We see it all the time: gaming communities on social media and Reddit being treated as though they’re the singular source of player-based feedback for any given title.
But of course, this simply isn’t the case — especially when it comes to hugely popular games like Helldivers 2.
Posting on Discord (as reported by GamesRadar), Arrowhead CEO Shams Jorjani basically warns against the dangers of listening only to online discourse when analysing and acting upon feedback from players.
“The vast, vast majority silently play the game – they don’t post here [on Discord] or on Reddit,” he begins.
“And when we do good we [see] this in the stats – and when we don’t we also see it – sometimes it overlaps with what influencers or people say in social media, often it does not. So we use different tools to calibrate our compass,” Jorjani explains.
In other words, paying too much attention to what’s being said online — by typically hardcore players — probably isn’t going to give you an accurate read on what most people think about your game.
And that might seem like an obvious conclusion, but as people who spend a lot of time on the internet ourselves, it can be so easy to skew your own perspective based on what the online consensus seems to be.
This isn’t the first time we’ve seen developers weigh in on this topic, of course. For example, ever-informative Tekken boss Katsuhiro Harada has taken to social media multiple times in the past to stress that the development team prioritises in-game data over online suggestions when making gameplay adjustments.
“This is a challenge for all games,” says Jorjani. “We balance things out internally by looking at a lot of data, metrics, and qualitative data like streamers.”
What do you make of this? Is he absolutely right, or should we all start taking online comments much more seriously? Put this whole thing to the test in the comments section below.
Source link
