We Help Game Publishers & Developers Increase Their Revenue and Retention up to 30% in 6 Months or Less
Client Highlights
Case Study: The Seven Deadly Sins: Grand Cross – 225 Pages of Strategy Guides in 45 days
Since the game had already launched, GamerSpeak had to quickly publish content as fast as possible. Netmarble F&C was incredibly responsive, providing us with assets and game stats that we needed in a timely manner. Within 45 days we had 225 unique pages of strategy guide content published on the wiki!
Impressed with the quality and speed, Netmarble F&C requested all the content to be localized into German, French, Spanish, and Portuguese. They used their localization partner, and GamerSpeak created the interlanguage language wikis and published the localized guides.
The Wiki launched on May 26th, 2020 to very positive feedback from the community.
Two months later on July 31st, 2020 Netmarble F&C was ready to share the Fandom directly to their Forum with 220,000 global users. At this point, we published 75 localized guides (~20 in each language) that allowed the content to be available to a large portion of the user base.
The post was very well received by 3,400 viewers in the first 5 days, with 33 positive reactions and only 2 negative reactions.
Challenge
- Rapid adoption of the game, but no strategy guides created by players even three months after launch.
- A huge number of requests by players globally for in-depth strategy guides.
Result
- 225 unique pages of strategy guide content published in 45 days.
- Strategy guide content localized into five different languages.
- Over 1M Page Views in the first 9 months.
Time Frame
45 Days
Game:
The Seven Deadly Sins: Grand Cross
Client:
Netmarble F&C
Featured
Increased Monthly Revenue +30% ($300k/mo) & Retention +30% for Iron Throne: The Firstborn in 6 Months
“The reason we work with GamerSpeak is in its name already. Any developer, especially mobile game developers, should be interested to hear what users have to say about their game, what they feel about it, all kinds of users, all power levels, different backgrounds, spending levels. The voices of all these diverse players are important to know for any game developer.
GamerSpeak’s insights into our users contribute about 30% ($300k/mo) of our revenue and retention.”
“We attribute around 15-20% of our revenue to GamerSpeak’s customer feedback loop and community insights.
In addition to contributing to our revenue, GamerSpeak reliably delivers results, which is really important for us. Many services deliver strong performance during the first one or two months, but their quality always drops off. Games like ours are very long term with a 1-3+ year life cycle and change a lot. We need stable and high-quality results that stick because that stabilizes our revenue and ARPDAU. GamerSpeak’s insights are a significant reason we see those stable revenue and ARPDAU numbers and that is why we keep working with them.
GamerSpeak also really knows our players. We have different kinds of players – top players, middle players, and entry-level players and it’s hard to get authentic insights from all of them. The GamerSpeak reports and comments cover all of those players, especially the middle and top players. We can reliably gather information and user sentiment from GamerSpeak for our weekly, monthly, and yearly plans.”
Challenge
- Limited knowledge of what top players are interested in.
- Conflicting internal opinions from different departments.
- Unreliable quality and short-term results from third-party service providers.
- No existing strategy guides. Players are unsure how some parts of the game work, and are not confident with their purchases. No existing strategy guides.
Result
- Players insights that led to better game design and accounts for 15-30% ($150k-300k+/mo) of Revenue and 30% of Retention.
- The game has been live and profitable for 2.5+ years and has no plans to shut down anytime soon.
- An incredible community hub with 50+ strategy guides that cover all verticals of the game and are updated monthly.
Time Frame
"The GamerSpeak team understands MZ’s products and works well with its game communities. Throughout our time working together, they have provided great feedback for our MZ titles."
Partnered Games That Have Reached Over $1 Billion in Revenue
Monthly Players
Monthly Pageviews
GamerSpeak Recommendations Implemented
Who This Is For
This method is for game developers who want to create a game that makes millions a day but are scared that the game will die at launch or never become profitable. You don’t want to see your game flop or never be able to compete with rival games in the market. You want your game to be able to stand out from your competition in a big way so that it becomes the top game in the genre.
