Player insights help businesses figure out how to constantly improve their games, and such data helps them maintain such leads.
Marketers employ market research to always figure out player sentiment on brands and trends.
Research may include a variety of methods but it always comes back to figuring out player insights and using the data for creating marketing efforts such as a marketing campaign or a public relations initiative.
Brand reputation is built upon how players perceive a game or its features. And market share represents the size of a company’s business within a specific market. Both rely on player satisfaction from game studios and can be figured out also from an analysis of user insights.
The final important factor to companies is that by analyzing insights from players, they are able to target audiences better.
The more they carry out player research and the more they analyze the user sentiment, the higher their chances of truly figuring out what their players need and want.
Research can take place in a variety of ways, such as conducting focus groups, carrying out surveys, tracking online reactions from social media platforms and review boards as well as doing market research.
Once data is collected and analyzed, profiling your target audience can become more accurate and efficient. The research done in order to use player insights then enables companies to turn more directly to a specific audience, with better marketing offers and greater game solutions.
Where to collect player feedback from?
There are numerous places where player feedback can be found in.
Many of them include open web platforms, meaning digital online places where players give their opinions and comments openly. This excludes closed platforms such as specific forums and communities, which are not open of course to the overall public.
In addition, there are direct communications between players and companies, from which valuable data insights can be drawn too.
Here is the lowdown on the variety of platforms from which user insights can be tracked, and then serve to combine the player’s true voice.
Players keep sending their opinions, be it praises or complaints, directly to companies via emails to the website or through chatting with the website bot.
This way they can communicate their experience and game insights. It is usually about complaints or about suggestions on how to improve various features.
Such intel includes player support issues but could be also related to the product, in-app purchases, or marketing. Whatever players comment about, businesses can consider and evaluate.
Game studios can treat such communications by first answering them, but also by collecting and analyzing all of them periodically (daily/monthly/quarterly) to figure out if there are wider pressing issues that they need to attend to.
Such email analysis also contributes to assessing player sentiment, looking for ways to improve game reputation, and maybe even reconsidering the company’s positioning in the market as well as its strategy.
In a similar fashion to the previous item, many businesses employ a “support ticket” system, in which players seek the game studio’s help regarding bugs, purchases, or feature issues, and the company deals with assisting the player via this system.
Operating a good ticketing system enables organizations to also maintain a list of common problems reported by players. That brings organizations to have a high-level view of their most urgent tasks to resolve.
Different departments can then be brought into the picture and take strategic actions to improve whatever players complain about.
There are many online review websites, either general and very popular such as Facebook (it is considered among many other functions as a review site) or specific industry-based sites such as Trustpilot.
Since reviews appear publicly on the open web, it is fairly easy to identify and collect such reviews, and then analyze them for actionable insights. These websites are, too, part of the big feedback machine that helps you understand player insights and behavior.
Several high-volume websites, such as Reddit, hold many genre sub-Reddits, or in other words, special forums dedicated to a specific audience. Learning about the player journey and conversations about games can be done by tracking and analyzing data from such special places.
For example, the Gaming sub-Reddit is the website’s third-largest forum, as it contains a large volume of player comments and feedback regarding various aspects of many video games.
Valuable data that can help you understand real-time player insights can come from tracking this special forum.
Social media completes the list of the platforms from which to track and analyze real-time player feedback.
User insights on a variety of games or features appear on many of these open web platforms, enabling game studios to learn more about their player pain points and how they view their user journey.
Insights and data from social media platforms are of course monitored 24/7, but there is also a way to target specific insights to improve products by using a keyword search.
Existing players many times turn to social media to voice their opinions about a brand, game, or a marketing initiative, and with the right analytics, a business can learn in an instance what consumers are thinking about with regards to its games.
7 ways of converting new players based on user insights
Every player insight counts, for a variety of purposes, but as they aggregate to form the voice of existing players, they also help draw businesses to new markets and new users.
Data-driven player insights help form new strategies, increase the growth of brands as well as create more conversions. So user insights play a key role in the future of every game studio.
With tools such as AI-powered platforms as well as machine learning, game studios are able to collect huge volumes of invaluable player data. Using such analytics tools leads to actionable insights, which sometimes result in new player conversions.
Users who just showed interest in a game are more likely to become new users if organizations employ the following ways.
Insights from players, when tracked and analyzed, contribute to improving brands and sometimes to even creating new games.
When better games are being produced, their chances of being liked by new players increase, and so do their potential sales. So insights about user pain points turn into improved brands, thus increasing possible new player conversions.
Player experience teams determine not only how the user journey continues after downloading or purchasing the game, but they also shape how the game is perceived by players afterward.
When players converse about the games or their features, they many times discuss how they were served by the business. Their real-time comments and mentions enable game studios to learn what they do right and what needs to be improved in their player experience.
After reviewing the aggregate voice and opinions of players, and discussing the entire player insight data, businesses can begin to take actions to improve and even optimize the features given to players.
Since the player insights include not only ratings of game studio’s player experience team but also written specific comments, once such data is tracked and analyzed, the type of criticism is very clear and actionable.
When managers collect such data and identify the player pain points, fixing those issues is both relying on solid data and not guesswork as well as actions taken to respond more accurately to the issues raised by users.
Marketing teams are always on the lookout to see how their efforts have resulted.
