actually fill our coffers with ideas when our well is starting to run a little bit dry um which definitely happens with the live Ops game uh and we can find out exactly what it is that they want and then we can deliver on it uh as I mentioned the demographic surveys revealed a need for more female content so what we did is we surveyed the players about what feminine meant to them and how we could better deliver on quote unquote female content we took that Fe or that uh feedback and we actioned on it um the design contests as I mentioned are also really effective um one of the important things to note here uh is to Beware of the vocal minority uh that is one of the dangers in engaging communities uh when you're dealing with large groups of players uh say you have 100,000 players it's very easy for a small group of players to Railroad a conversation and over represent the size

of their population through posting uh and that's why you want to use validation through St strict data when the conversation takes a turn on you uh so another thing that we do is post relase or post- release surveys um what we do as an organization is we look at every release we do as an opportunity to improve every single time we push content out to players that's an opportunity to do better next time uh now we don't do a survey every single time we release content that would be far too cumbersome U but what we do is we release uh to our most engaged players a forum post because we do still use forums and we ask them what did you like about this release what didn't you like this release and how are we going to do better if that sounds very agile that is the way that we operate we are an agile shop so we're always looking to iterate and improve on the things that we're working on um and when we do those we always make sure that we measure both objective and subjective feedback um because because having players provide yes or no answers is great having them

answer multiple CH choice questions is also great but you need some context for where those answers are coming from um and then what we do is after that release we'll plan our future releases based on feedback and data um now if that sounds complicated it is uh we move at a very fast pace uh but it's very worthwhile because one of the reasons that we've seen such rapid growth is using the feedback of players to constantly iterate improve on the things that we're doing so this is just a real quick glance uh of a feedback Forum thread uh from players on a bundle that went out um you can see one of our community managers posted what do you guys think about the stuff that was released today um and players responded now as I mentioned it's actually pretty difficult to get a lot of information on a tiny screen um but what I'll point out is that there's two sort of side by sides here you've got the Forum post on the one side and then on the other side we actually have our measured data uh with the numbers removed for the sales

figures so what we'll do is we'll ask players how they feel about things we'll get their response and our community F managers will feed that back up to us uh in production and then we will take that fedback data and compare it to the actual data that we're receiving on sales and make sure that the two gel um because one of the things that our players have learned thank goodness it's awesome uh is that they can back up their opinions with their wallets which can be dangerous if they don't like things but very very good if they do so as I mentioned when you're measuring your feedback always make sure that you're validating uh your feedback with data um using things like sales figures and participation numbers uh and other analytics thata is really really really critical um and make sure that you're creating feedback and Improvement Loops for your team um if you're not validating data you definitely should be uh because one if you're getting subjective feedback from all of your players especially if you're dealing with a large scale title you can't go through it fast enough there's just too much information and that's when you're

going to need really objective feedback but if you need more clarity that's when you get into the subjective stuff so how do you decide what to listen to that's a tough question um every player has an opinion um but not all feedback is created equally interestingly enough um some players we actually we make a point of knowing our players really well with um with a relatively large player base that can be challenging but our community managers happen to be particularly good at knowing who people are uh and we have certain players who we know we complain no matter what we do every single day they'll complain about something nothing's ever good enough and that's when you get to the point where okay we just kind of discard your feedback we still kind of hear it but it becomes more white noise um and we try and train our players to behave in ways that we want them to behave um and what that means is teaching them that there are good typ types of feedback and bad types of feedback they can provide feedback in

a constructive context but they need to know how uh we also try to balance the player feedback with long-term objectives um that can be very challenging when you have outside influences um on your product for example that players don't necessarily understand um that you have to deal with right um so for example if you have uh Regulatory Compliance uh which doesn't happen to a lot of people uh I know it definitely happens uh in a lot more casino games uh but if you have things like that or you have external stakeholders or you have a technological requirement that you need to meet uh for example we did a large server transition uh because we were dealing with a seven-year-old server infrastructure uh that just didn't make sense anymore players do have a difficult time understanding that um and that's where your communication is going to come in key uh because the long-term objective is to provide better server infrastructure so that you can provide

