Our first article, “What is a Superuser?,” helped define these amazing members of the Gaming Community. Ninjas, VIPs, Socializers, Leaders, and Content Creators all help to create a healthy, growing, engaging, and nurturing gaming community.
And while they will certainly help the longevity of a game’s success, if the Game Developers don’t take into consideration what the community needs and desires, then that longevity, retention, and satisfaction will turn into anger, frustration, and people leaving the game for another.
Why Should You Acquire Superusers?
Superusers can help educate, inform, and communicate with thousands of players in the gaming community every day. They can do this in the form of creating guides, charts, graphs, tips, and easy-to-understand content that the gaming community can trust since these Superusers are vetted by the community already.
Additionally, Superusers, through their connections can obtain tons of actionable feedback from VIPs, gifted players like Ninjas and other top-ranking players, leaders from an influential and prominent guild, and deliver that feedback to developers, minus the noise from the community.
Finally, Superusers can directly work with game developers on trying to deliver the actionable feedback given from the community. Game developers can help train Superusers on specific topics that are important to the longevity of the game’s health, growth, and retention rate.
Superusers then can submit actionable feedback to the game developers on a weekly or biweekly basis, pulling ideas, suggestions, and feedback from the game community’s most influential and intelligent players.
Community Engagement
Superusers can serve as your hype crew, your moderators, and/or your masters of the meta. Since Superusers are so engaged with the Gaming Community, they can help to nurture and grow a healthy environment for all the players to enjoy.
Additionally, Superusers can provide content such as tutorials, how-to guides, videos, strategy guides, and tips directly to the community in Discord Servers, Line Rooms, and other methods of communication.
They’re perfect candidates for Community Moderation since they’re well respected among their peers. Superusers can assist in banning toxic players, help direct players to correct rooms to ask specific questions or access guides, and keep the overall Gaming Community happy and engaged.
Strategy Guides
Since the days of GamePro, Nintendo Power, and GameFAQs, gamers have craved and appreciated walkthroughs, tips and tricks, and strategy guides. With video games becoming increasingly complex, the need for easy-to-digest and comprehensive strategy guides is on the rise.
Content Creators can specialize in a variety of entertainment and informational content, but strategy guides according to a study conducted by Facebook Gaming, “Genre and Great Games,” still remain to be the most popular and desired form of content.
Moderators
Superusers can be fantastic candidates for becoming Moderators (or Admins) for a Game Community. Naturally, with both their experience in-game and being active in various communities, they already command a lot of respect from players and can help to ensure that the community stays on topic, stays positive, and players are directed to the right rooms and/or people to have their questions answered.
Mediators
When Superusers can communicate directly with Game Developers, they can act as the perfect Mediator between the players and the gaming company. They can explain clearly to developers what kind of changes the community would like to see as well as explain to the Gaming Community the nuances of upcoming changes, features, and updates, and why the Game Developers chose to implement these changes in the first place.
Actionable Feedback
Our Superusers (the Gamefluencers) are masters of articulating the specific needs, concerns, and complaints of the gaming community. As a result, they’re able to submit actionable feedback to the Game Developers to improve the overall quality of the game for everyone to enjoy.
Actionable Feedback, when implemented, not only makes the Gaming Community happier and more satisfied, as customers, but it helps to increase spending habits from Free-to-Play and Whale/VIP players alike.
Also, Bugs can happen as soon as a new patch, feature, or update drops. They have a huge impact on the overall health of the game if not fixed and addressed quickly. A team of Superusers can easily identify potential game-breaking Urgent Bugs within hours versus days, weeks, or even months.
In addition to weekly or bi-weekly Sentiment Reports that Superusers can turn in, you can have them submit Urgent Sentiment when a new update goes awry and the entire Game Community is disappointed.
These occurrences are uncommon, but in cases where the Game Developers create a feature that shifts the overall Meta and health of the game too far in one direction, an Urgent Sentiment Report can help them balance this feature out by taking into consideration the feelings of the Gaming Community.
Also, if specific Whales/VIPs are experiencing a huge disappointment with the Game Developer’s direction, the Superusers can reach out to them and report their frustration directly to the Developers. Considering how much money Whales and VIPs can spend on a game, a drastic change in the game can cause them to leave immediately and take many players with them, driving your overall revenue down.
You can set up a stream of direct communication between your Superusers and the Game Developers to enable efficient, thorough, and fast communication. It can be through emails, a Discord Room, or a customized form that once submitted it will be sent to the appropriate Game Developers. The process can be incredibly simple or detailed, depending on the needs of the Game Developers and what the Superusers came to an agreement on.
At GamerSpeak, we’ve seen our Gamefluencers help Game Developers increase their revenue and retention by 30% in six months or less.
LiveOps
LiveOps provides the gaming community with new features to help prevent “burnout,” keep players interested in the game and maintain a high retention rate.