While several actions are quantifiable, such as marketing leads resulting in sales or when issuing social media posts and seeing how many likes and shares they have received, items such as brand sentiment and reputation need a broader evaluation and consideration.
Qualitative insights and data are extremely important when it comes to marketing-related items. Looking for new markets constantly, or for personalized marketing, means taking many different actions to reach and convert new prospects.
At the center of such efforts are marketing campaigns. They can be about brand awareness or simply hard-selling a game.
Once the strategy and targeted audience for a campaign is determined and the online and offline ads appear, marketing managers are able to collect valuable numbers but also qualitative intel from customers.
The process of tracking and analyzing both numbers as well as written insights enables marketers to identify whether their efforts have paid off. And through the player insights analysis data and process, managers can improve their future campaigns for further success.
As can often be seen, organizations sometimes pick specific player insights to be presented to the overall public.
Many managers consider testimonials to be a strong sales factor. A player insight about his journey, as told by him in front of a camera, is one of the sales tools intended to convert many new users into downloading or purchasing a game.
Believing that there’s no one better to describe the player experience than the user itself, managers choose such a tactic as one of their many solutions to increase conversions.
“Word of mouth” reality is the hope of many businesses, as a recommendation from one player to another may be the best publicity there is.
Marketers do not wish to take their chances in seeing whether their games create a natural “word of mouth”, and work their ways to help the process. An example may be carrying out a buzzworthy influencer effort or a feature giveaway program.
Analyzing every player insight via an AI-driven player feedback analytics platform is one of the main tools organizations nowadays use. But analysis of what user insights come out of what players say about competing products can be important as well in converting new users.
Trying to differentiate your game from those of your rivals, or taking a similar direction as your competitors, is a choice faced by many game studios.
Learning and evaluating what the player’s voice says about competing games can give businesses the necessary intel to decide which way they choose to go about their own market products.
Tracking player insights constantly from all over the open web enables game studios to always know where they stand.
Following the sentiment graph is a fascinating thing, allowing managers to see the ups and downs of their efforts as viewed by the eyes of their players.
It is like seeing the journey as voiced by many people who participate in it. So it is a sort of a collective diary where the aggregate opinion of many players is reported while their journey takes place.
A key factor is to track those ups and downs, or “mention peaks”, as they are professional terms.
A feature change may result in a positive peak, meaning many players view it in a good light. The opposite happens for a move that gains lots of criticism, leading to a negative mentions peak.
Since along the user journey there are many “ups and downs” peaks, strategies may be tested or replaced when game studios analyze each and every peak.
It enables them to continuously research and witness the direct relationship between their actions and player reactions, leading businesses to learn if their strategy works.
Feedback analysis from Affogata’s AI-driven player feedback analytics platform can help convert new players
The user experience is described on many different digital platforms by many players. As one insight adds to another insight, the aggregate player’s voice is formed.
Imagine the collective, real-time player insights pool or the collective say of endless focus groups and surveys, as tracked and analyzed by an AI-powered platform.
Such a platform does the tracking, and monitoring but also the real-time analysis of those digital surveys, which are what players mention and converse about games.
Affogata’s AI-powered platform does the research as well as the analysis of all those player experience conversations. As the AI works to collect the data, doing its automatic feedback analysis, managers can enjoy the evaluation of their user insights in real-time.
Fast-tracking of player insights helps businesses check their strategies, sales, games’ performance, reputation, and much more.
Coverage of the player experience, as appears in many digital places all the time, serves as the ultimate market research as it expresses lots of user insights game studios can work with and learn from.
Some of the tools and benefits of this platform include the following:
Tracking player insights, as they appear on many different digital platforms, and then analyzing them, forms the collective player opinion and voice. It is a collection of their unfiltered, unbiased sentiment.
Once bots and spam are excluded, as is the ability of the AI platform, an accurate sentiment score and insights analysis are established.
That enables game studios to immediately learn where they stand in the market, not only in terms of sales but also with regards to their strategy, market share and position, and more.
Players react all the time to actions and changes from studios, be it new features, new launches, sales efforts, personalized marketing initiatives, or brand campaigns.
When positive or negative moves take place, they are expressed in the player insights, and that results in seeing up or down mention peaks.
Getting those mention peak alerts, as provided by the platform, enables businesses to know how their players react as well as take action, when necessary. Reacting, or deciding not to, is the privilege of businesses, and the AI data enables them to make up their minds quickly.
Strategies are formed and examined not only by the wishes of game studios but also by the moves of their competitors.
It is now fairly easy to track and analyze such moves as also seen by the eyes of competing studios’ players.
Comparing sales and downloads figures is not enough anymore.
It is understanding the business’ story against its rival businesses’ stories. Player insights regarding the competition, as if conducted with many surveys about their brands, tell an organization where it stands in the market and may lead to future decisions and moves.
The data tracked and analyzed can serve multiple teams within every organization.
So the product department, for example, is not the only one to use the player insights analysis. Other teams, such as marketing, player-facing teams, and even sales and human resources, can receive their own data for analysis and decision-making.
The executive branch can also use the data, for strategic, high-level market views. They can use the analysis to, for example, among many other things, discuss how they go about converting many more new players.
Pain points from players, as mentioned in their millions of conversations all over the open web, turn into the collective player insight voice. By tracking how users view their experience and journey, businesses can analyze how their actions resonate with consumers.
Then game studios can take actions resulting from such insights data and trust that such moves are built upon what their players want.