them better features in the long term but you need to be able to communicate that to them effectively uh also as I mentioned pay close attention to your sample size don't let a thousand people out of 100,000 drive your decision- making um they will if they can uh so make sure that you're maintaining control so while this is a wall of text this is a very good example of very helpful player feedback um first of all players name's been blacked out because safe and secure is one of our values so if they wind up watching this I got you um one of the really important things that this player told us uh is that they felt that the color use could be improved uh in items so what that means is that we can provide that feedback to our artists and say you know one of our top supporting players feels like color use is off right now can you take a look at the last batch of stuff that's like this is 5 minutes of work right take a look at the last batch releases make sure that everything is actually on

pallet because when for a decorating game in particular if you have 10 or 12 artists that are all working towards decorating a room but they're all making uh their pieces sort of in isolation you're going to wind up with color mismatches if you're not really really careful so we always listen to that feedback um secondly the player pointed out that pricing seems high and this was really good feedback for us because the player was interestingly both right and wrong um based on this player's feedback and I'm going to note that if you take a look at this post this post had 100 replies to it with 70% of the replies supporting the post we don't just take one long Forum post and say okay this person's got great ideas let's Dive Right In um but what we do is we say okay if there's a lot of support we're going to look at it the pricing feedback that we received uh in this instance was that prices are higher than they used to be and everything's more expensive the player was wrong about that the average price of the items in that theme had actually gone down about 5 to 6% but the player was also right because the number of items that went out during that theme

had increased by 20 to 30% so organically by process of playing the game the player innately had an understanding of the total cost of ownership of the theme right it just felt like it was costing more and having that kind of feedback having feedback from players with they're like this doesn't feel the way it used to feel sometimes it's right sometimes it's wrong but it's valuable to listen to and finally the the player also said that we're doing too much of the same thing uh if you take a look at the post if you can find it it's down here at the bottom too many rugs too many lamps too many couches that's great feedback um because what that says to US based on player feedback and they're being supporting evidence from other players is that we should be taking a look into our sales figures directly for those items and finding out whether or not their sales are on the decline if they're on the decline then we're wasting effort on doing them and we can be making better offerings that make the players happier and make us generate more profit at the same time so how do you get them to talk

um contrary to popular belief not everybody wants to share their opinion uh and sometimes you have to encourage them to do so uh so sometimes what we need to do is we actually need to incentivize our players to engage Us in conversation uh and sometimes we actually need to start that conversation ourself uh one of the things that I'll point out is that rewarding players is highly highly effective um rewards do not have to be large they can be very small things uh and a reward can be something as simple as a thank you just telling players that you appreciate the feedback and you're going to look into it is a reward for some people um but using rewards I'll point out our nor uh most normal survey response rates for games that we've worked on are about 40% um which is that's not bad that's enough to get an idea uh in your world our average response rate is actually 63% um and that's because of the engagement effort however with rewards our response rate goes up over 90% uh for something as simple as an

item that could take an artist an hour to make all of a sudden we've increased the effectiveness of our data significantly uh so here's an example of how we sort of showed off our newsletter to our players um and what we did is you can see on the right hand side we incentivized it with a peacock hat which is literally just a peacock that stands on top of your head um but players love the item so uh the signup rate for our newsletter was over 70% uh just through that incentivization and the amazing thing about that for me uh is that we had created a separate channel of communication for players outside of the game which is one of the biggest challenges everybody has is how do you talk to them when they're not playing um as a just as an aside if you're going to do a newsletter for your game um I highly encourage you not to make it a sales initiative make it about communicating with players you can put sales stuff in there but if you're only sending them another ad once a week to buy stuff they're going to unsubscribe really

quickly so rewarding player Behavior Uh is really important uh we tend to use small tokens and character adornments uh because we find that they're highly effective one of the things I like to compare it to is if you think about the Rock the vote badges that you can get when you vote it's the same idea it's a way for people to let other people know that their voice was heard and that they contributed uh so it doesn't again it doesn't have to be big it can be something small it's just a matter of making it uh and especially if you make it excl exclusive it's all the more valuable uh also always show your gratitude and appreciation for player feedback never stop saying thank you everything they have to say even if it's terrible and mean and awful is valuable um and I'll talk about that in just a sec um most of the time you also want to make sure that you're rewarding after and not before which makes a ton of sense right if you want your kid to clean their room you're not going to give them a chocolate barard a chocolate bar before they clean the room you're going to do it after because otherwise you're just going to have a chocolated up kid in the dirty room uh so here's an