The truth is that even though gaming is a huge market, it’s also extremely saturated. It’s overwhelming to look at Game Refinery’s Market Explorer and see so little opportunity everywhere you look.
Maybe you want to make a chart topping game, but are worried about yours fizzling out within a few years. The initial KPIs of your game are OK or even pretty good, but you are worried they could deteriorate quickly if you aren’t able to continually keep your players engaged with compelling new content.
Our method is for anyone who wants to be ahead of the curve of what their players want, but is bogged down and frustrated with other projects. You just don’t have the resources to build feedback systems to understand all your various player profiles. Plus, it’s really hard to come up with new features and a meta that players want. They’ll only complain about new content being too expensive anyway, right? All you hear from the community are game performance complaints and annoying requests for “free stuff”. Maybe you don’t have a community manager or for whatever reason they are unable to get actionable feedback that is actually useful for your design team.
You might feel a barrier between you and your players that feels like they don’t trust your intentions and think you only care about “taking their money.”
Perhaps you want to implement changes to the game that increase revenue and improve retention, but you’re facing consistent PR nightmares because you’re releasing new content that players don’t want to buy or the new content isn’t what players expected. It’s a hassle to constantly ban players, enforce rules, and manage pissed off VIPs. You’re losing valuable development time managing these problems and it’s becoming a harmful cycle that’s holding you back from making the game extremely profitable.
You want to delight your players and make them feel listened to and supported, but you don’t have time to answer all their questions and complaints. Popular new games are coming out every week that players in your communities say they are leaving your game to go play.
Maybe you want to bring ideas to your team that will help improve the metrics you are responsible for, but you aren’t sure if a new SaaS platform or technology is where you will find answers. Meanwhile, your player base is exploiting your game’s bugs and complaining about everything you release, and you don’t think software will reverse the negative cycle.
You’re the person responsible for bringing new strategies to your team that will be successful and increase your game’s retention and revenue, but you haven’t found a compelling new strategy in a long time. The ideas you currently have are too expensive and time-consuming to integrate with your game.
How do I know if this method isn’t right for us?
Typically, if you relate to one of the following, the GamerSpeak Sentiment method will not be the right fit for you:
- You are satisfied with your internal community management, player feedback, and game KPIs.
- You don’t want to work with a third party for actionable player feedback and recommendations.
- Your MRR is less than $50k/mo or you have less than $2M in funding.
Chad Kihm’s Story
Chad and friends showcasing Apoc Apparel
In 2010, I accepted my admission to Cal Poly San Luis Obispo for Industrial Engineering. Deep down I knew I was more interested in business than in engineering, but my dad was very successful in his career because he knew how to speak to engineers as a VP of Marketing. I figured it would be easier to learn engineering in school and business skills afterwards or on the side.
In the first quarter of Freshman Year, I started a clothing business called Apoc Apparel with a few other friends who also wanted to gain business experience while majoring in other subjects. By Junior year we had sold about 1,000 items and every day I saw someone I didn’t know wearing our clothing around campus.
In 2015, six months before graduation, I was studying abroad in Germany and knew I needed to choose a career path. So I decided to take a five day trip to Dubrovnik, Croatia to meditate and make that decision. I thought back to what I knew I enjoyed doing every day and what came to mind was Apoc Apparel and a strategy guide website I had recently started for the most popular mobile game in the world at the time.
Just a few months earlier, I had started the website for the #1 Top Grossing Strategy Game, which had millions of daily active users and was earning over $5M a DAY in revenue.
I had been playing for about three months and had spent hundreds of hours studying how to “burn” other players. In this game, when you burn someone, you’re often costing them hundreds or thousands of dollars worth of in-game currency. There was no other game like this in the world at the time.
Half the players in my alliance tried to solve their lack of knowledge in the game by heedlessly pouring more money into it. The players who did that quit in a matter of weeks because they never learned how to actually win. This was costing the developers an incomprehensible amount of revenue.
