Your Players Are Talking…Are You Listening?
Harnessing Facebook Group Insights for Game Development
Most modern tech companies are steadfast believers in the use of Agile methods in the development process, which should result in the integration of feedback into every iteration of a product. The big question is, whose feedback? Well I can tell you right now that it’s often NOT that of the intended end user. Before moving in the mobile game industry, my focus was on understanding Biotech entrepreneurship, including the development of medical devices. That industry is rife with very expensive examples of failures resulting from the fact that the product doesn’t actually solve the needs of the user. In the mobile game industry, it’s come to be painfully obvious that many of the development problems are exactly the same.
Despite the use of agile methodology, it’s quite common that feedback from the actual players (this term in itself is a point of contention, as dev teams often don’t know who these players are on a qualitative level) of a game aren’t included in the development process, and many times this oversight results in expensive and avoidable mistakes. This issue isn’t just found before a game is launched, but can plague the continued development of live-games as well. It really doesn’t have to be this way.
There is a wealth of qualitative feedback being generated everyday on social media for free, you just need to create the right environment to systematically listen.
In this article I’ll show you a quick way to start doing just that, right now…but first let’s cover some background on the platform we’ll be using.
Communicating with Facebook
Social media giant Facebook (FB) has long been established as one of the primary platforms for companies to communicate directly with their users for both customer service and information management. Similar to other B2C industries, the mobile games industry also uses the FB Ad network as the primary pathway for paid user acquisition (UA) due to its incredibly targeted algorithms.
In recent years, FB has continued to develop and improve their paid pathway (ad network & boosted posts) while at the same time prioritizing community posts (friends & family) over business pages, thus making it harder for companies to organically communicate with current and potential customers. As of 2018 the organic reach of a brand page was as low as 2% in European markets , making the reach essentially non-existent.
This change in the fabled FB algorithm can raise a few questions for anyone working with social media management in the mobile games industry. For example, if UA is an integral part of growth, does a lack of organic reach on a FB page even matter? Or, is a FB page at all valuable for player engagement? In 2017, one year before the announcement of changes in FB’s algorithm, I had begun to ask myself these questions. I was spending 40 hours a week creating and curating content for this outlet, but was there any actual return on that investment?
Owing to the fact that mobile apps produce an incredible amount of detailed user data, we were able to answer these questions in a systematic way. Without going into too much detail regarding methodology, I was able to see exactly what happened in the game at the exact time points where I had the highest engagement on our FB pages with the help of our business intelligence analysts.
Unsurprisingly, it turned out that whatever I did on our FB pages, extremely good or bad, there was no statistically significant effect in the game.
This realization combined with the impending doom that was the FB newsfeed algorithm change, led me to determine that we needed to pivot, and pivot fast…and so begins the dawn of the FB group.
Facebook Groups
If you know nothing about facebook groups, please stop now and refer to this facebook help page for more info.
While groups have been a part of FB for a long while, they have risen in prominence as an important way to create small, closed communities within the ever expanding faceless millions that use the platform. Due to the fact that members have to “opt-in” to the groups, and commit to discussions surrounding the subject the group focuses on, they tend to attract the most engaged type of people.
This is important, because in addition to its private uses, companies have come to understand that the new FB algorithm organically promotes group content to group members through notifications & pride of place in their newsfeed. This is an important way to circumvent that 2% organic reach problem while connecting with those most likely to engage in a meaningful way with your brand.
Increased visibility, combined with the feeling of safety and community found in these groups, allows for the types of spontaneous user generated discussions that you will not often find in the comment section of a page post. This unique ability to be in dialogue with a group of highly engaged users will allow you to better understand the wants, needs, and motivations of who is actually engaging with your brand or more specifically playing your game.
Funnel The Right Players
To get the most important players to join your group, you will have to use a funnel somewhat the reverse of what you’d use for your UA strategy. In essence you will be moving players out of the game and onto your social media. When migrating players in this way a natural filter occurs, assembling only the most valuable engaged players.
Upon reviewing the types of players that were present in our first group, we found that unlike the players who followed our business page, they were all everyday players (30 days per month) or paying players. For free-to-play games, these types of players are the créme de la créme. After starting our subsequent two groups, I repeated the same process and found the same results, thus validating that the funnel was indeed working.
To create the funnel:
- Create an in-game pop-up informing players of the existence of your facebook page. There should be some sort of reward or engaging content that you mention, to motivate the players to follow the link.
- Once players are on the facebook page, there should be some sort of regularly recurring game or contest that keeps players coming back often.
- Start your players group, connected to the business page.
- Encourage players to join by moving the aforementioned special event to the group only.
Player Feedback
The information derived from your player group can either be qualitative or quantitative. The qualitative feedback you gain will help you identify the problems and opportunities relating to your game within the player population, while the quantitative data will give you the measurements to confirm the actions you should be making based on the qualitative feedback. Very often we are quick to solely use the wealth of quantitative data available to us as game developers, without regularly balancing it with its qualitative counterpart, losing the human element. The player group can balance this tendency by providing easily and regularly available qualitative feedback.
In the player group, quantitative information can be derived from the FB insights package, which is more informative in the group than what you will find on the business page. You can learn more about using these types of insights here. You can also find ways to connect your player population in the group with their in-game user behavior by asking for their user identification information. This type of data, while interesting, isn’t much better than what you’d collect anyway from in-app player metrics. The most important data you will glean from this outlet is of the qualitative variety.
Qualitative data allows you to better understand who your players are and what motivates them. By focusing on the qualitative you’ll be better able to identify blind spots and predict how the players may react towards future changes because you will understand them on a deeper, human level. This type of information can come from a few places in the group: observing player-to-player conversations about likes and dislikes, observing how players discuss using the game, asking for direct feedback about current builds via polls, or even giving access to prototype builds and collecting feedback on those.
Of the various ways you can gain qualitative feedback, feedback from careful observation is often the most powerful.
This is due to the fact that it isn’t affected or defined by your natural biases, and because it is undirected, the directions players go will often really surprise you. This identifies opportunities in blind spots. The feedback that comes from asking questions to the group is also important, but will of course be affected by what you choose to focus on and how you choose to ask it. The feature prototype tests are valuable because you can get that quick feedback you need from highly engaged existing users. You’ll have an idea of what the response might be before you ship a build to the entire player population (believe me it will save you some heartache).
In addition to collecting feedback about existing games, you can also utilize the player group to get feedback on possible look alike games that you are developing. If the defined persona of the existing game is the same as a new game in development, who better to get feedback from than the dedicated players and payers from your existing game.
No matter which type of qualitative feedback you decide to collect, do it in a regular and systematic way so that you can present it to other stakeholders in your company in a form that they can utilize. Weekly or monthly summaries can be helpful, combined with feedback spot checks as needed by the team. Being in constant communication with the development and live-ops teams is the best way to make sure that useful feedback doesn’t get lost. In the fall we will release a companion piece to this article from the developer perspective. This will focus on best practices for incorporating this type of feedback into the development cycle once you’ve collected it.
Conclusion
With a wealth of data constantly streaming around us, it can be easy to lose the sound of the human voice. Identifying better ways to listen for that voice will only enhance the effectiveness of the powerful analytical tools we use to crunch data, creating new opportunities and reducing blind spots. It is up to us to make sure to integrate the voice of player feedback earlier, instead of reacting after the fact. Using a player group is a cheap and powerful way to achieve this, providing value to us as mobile game makers and value for our players, who at the end of the day are ultimately who we do this for.