example of one of the ways that we use feedback in a sales context that we actually find very very effective and this is what we call a you asked we listened um and this is part of a larger brand strategy that we use for the players to let them know that we're listening to their feedback uh while also presenting them with items for sale uh and this is a great scenario because uh if you look at the two hairs that are here um these are are both player designed hairs that we released uh and the player feedback that we got was we would like more colors for these hairs if you please because the color selection is great but we think that there could be more it's real hard to say no when people want to buy more of your content uh so we have a tendency to give in uh and just make that content for them uh and then we'll package it up in one of these you ask we listens which is a standard format uh and players respond really real really well to them sorry so how do we know that this works it's a good question Jacob thank you uh

so our da growth is currently about 30% of one back players um and that's important to us because the players that have grown uh our actual daily active users are players who used to play YoVille got fed up and left and then have heard from their friends that things have changed and things are better so now it's time to come back that's great because these people also tend to be highly engaged players and they're going to be contributing to the communication that we get back uh also on average as I mentioned the items that were created uh based on player feedback do perform 20% better uh and our AR Dow is up almost 40% um I can't go into direct numbers but the product more than pays for itself um just by way of keeping Communication open with players so here's some of the added benefits to actually doing this um caring can really help engage your players with your team uh and more importantly caring engages your team with your players and that's a hard

thing to do for some titles um how many people here work on a live Ops title right now so some so anybody who works on a live Ops title knows that live operations can be a grind right especially if you're highly content-driven it does sometimes feel like an unending treadmill um the way that you can break yourself out of that cycle is to find a way to communicate with your players and really care about them because then you're making content for your friends right then you're building stuff for people who love what you're doing uh and have your back as well uh and that's a really good way to keep the flame burning between the team and yourself uh and the players uh so this is one of our community managers this is Trevor um Trevor is actually drinking in uh coffee uh out of a mug that was sent to us by players uh the postcard wall that you see behind him is all postcard sent by players and the coffee in that mug is also coffee that was sent to us by players uh Trevor's very brave I wouldn't drink the coffee uh but Trevor would um so good job Trevor um how many

Community managers do we have in the room thank you if anybody hasn't said that to you in the last month I'm sorry thank you thank you so much for everything that you do if you work with a community manager um thank them today if you can't thank them today thank them tomorrow but thank them the amount of hard work that Community managers do to bridge the gap between us and our players and provide that feedback in a meaningful context while keeping a smile on their face and dealing with sometimes very frustrating situations is immeasurable uh so make sure that you're thanking them give them a hug they deserve it um so the takeaways for today number one always remember the human side of gaming uh one of the things I try to remind myself of the first thing I do when I get into the office in the morning is why did I start down this road why did I want to make video games because I love them okay so why are people playing our games because they love them right they're they're not just

another number on a spreadsheet they're real living breathing people who are looking for an exciting and engaging experience that we can help deliver to them um and that will help drive your passion for building games for years if you can find a way to engage with players on that level um also find out who your players are and what engages them um don't make assumptions based on the data that you have actually ask them who they are where they're from what they did as long as they love you um also create pillars and standards that you and your players will understand um and that's just for driving Communication in an effective manner uh so Behavior modeling is really important when it comes to dealing with player bases so if players are behaving in a way that is really admirable make sure that you're rewarding that if they're providing feedback to a survey great reward that if you have one player that goes out of their way to help other players it can be as simple as recognizing that and saying this player

is awesome they do what we want them to do that encourages the other players who are in the same you know who are sort of in the same situation and thinking of helping other people to take that next step and become helpful and it drives Community um also make sure that you're making players a big part of the team um they have so much to offer don't leave that on the table uh so caveats really important um always remember that if you're engaging your players in an effective way you're essentially giving them agency over your title you're still going to be in charge but they're helping drive that decision- making uh so agency can really easily breed passion and passion can very easily be misinterpreted as anger um make sure you're not taking it too personally uh and Beware of the vocal minority uh because they can break through if they really want to um and just maintain control of the conversation uh ultimately you get to decide how you engage with your players if people are being overly toxic you don't have to continue to engage in that

conversation uh you can give them timeouts it's okay um also find ways to keep the players busy and engaged one of the things that we found most effective with engaging the players on a day-to-day basis is keeping them busy by way of games by way of social interaction uh and by way of designing stuff and what that does is it takes away the potential for boredom uh if they're in an idol state they're not actively playing the game but they are still interacting with the community boredom can sometimes feed drama because they're bored and they're looking to start a fight because they're looking to be entertained by anything right so if you're finding ways to keep them entertained you're going to nip that in the bud right away um don't take feedback personally as hard as it possibly is try not to take feedback personally what one of the challenging things quite frankly uh in developing games is that we pour our lives on our passion into games um you know nobody