I actually got fed up with my teammates quitting because it made it harder to win competitive events in the game. I tried searching for any educational resources on the game that I could share with my team. Even though there were millions of daily active users for this game, it only had a few small Youtubers, no websites, and no Twitch streamers.
Six months after launching the website and working with many of the top players in the game to generate accurate strategic content, the site had a combined 800,000 sessions and 2,800,000 page views.
Google Analytics from Jun 2014 - Jan 2015
The player base was eating it up and I got to know many of the whales/VIPs in the game personally. These guys were spending $100K a week like it was nothing. In fact, the #1 most dominant player, “Stayalive77”, loved what I was doing for the game so much, he invited myself and three other of his closest friends on an all-expenses paid trip to Dubai for three days.
I sent these pictures to various game developers and explained how I was able to get in the inner circle with VIP players. I knew exactly how to discover what they wanted to pay for and what they didn't. A few big time developers were immediately interested.
Navi on the left with Stayalive77 on the right
Chad in front of the Burj Khalifa
The initial partnerships were a huge success, so I officially formed “GamerSpeak” and went on to build more Superuser-led communities that generated authentic, actionable feedback for many other gaming titles, seven of which have earned over $1B in revenue.
Case Studies
Featured
Increased Monthly Revenue +30% ($300k) & Retention +30% for Iron Throne: The Firstborn in 6 Months
The reason we work with GamerSpeak is in its name already. Any developer, especially mobile game developers, should be interested to hear what users have to say about their game, what they feel about it, all kinds of users, all power levels, different backgrounds, spending levels. The voices of all these diverse players is important to know for any game developer.
GamerSpeak’s insights into our users contributes about 30% ($300k/mo) of our revenue and retention.
We are a Korean company, and we can guess what our North American users feel, but it’s better to hear it first hand. GamerSpeak’s community insights are very different from the insights we gather. The perspective they deliver with their sentiment reporting allows us to know what our players are really thinking and that is very important to us.
There is a huge difference between internal and external sentiment reports. When we look at sentiment we look at it through the eyes of users and developers and it’s always different in some way from the POV of a developer and user. It is important for us as developers to look at the game through the eyes of users - someone else who is not us. GamerSpeak’s reporting gives us that authentic user perspective, so we have a complete picture.
One of the biggest benefits of working with GamerSpeak is the community hub website and chat room they create and maintain for our game. The guides on the website help the players a lot and the sentiment reports GamerSpeak sends us from the chat room improve our game.
Our game design team uses GamerSpeak’s sentiment reports for certain events, game mechanics, and the interface. It saves us a lot of time on testing. For example, if we are considering some change, GamerSpeak will tell us how the community will react to that - and we might end up saying “Oh, well then we probably won’t do that” and we will save a lot of time that could have been spent on an idea. GamerSpeak bug reports also save us time because they send them very quickly and have the exact information we need, including screenshots a lot of times, that make it so we don’t have to do all the testing and searching ourselves to fix the bug.
Finally, because GamerSpeak’s work helps meet our business goals, it directly affects my personal job satisfaction and personal happiness.
Challenge
- Limited knowledge of what top players are interested in.
- Conflicting internal opinions from different departments.
- Unreliable quality and short-term results from third-party service providers
- Players are unsure how much of the game works, and are not confident with their purchases. No existing strategy guides.
Result
- Players insights that led to better game design and accounts for 15-30% ($150k-$300k+/mo) of Revenue and 30% Retention
- 2.5+ year life-cycle support with consistently high-quality results
- 50+ strategy guides that cover all verticals of the game and are updated monthly
- An average of 8 GamerSpeak actionable recommendations are implemented each month for an estimated savings of $12,920/month, $155,050/year in engineering and developer costs.
Time Frame
We attribute around 15-20% ($150k-$200k/mo) of our revenue to GamerSpeak’s customer feedback loop and community insights.
In addition to contributing to our revenue, GamerSpeak reliably delivers results, which is really important for us. Many services deliver strong performance during the first one or two months, but their quality always drops off. Games like ours are very long term with a 1-3+ year life cycle and change a lot. We need stable and high-quality results that stick because that stabilizes our revenue and ARPDAU. GamerSpeak’s insights are a significant reason we see those stable revenue and ARPDAU numbers and that is why we keep working with them.
