What gamers are thinking, sharing and saying online
My last few blogs have explored how games companies can take advantage of social media to improve the products they offer and the service customers receive. I mentioned that one of the key areas of advantage is the ability to create new insights, to conduct analysis into customer behaviour that was previously impossible.
People love to express themselves when playing games.This is even easier with the close interaction between games consoles and social networks today – many gamers love to record and share segments of games or even just screen shots. And many just comment, sharing their opinion on a new game or their expectations for a forthcoming release.
A great example of this is the newly released cinematic for Blizzard’s upcoming expansion to World of Warcraft – Warlords of Draenor. My colleague Rory and I were lucky enough to be in the crowd at gamescom – about 120 rows of people back from the main stage, surrounded by avid fans and an atmosphere that can only be compared to that of a football match, when this cinematic was shown to the world.
Within the first nine days, over 8.5 million people have viewed the new cinematic on the official World of Warcraft YouTube channel with nearly over 11,000 comments, with over 51,000 likes and over 1,100 dislikes. The figures on unofficial channels and games forums is also exponential.
However, a lot of the of this type of communication is not under the direct control of the games company. The players can say what they like and when they like, but the games company can monitor this online discussion, analyse it and gain insights into player preferences and behaviour based on what they say. And don’t forget that these discussions are informal and not part of any structured feedback – this is what the players really think rather than what they think a games company might want to hear on a branded forum.
In addition to the advantages of getting honest and ongoing feedback about games, there is also the ability to conduct quite detailed competitor analysis using this public data. The same games players will be talking about the games your competitors are offering allowing comparison and competitor analysis to be undertaken and all without ever asking the players for their own subjective view on which game is better.
Our e-Performance team conduct sophisticated big data analysis combining social media data with customer experience data from all channels, delivering insights and recommending action plans focused on player experience enhancement. By crunching and finding patterns in the numbers, we investigate potential hypothesis for the main drivers of player sat and de-sat, for product adoption, for the success rate of player engagement, for variance in the advocacy score of the brand on social media – essentially mapping out the big picture of what players are really thinking and doing.
Do you agree that it can offer insights into what gamers are thinking, sharing and saying? Leave a comment here or get in touch via my LinkedIn and feel free to reach out if your brand would like to learn more about how our e-Performance team could help you with analysis of your players.
Photo by Stefan Schubert licensed under Creative Commons