who works in games is a stranger to 12 or 14 hour days we've all been through crunches we've all Port everything that we have into a title and to have somebody come along and tell you that the work that you've done isn't good enough can be really hurtful but what you need to remember is that where that player is coming from is that they care very much about the game that you've made remember that that anger is far better than indifference uh because an indifferent player is basically a dead player and they're going to be leaving very soon uh so remember that if they're coming at it really passionately they're coming at it from a place of Truth uh and make sure that you support that and finally just have clear-cut rules of engagement and be consistent in your follow-through um make sure that the rules always apply to all players nobody is above the law uh that is a thing that we've dealt with in that um some of our Platinum supporters our high tier supporters will sometimes feel like their opinion matters more than other players uh don't tell them of course it kind of does um in a way in that when it comes comes to sales and stuff we'll listen to it but when it comes to the treatment of other players no way safe

and secure is our number one yo value and we always go back to it and that's it [Applause] questions I apologize if you covered this and I just didn't hear but how your feel about compensating players for user generated content how do you how do you go about it that's a fantastic question I actually didn't go directly into it um so the question just so to make sure everybody heard is how do we feel about compensating for user generated content uh we're generally in favor of it uh but the compensation tends to be an in-game currency um one of the issues with compensating people especially when they're across the world is that sending direct money doesn't necessarily work uh so we will do it in in-game currency the nice thing is that most of our players

who are generating that content are actually pretty active players who are into spending so to them it's a fair trade they're they are getting money and that they're not investing money in the game for the next little bit and do use soft currency or hard currency we have two currencies you give them the we give them the hard currency yeah absolutely cool thanks hey um so at one point you mentioned uh for example uh trying to convey to users the importance of server downtime that you had um is there a a place where you draw the line between like um revealing information that is useful to them versus saying too much is there a line there yes uh the problem with that line is that it is ever shifting um we part of it is based on what we know we can tell them and what we know we can't tell them and I know that that's a really vague answer um but

so for example server downtime where we're like the server architecture is old it needs to be upgraded because our server calls are taking 35 milliseconds and we would like them to take .2 milliseconds players don't necessarily understand when you speak technically but then you're just like that's a thousand times faster they're like okay everything's faster that's the thing we can communicate effectively um but when it comes to um and I have to tiptoe around this a little bit uh that you may have noticed it during the talk I was tiptoeing around a little bit when it comes to certain things that you have projects on the go that have to deal with a title that you can't necessarily talk about uh that's where it does get more difficult um as an example right now we have a number of our developers working on sort of a secret project for yo world that players can't know about um just because if we told them about it they may react in a way that we didn't want uh and part of it is knowing how the players are going to react as well right than yeah uh do you have any tips

on how to send the surveys to the right people cuz we had uh there was a time we sent surveys to thousand people and only three people responded so how would you uh gauge like who how do you filter who to send and to get the valuable information sure uh so the question was how do you filter uh the surveys that you're sending out to people uh to make sure that you're getting meaningful information and sending stuff to the right people uh that in and of itself is a bit of an iterative process um and we we've come at this over time right uh so step one for us uh was getting a server or survey infrastructure in place that we could actually make use of uh so there's a number of tools that we had to build along the way uh but we've measured uh like for example sales data tends to be really good for basic demographic data right you're going to have basic sales data on all of your players uh so one of the things that we'll do is we have our players broken down into I believe it's eight tiers uh

eight different spend tiers uh so we will send out surveys to the eight different spend tiers and just ask them questions uh based on their tier of spend um and what you can do is and you can measure your response rate within tiers right one of the things that we know is that our highest tier spender actually tends to be highly responsive so if we have something that we absolutely need information on then we'll actually go to our high tier Spenders um and just ask for feedback that way way um as I said you know if your if your response rate is about 3% um rewarding is going to help you a lot with that um depending on the style of game uh not all games allow for certain rewards um but I mean we've done rewards even where we've done hard and soft currency as the reward um to get response rates up uh and part of that is the behavior modeling that I talked about of teaching them that you appreciate them taking the time that you value it as well yeah you're welcome okay looks like that's it thanks guys