GamerSpeak also really knows our players. We have different kinds of players - top players, middle players, and entry-level players and it’s hard to get authentic insights from all of them. The GamerSpeak reports and comments cover all of those players, especially the middle and top players. We can reliably gather information and user sentiment from GamerSpeak for our weekly, monthly, and yearly plans.
Iron Throne: The Firstborn is a 4x mobile game that has maintained steady retention and revenue in a very competitive hardcore genre. The game launched globally on June 7th, 2018.
As of August 2020, the game maintains 60,000 DAU and daily revenue of $33,000, with 15-30% of that revenue and ARPDAU attributed to GamerSpeak’s services.
Netmarble F&C (formerly “4PLAT Inc.”) came to GamerSpeak two months before they were going to launch their first 4x title, Iron Throne: The Firstborn. They were coming in late to an extremely competitive market of 4x games from the likes of MZ, Funplus, Tap4Fun, and Elex.
To make sure they could get an edge on all those other games, they hired GamerSpeak one and half years before global launch to write up extensive breakdowns for all other top 4x games in the market. We highlighted the latest and greatest features from each game that monetized successfully, as well as the core elements that made the most successful 4x games fun.
Then, when the game was in soft launch, GamerSpeak recruited 15 influential VIP players from various 4x games who were interested in playing the first 3-dimensional 4x game to come on the market. The playtest lasted two weeks, with an average playtime of 40 hours per player, and included an extensive survey that covered every vertical and monetization feature in the game. Based on the recommendations of those VIPs, NM F&C implemented over 15 major changes into Iron Throne. One of the most successful implementations was the recommendation to incorporate layers of VIP customer support that were very clear to the player how they could earn it. This differentiation retained many VIP players who came from other games that were unclear about how to get high-quality customer support or didn’t offer it altogether.
Finally, as a late entrant into the genre, Netmarble F&C knew they needed a solid community to stand out amongst their peers. Their only competition that had up-to-date strategy guides and a very active third-party community was MZ. As such, they partnered with GamerSpeak to provide all of the same services.
Iron Throne developers were able to carve out a strong niche within the genre by being incredibly talented, creative, and fearless with their game design.
Services Requested
- A GamerSpeak community hub website
- Engaging strategy guides
- Line App superuser community
- Detailed authentic sentiment reports
- Urgent bug and urgent sentiment reporting
Solution
- Deliver accurate and filtered general sentiment from the community to all departments at Netmarble F&C
- Deliver actionable recommendations and specific improvements to existing gameplay
- Assist the Netmarble F&C team to proactively avoid negative sentiment by vetting new features before launch
- Strategy guides covering general info on ALL the components of the game: all heroes, troops, gameplay styles, buildings, PVP, PvE, equipment, etc
- Teach players the value and effect of new content, to increase the pace of adoption and thus monetization
Results
Currently, the Iron Throne Producer attributes 15- 30% of their revenue and 30% of their retention to GamerSpeak services.
At the beginning of the project, GamerSpeak GamerSpeak launched a custom community website with 16 beginner to intermediate level strategy guides for Iron Throne: The Firstborn in four weeks. Within one month, the website was generating 500 page views/day, and after 2 years the site has had over 150,000 page views.
Additionally, GamerSpeak built up a massive Line room with 500 Superuser players looking to improve their game by using the latest strategies and new features. Many of those 500 are VIP players spending over $1,000/mo. At the time of this case study, GamerSpeak manages two Line rooms with 750 daily active users.
From the authentic conversation in those rooms, GamerSpeak’s team of Gamefluencers (top players in the game who help us run the community) take detailed notes of player sentiment. They often promote deep conversations on certain topics to provide maximum fidelity to the developer and to uncover actionable recommendations the developers can use to make future improvements.
