Vickie Chen is an 18-year gaming industry veteran and serves as the founder and CEO at AviaGames, Inc.
The looming threat of a global economic crisis has brought about a range of market changes, from decreased revenues to a slowdown in development and creation as companies announced layoffs in gaming media during the first part of this year. However, despite the economic outlook, the gaming sector is projected to be worth $321 billion in 2026, per a new report from PwC. They note that one of the main segments fueling this growth in the gaming industry is social and casual gaming.
So what does this mean for gaming startups in today’s competitive market for the short term? As the market continues to shake out, I suggest focusing on nurturing the player community and retaining users. When it comes to cultivating a gaming platform that users value and prefer over others now and in the future, pay attention to three areas of focus: listening, learning and leveling up.
Listening To Players
Given the conditions of the market, instead of putting heavy resources into new offerings, put an emphasis on player needs and create a foundation primed for future growth. You can have an unparalleled game idea; however, at the end of the day, if you don’t cultivate a community of users, it doesn’t matter how good the idea is.
Constantly look for ways to improve, enrich and nurture your user community. It starts with listening—whether that’s through focus groups, player forums or support initiatives.
For example, at my company, we have a dedicated research team whose role is to analyze data, identify problems and design and implement user surveys to proactively collect feedback. This feedback is then shared with production, marketing and customer service teams to continuously adjust and improve based on real user insight. In addition, we make it easy and accessible for users to access 24/7 customer support if they need assistance.
It’s critical for companies to know what is working and what needs to be adjusted in order to better meet gameplay needs.
Learning From Players
An in-game or in-app interface, design and degree of usability will determine if a user continues to engage. The app developers and publishers that are better poised for success when it comes to customer satisfaction are those that have a research team that works closely and cross-collaborates with production, marketing and customer service teams to learn and adapt from players.
Make sure you have a team dedicated to analyzing data, identifying problems, designing and implementing user surveys and coordinating interviews and focus group studies, ensuring your company’s best ability to be proactive when it comes to collecting and acting upon user feedback.
It’s also important to have the right infrastructure in place to support listening and learning capabilities for a user base with very high daily engagement. There is no doubt that data is king, but having the right tools for analyzing data is just as important, if not more important when it comes to learning user preferences and behaviors. Analytics can provide an in-depth understanding of who users are, how they interact and more, giving businesses valuable insight to learn from and ultimately be able to deliver better user experiences.
In addition to learning from data, it’s equally important to make sure you are aware of what users are proactively saying about your offerings or business in general. Monitoring player reviews, along with following conversations on related forums and social media groups or pages, is a supplemental avenue for learning about user demographics, preferences and more.
Leveling Up Your Company
Smart businesses will leverage the insight gained from listening, including pain points, general feedback and common topics to share and integrate with other teams for the purpose of fine-tuning the product.
It is this dynamically-extracted, direct user feedback that helps developers and publishers continuously adjust and improve their offerings to better suit users’ needs. This means focusing on feedback, building up a strong customer support arm and enhancing accessibility, including multiple avenues for users to engage with the community and support.
And listening goes beyond just reading to include acknowledging the feedback through social media channels and support channels and even showing users the ways that you’ve incorporated feedback.
Today’s game publishers must be vigilant and dedicated to consumer needs in order to earn a place at the top of the leaderboard. I believe retaining users is the key to success in such a highly-competitive industry.
In addition to listening to user insight, digesting direct feedback and using these learnings to level up offerings, it’s also important to provide users with a personalized experience with diverse and engaging content and access to customer support. Ultimately, it is all about player preferences, habits, attention, time and spending—and the insights coming from this data are critical to guiding product, technology and company decisions.
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