Community Feedback is essential to keeping a game’s longevity and retention rate high; however, when you’re trying to obtain that information, it can be incredibly difficult to make sense of everything when you have a flood of feedback from 10,000, 50,000, or 100,000+ players.
Superusers can help to cut through the “noise/buzz” of community feedback and hone in on the most important aspects of improving the game’s LiveOps from both a player’s and a game developer’s perspective.
Finally, a developer can leverage their internal resources and reach to boost the audience each Superuser influences. They can promote the Superusers’ community, collaborate with Superusers for content creation, promote the Superusers to moderators, train the Superusers to give KPI-specific feedback, and much more.
Andy Nguyen, a Producer/Designer at Pocketwatch Games, that produces Tooth and Tail, used Discord before release to actively engage with Superusers to help design the game and listen to the Gaming Community’s feedback.
Nguyen’s Game Development team created various rooms for different purposes. Some of these rooms included Community General chat, an Announcements chat, a Testers room, a Beta Feedback room, and many more.
In a Gamasutra interview, Nguyen explains, “We wanted to make sure that the communication was really intimate because if they had a problem we needed to make sure that they communicated exactly what the problem was so that we could fix it specifically.”
This is a fantastic example of a Game Developer using tools (such as Discord) to communicate directly with the Gaming Community and have a close relationship with Superusers. By using Discord and the tools available through its platform, Tooth and Nail were able to build a healthy and successful community with the help and insight of verified and knowledgeable players/Superusers; therefore, making the game more enjoyable for everyone.
If you’d like to understand more about what platforms are available for building community engagement and feedback effectively, make sure to read our article, What’s the Best Platform for Game Developers to Obtain Community & Actionable Feedback?
Below are some of our Superuser’s (aka the Gamefluencers) thoughts on how essential Superusers are for both the Gaming Community, Game Developers, and the overall success of the game.
CmRage (4X Strategy Game Expert)
“No matter what the Game Developers try, even if they build their accounts, they will never fully have the actual perspective as a player in the community. Superusers are smart players who are immersed in the game and play a big role in the community.
Developers can trust that these Superusers want the best for the overall game since they have spent years building alliances, friendships, and are personally invested in the game as well. Usually, the feedback, advice, or validation of bugs end up saving the Developers time and money.”
ConcreteRose (4X Strategy Game Expert)
“Superusers are similar to beauty influencers or fashion bloggers; we create an impactful market for game industries. We have a knack for engaging and reaching the community in ways that the game company cannot, regardless of all the money spent in marketing. We bring their brand to the community.
Since we are gamers and experience what the players feel, we can create trust with the community while gamers tend not to trust developers. That alone is vital, especially when we enjoy the game as much as the players do. We have that same mindset and share that similarity. Developers tend to think about revenue, which gets in the way of the community goals; we bring that balance to improve it overall. While there will always be some negativity and bad apples, a happy community drives engagement and longevity of a game’s lifespan.”
DK (RPG Game Expert)
“Superusers share a common goal with Game Developers: make the game continuously exciting and long-lasting. Since they are heavily invested in the game, they carry profound sentiments and ideas that can be considered good from a business perspective.
It is important to search for improvements that can increase user satisfaction — and there’s no better way than getting those recommendations from Superusers. They also have a huge influence on user retention which is crucial for the game; so making them feel heard is also doing a favor to the Superuser and the game’s community.”
Takeaways
Superusers act as the ultimate Mediators between the gaming community and the game developers. Since they’re so closely invested in the gaming community and understand the needs of many players, they can deliver the best actionable feedback to game developers to improve the game’s LiveOps, Retention Rate, and overall satisfaction.
The Superusers’ insight can help Game Developers prioritize the biggest issues that are affecting the game by submitting urgent sentiment, bug reports, and VIP reports in hours versus weeks or months. They’re an extension of your Quality Assurance team who actively test the Game Developer’s newest features and can report any problems, suggestions, and community reception.
The Superusers’ passion for the game’s success and overall health of the Gaming Community will serve as an invaluable asset for the Game Developer’s overall success in delivering an amazing gaming experience for all to enjoy. Because of their influence in the community, Game Developers should actively engage with Superusers as the lifeblood of their respective communities.
In Part 3 of our Superuser series, we’ll give you a brief overview of “How to Build the Perfect Superuser?” and how you can train Superusers to give you the best actionable feedback to fulfill the needs of your gaming community and the game developers.
We specialize in training, managing, and developing Superusers for a variety of Games using our patented GamerSpeak Method. Click here to learn more!
From Community Engagement to Discord Moderation; Custom Sentiment Reports to Urgent Bug Reports; our team of incredible Superusers can help your Game Developers build an amazing game for years to come.
You can schedule a 30-minute free consultation with our CEO, Chad Kihm. He can detail how our team of Superusers can help your game grow.