At the time of this case study (April 2021), an average of 8 GamerSpeak actionable recommendations are implemented each month for an estimated savings of $12,920/month, $155,050/year in engineering and developer costs.
Conclusion
Detailed authentic sentiment reporting and high-quality recommendations from GamerSpeak meaningfully increased revenue and retention by 30%, and stabilized LTV and engagement for “Iron Throne: The Firstborn”. This was possible because of the insights from our deep understanding of Iron Throne’s player’s at all levels, and our services to create strategy guides, a community hub, and a feedback loop.
GamerSpeak can increase revenue and retention up to 30% in 6 months or less for your game. Book a consultation to get started.
The Seven Deadly Sins: Grand Cross - 225 Pages of Strategy Guides in 45 Days
The Seven Deadly Sins: Grand Cross is a mobile game based on the hugely successful anime series. The game launched on February 27th, 2020 globally after having hit #1 in Japan and Korea in 2019.
The global launch was also tremendously successful, reaching a peak of 3.5MM DAU and daily revenue of ~$750k.
Challenge
Even with what most companies would consider a vibrant community, Netmarble F&C had thousands of players asking for high-quality strategy guides for the “The Seven Deadly Sins: Grand Cross” (7DSGC). It was hard for players to find the exact information they were looking for by watching YouTube videos from influencers. In addition, the database websites only provided stats and not strategies.
GamerSpeak had been in talks with Netmarble F&C about building a community for their game before the English version had launched , but with such a strong title, Netmarble F&C wanted to wait and see what sort of community would arise naturally from the player base. In the first few months, multiple large YouTube channels (5,000+ subs) and two database sites were created for the game. There was also a strong presence on Reddit with over 30,000 subscribers. Yet no one in the community was writing strategy guides. It was a daunting task considering the scale of the game.
Solution
GamerSpeak created long-form, in-depth, and high-quality strategy guides for Netmarble F&C using the Fandom wiki platform.
The key objectives for the content in priority order were:
1. Content covering general info on ALL the components of the game:
a. All Heroes, Map Levels, Team Suggestions, Buildings, PVP, PVE, Equipment, Etc.
2. Content to assist the progression of their core engaged audience who had been playing for 30-60 days
3. Content to help players get the most out of new features and events launched every week
4.Content that would shed light on hard to discover portions of the game
Results
Since the game had already launched, GamerSpeak had to quickly publish content as fast as possible. Netmarble F&C was incredibly responsive, providing us with assets and game stats that we needed in a timely manner. Within 45 days we had 225 unique pages of strategy guide content published on the wiki!
Impressed with the quality and speed, Netmarble F&C requested all the content to be localized into German, French, Spanish, and Portuguese. They used their localization partner, and GamerSpeak created the interlanguage language wikis and published the localized guides.
The Wiki launched on May 26th, 2020 to very positive feedback from the community. Two months later on July 31st, 2020 Netmarble F&C was ready to share the Fandom directly to their Forum with 220,000 global users. At this point, we published 75 localized guides (~20 in each language) that allowed the content to be available to a large portion of the user base.
The post was very well received by 3,400 viewers in the first 5 days, with 33 positive reactions and only 2 negative reactions.
Lifetime Page Views
Peak Daily Pageviews
Lifetime & Daily Statistics as of March 2021
GamerSpeak's rapid development of strategy guides filled the strong demand from the community. Because GamerSpeak was able to quickly write and publish the strategy guides on the Fandom Wiki for 7DS:GC, the community had a place to go to answer crucial questions that were answered from a player-first view and continued playing the game.
GamerSpeak’s in-depth strategy guides and powerful feedback loop can increase revenue and retention up to 30% in 6 months or less for your game. Click here to book your consultation call to get started.
Challenge
- Rapid adoption of the game, but no strategy guides created by players even three months after launch
- Huge number of requests by players globally for in-depth strategy guides
Result
- 225 unique pages of content published in 45 days
- Content published in five different languages
- Over 1M Page Views in 9 months
Time Frame
45 Days
Game:
The Seven Deadly Sins: Grand Cross
Client:
Netmarble F&C
Highest Scoring Feature Releases From GamerSpeak Recommendations for Iron Throne: The Firstborn
Iron Throne: The Firstborn" shared with us that two (#1 and #4) of our recommended features were in the top 5 most positively received by players from their latest update. They emailed us saying “our highest scoring recent feature release, ‘Lvl 30 Super Pass’, was entirely based on your reports!" We love seeing the power of our Superuser-led communities generating positive sentiment and increased engagement!
Game:
Iron Throne: The Firstborn
Client:
Netmarble F&C
Elevated Official Discord Server Moderation Efforts for OverPrime, NetMarble F&C Inc.’s new Action MOBA and Grew the Server to 3,500 Users in Two Weeks
NetMarble F&C Inc. created a new, official Discord server for their new game OverPrime, which is currently in closed beta. OverPrime has a passionate, dedicated player base; however, they were having difficulty finding trusted, reliable moderators who were experienced in conflict mediation and community moderation.
NetMarble approached GamerSpeak for help with moderating the new Discord to create a healthy, welcoming environment for all players as they prepare for launch. GamerSpeak entrusted their experienced Gamefluencers to help set new expectations for server behavior and reinforce server rules. GamerSpeak also implemented a new moderation bot to assist with moderation efforts and solve the technical issues that occurred with the original bot. Currently, the official OverPrime Discord has grown to over 3,500 members in one month and has continued to actively increase membership daily.
Overprime Discord Server Stats as of April 2021:
Challenge
- Internal conflicts regarding moderation practices and banning players.
- New, official Discord server needed trusted, experienced moderators who could foster a comfortable, inclusive community.
- A few experienced, but rebellious players trolled the community, which created tension and unrest in chat.
- Increase in player frustration due to issues with custom moderation bot incorrectly moderating “bad” language which caused unwarranted banning and trolling the bot.
Result
- Immediately set a visible standard of moderation in the new Discord server and established an expectation of proper rule enforcement.
- Moderators checked in on the server regularly in shifts that covered the server 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.
- Recommended to clearly split the user moderator and content moderator roles to reduce role confusion.
- Implemented YAGPDB Moderation bot properly into the server to assist moderation efforts. This bot correctly striked banned words and managed server roles.
- Submitted bi-weekly reports about the health of the Discord server and other moderator activities.
Time Frame
Two Weeks
Site:
OverPrime
Game:
Overprime
Community:
OverPrime Discord Server
Client:
NetMarble F&C Inc.
F.A.Q
Should I hire an internal Community Manager or GamerSpeak?
This is our most commonly asked question. We recommend hiring a Community Manager for representing your official brand on social media. However, if you are looking for actionable player feedback that will improve your KPIs, it will be at least 83% less expensive to use GamerSpeak.
The old way of capturing feedback is using Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, or a Forum as a “Community” where you post game announcements and hope that players will leave comments with good feedback. This ends up being a huge waste of energy and money because your follower engagement on these platforms turn out super low, and your ROI for these activities end up extremely murky.
GamerSpeak builds a Superuser-led community ecosystem that works together to directly and clearly impact business goals. Superuser communities are proven to be more effective than official communities in all areas that impact business goals.
- Superuser strategy guides are more educational and engaging than in-game help menus or “fluff guides” published on the developer's official website.
- Superuser chat rooms are not full of biased and negative comments that plague official channels.
- Authentic sentiment can only be collected by Superusers in unofficial communities. Sentiment from official communities is just players asking for free stuff or thinking the game is broken when it isn't.
- Actionable feedback from trained Superusers includes win-win situations for the enjoyment of the players and the business goals of the developer.
What you really want is to build a community that generates actionable feedback that improves your KPIs. This is feedback that your design team doesn’t ignore but actually gets excited about and implements on a regular basis.
You need feedback from Superuser players who play your game so much, they know more about it than your designers do. Especially a year or two down the line when the game gets bloated and it's extremely difficult to keep track of all the little details that need maintenance.
How do you find Superusers?
Great question. This can be done in three ways:
- GamerSpeak recruits from existing official or Superuser communities that currently exist (easiest).
- GamerSpeak leverages some of our existing contracted Superusers who have experience in your game genre to temporarily get the community started. We recruit native players from your game within 30-60 days after the strategy guide website launches.
- You may have already identified some potential Superusers/gamefluencers we could reach out to to interview.
We recruit a variety of different player personality types:
Source: https://www.gamerspeak.io/6-lessons-from-6-years-of-player-first-community-management/
The qualities we look for in the people we recruit are:
Source: https://www.gamerspeak.io/6-lessons-from-6-years-of-player-first-community-management/
How do you train Superusers?
Thoroughly! Trust and reliability are attributes developers need in their Superusers. We train them on a wide array of topics like:
- The basics of game design
- How to give KPI-specific feedback
- How to give actionable feedback
- How to be a leader in the community
- How to handle sensitive situations in the community
- How to write in-depth content
- How to market their content in the community
- How to have authentic and targeted conversation on certain topics
- How to converse honestly, but without bias to a developer
You don’t have any case studies in my game genre. How do I know it will work?
There are differences in the amount of GamerSpeak services necessary for a given game genre, but all games need a deep understanding of their players in order to succeed in the long run. Games that fail have initial resonance with players but cannot maintain resonance month after month, so they die off quickly.
Our sentiment system is platform agnostic. The methods we use are proven to work because they are player focused, not game or platform focused, and consistently deliver results for our clients across all game genres. Waiting for a case study in your specific genre is like waiting to develop a feature only after you've seen competitors deploy it.The asymmetric returns come from being the only one in the meadow. If you are the first to use such a sentiment system, you will have a window of time to gain until your competitor catches on and imitates.
Furthermore, research shows that the information players care about the most in all genres and in all countries is: tips, tricks, and strategy.
Can we write official strategy guides?
Sort of. You can write some basic guides to explain how the game works, but we recommend Superusers write more intermediate and advanced guides that go into depth about game strategy and how they play. This is because players connect with Superuser-written guides more because they are written from a peer perspective as opposed to a developer perspective.
Think of it like trusting buying advice from a car salesman (developer) vs a friend who loves their car (Superuser). You tend to think the car salesman isn’t really looking out for your best interest, but if a friend raves about their car, you trust them because they have nothing to gain and they are your friend, after all. That’s why players have more trust in strategy guides written by Superusers (their friends).
Can we host the strategy guides on our official website?
We’ve not had any clients elect to do this. The goal is to create a fan community with as much authenticity as possible so that ultimately the feedback you get is as authentic as possible. If you start mixing the value (strategy guides) into official channels, there won’t be as much trust in what is written in them.
I do want you to know that as per FTC guidelines, we still include a phrase at the top of every guide that says “This website is sponsored by the developer for the enjoyment of the players.” So if you are wanting credibility and respect for sponsoring community content, this is where you will get that.
How many DAUs should my game have before working with GamerSpeak?
We’ve seen Superuser communities of as little as 500 players generate incredible insights. Every player that you acquire who does not get to experience the community we develop has a higher chance of churning and lower LTV. We recommend launching a GamerSpeak community as soon as your game is global launch ready. Just so you know, we need 30-45 days of lead time.
Should I work with GamerSpeak before or after launch?
At a minimum, you should start with GamerSpeak as soon as you determine that your game is ready for global launch. Although, we have had 20% of our customers start with us in soft launch and playtesting phases to make sure they have a clear path of what their target audience wants from the game.
If you don’t want your game to die in soft-launch, start with us then. Even if metrics don’t look great during soft-launch, we can give you a clear path of what your target audience wants from your game so you know exactly what to change to get awesome KPIs.
We had a client wait 3 months after launching before they could get approval to bring us in to build a community hub with in-depth strategy guides. As a result they missed out on an INSANE opportunity for higher engagement, retention and revenue for their game. One year later that community is generating 487,000 page views a month. we could have achieved that engagement 4x times faster if we launched the community hub before or at the same time as the global launch of the game.
Should I build an official community or a Superuser-led community?
Superuser communities are proven to be far more effective than official communities in all areas that impact business goals, but there is still a place for official communities.
- Superuser strategy guides are more educational and engaging than surface level official guides.
- Superuser chat rooms are often more positive and constructive than the biased and negative comments that plague official channels.
- Authentic sentiment can only be collected by Superusers in unofficial communities. Sentiment from official communities is often just players asking for free stuff or thinking the game is broken when it isn't.
- Recommendations from Superusers, who are trained to look for win-win situations for the enjoyment of the players and the business goals of the developer, are more valuable and actionable than what players suggest on social channels.
We still recommend investing in an official Discord for game announcements and creating relationships with players. Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, etc. won’t generate insights that can be measured for ROI. Nor will they achieve compelling engagement to justify the effort you put in. If you’re curious how to best use each social media platform, we wrote about that here: https://www.gamerspeak.io/whats-the-best-platform-for-game-developers-to-obtain-community-actionable-feedback/
We’ve not seen or heard of many developers claiming to increase their retention and revenue by using traditional social media to promote engagement in their game. Instead, they look at whether or not the player feedback they receive and implement is affecting their KPIs. However, the vast majority of developers do not have great channels for reliable, detailed, authentic, and actionable feedback. This is the problem GamerSpeak solves for them.
Is it still valuable to create a Facebook page for my game?
We don’t think so. Take Fortnite - the biggest game in a very long time only has 5 million Facebook page likes as of March 2021, with between 200-1,000 engagements per post. That’s appallingly low for a game with 25M DAU. Facebook doesn’t promote pages or groups like they used to.
Take this quote from David Logan, a Discord community expert, on Gamasutra: “Fifteen years ago, anyone launching an indie game would have needed to make a Facebook. Ten years ago, they’d need Twitter. Five years ago, they’d need Instagram. Today, every marketing expert in gaming is going to tell you to set up a Discord server for your upcoming indie titles.”
Will GamerSpeak manage my official social channels?
We won’t manage any “social media” channels, except Discord. With Discord, we’ll walk you through our standard operating procedures for exactly how we recommend your team engage with players while we manage it.
Does GamerSpeak work with premium games as well as F2P?
Yes. There are differences in the amount of services necessary for games with different revenue models (cosmetic vs. premium vs. free to play), but every model needs to deeply understand their players to be really profitable. Games that fail have initial resonance with players but cannot maintain resonance month after month, so they die off quickly.
Do you translate your content in multiple languages?
We can publish our content in multiple languages to reach an international audience. As for the localization itself, we go through the developer’s localization partner. Then we publish the localized content on the community hub in a SEO friendly manner.
Will your service work for a game with an international audience?
Absolutely. We can localize content in as many languages as your game has. However, our customers typically focus on English content, or they just localize content for the most popular countries and languages the game is played in.
If our partnership ends do we get to keep the community hub?
Yes. We would transfer the administrative rights to your team, and move the hosting to a server of your choice.
Do we get to have a say in the content created on the community hub?
How does the guarantee work?
We offer an action-based guarantee. If you follow our action plan and don’t get high-quality strategic recommendations 90-days post-launch, then we refund your money. Obviously, you have to do the work and show that you followed the steps for the guarantee to apply. However, if you are leaning on a guarantee before you get started, then it's likely that you don't really believe that this will work and it may be better for you to go back and think if this is really for you or do a little more research before pulling the trigger.
Why work with you? What makes you so special?
Our CEO, Chad Kihm, started building communities for F2P mobile games back in 2014. He found a recipe for building a community that VIP players love, and a community that uncovers hidden insights game developers can use to make a lot of money.
Who are you guys anyway?
What happens if I wait?
What results will I actually get from this?
What exactly am I signing up for?
Are there any hidden fees?
Are there any long-term contracts?
Do I need to integrate your service with anything?
The GamerSpeak Method does not include any software that needs to integrate into something.