I think the solve is to actually be honest about the negative stuff as well as the positive stuff. I don’t believe at all that it’s better to be radio silent, than it is to admit that features are cut, plans changed, etc.
If there is honest comms there will be negative reaction to the bad news, but at least some people will nod and say OK, I get why you had to do that.
When everything is silent, you get none of that understanding. People just feel like they’re being led along, waiting around for promised features that have been silently cut.
The solve is to communicate, honestly. It’s not magic. It’s easy.
Edit: For clarification I have told customers, ranging from a single private person, to someone who represent a huge company, really bad news. Sometimes the bad news was the fault of the company I work for, sometimes it was external issues. Most of the time people understood. Some got angry, but mostly people understand.
The times that people really got angry with our company, was when we didn’t communicate, and they had no idea what was happening with their issue/product.
I can’t really fault CM for this. Probably thing like writing a separate post about an issue like re-prioritization, dropped features and such requires permission from someone, but with similar topics/information getting released (and then probably lost) in a single comment on some thread like @CommanderJ said does make me much more understanding of both the confusion and the anger of the community at large (even tho I feel like the negativity and the general blackpill takes are many times not justified.)
I’m usually just happy when it happen that in some way the CM can get information out.
This.
In most cases both parties want the product to be good. F-ups can and will happen. Openly communicating early enough (emphasis on ‘early’) here is the key to keeping both parties happy in the long run.
Adding to this the fact that players want the game to be good and are spending hours upon hours writing up feedback should speak volumes to a developer.
People don’t get that mad or write that much sht if they do not care.
If fatshark would come out tomorrow and actually owned up to all their missteps me and a lot of their ‘haters’ would be genuinely impressed and give them a chance to prove it. And I’m saying this as someone that wished FS was a publicly traded company so he could short their stock in the hopes of a bankruptcy.
I’m of the opinion that Fatshark gets zero right to complain about negative feelings from the players.
And I’m happily going to say I’m part of the problem, trying to archive and update every broken promise and insult from the company. Fatshark wants to fix its PR problem? It can stop going radio silent on promised features and start being honest with people.
Do you remember the ‘open letter’? While people were skeptical of the corporate doublespeak there was actual hope that Fatshark would fix everything, especially because they seemed willing to eat a hit to profits by turning off the microtransaction rotation.
Then they burned that goodwill in April by re-opening it without fixing the largest player complaints and have never really recovered it.
Yeah, someone asked once how the CMs collect information. I explained it in a panel once, but it’s done by collating all the platforms (twitter, forums, discord, reddit, etc) through a tool and then a sentiment score is calculated 1-100. Sometimes the topics are on point, sometimes they’re not, so the CMs usually hand cull the outlier data. This is then packaged in a report with the quantitative sentiment score with qualitative data (quotes from feedback that correspond with the “hot topics”), and the sentiment trend line is compared with our competitors. This report is then given to the devs. How it’s acted upon is out of the CM’s hands, though.
Of course, CMs also use gut instinct and fight for player needs as well, but they don’t have final say.
I still think that the way Rebecca Ford managed to turn the often very negligible role of CM into a crucial tool for Warframe’s success and grow into a creative director for the game is something devs should take a closer look at.
I believe there’s a simple answer why: The gaming industry is in it’s stock growth phase ever since gaming as a medium started to make more revenue than movies.
This means safety, profit and growth are the most important factor. Trusting consultants, excel sheets and ‘tried and true’ methods reign supreme. With that you also get the slow behemoth type reaction speeds to require change.
F it I’m not gonna bother editing the grammar. I hate my phone and touchscreens
That, and boards skew older and haven’t really accepted the fact that player sway and organic social media (not paid) is actually very, very powerful.
Industry likes to say getting slammed with negative reviews doesn’t work (BIG DISCLAIMER: I am not saying review bombing works, and I AM NOT advocating for it, as Steam has tools to combat that, but I mean legit negative reviews and refunds), but really at minimum it can cause panics because it bites into profit margins. Seeing “Mostly Negative” on Steam is the line between a new buyer purchasing the game or not. It’s also one of the easiest ways to collect player thoughts and data in generally unbiased ways.
This is the power of giving CMs more weight in decisions and player comms that a lot of studios aren’t fully realizing. A good CM with that leeway can see this, divert it, and recommend fixes. Devs iterate on that and thus in theory, you can avoid a fallout.
And of course, word of mouth is one of the most powerful marketers of all.
I honestly think it’s just Fatshark learning the wrong lessons. In ‘Winds of Magic’ instead of taking fan feedback more seriously they opted to instead double down and get all arrogant with their whole:
That resulted in one of the most catastrophic video game add ons I’ve ever seen in my 20 something years of gaming. What was their main take away from that - not sure, it sure as heck wasn’t to take fan feedback more seriously as is evidenced by Darktide’s whole development.
People tend to forget that. Especially the ‘organic’ part. Some of the more random and insane social media / influencer campaigns just boggle my mind.
Yeah, which is exactly why I was one of those twats yelling “REFUND AND LEAVE A BAD REVIEW” when the game released in the state it did. Hurting the bottom line always works.
True, I also believe that CMs should be clearer and more direct in their approach. Again, Rebb is bit of a dingus but she mostly wears her heart on her sleeve. She rarely falls into PR talk and people can hear how passionate she is about the game. CMs should have some form of PR training, but they should also be at eye level when communicating. Ye old ‘PR tongue’ is a big no no IMO
…we don’t serve people based on what they want, we serve people based on what they need.
I never wanted to punch a dude harder in the face when I read that. The absolute audacity.
My brother in christ you just shipped the most catastrophic tone deaf misstep in the entire game’s history. How about eating some of that humble pie and shutting the f up.
Exactly. I freakin’ despise corpo talk. It’s just a long winded, obtuse, way of telling someone: sorry you got fired, also the company cat took your cubicle for Instagram campaign.
We probably don’t even have the thing they really envisioned. Going through the code you can find a few traces of things that aren’t done yet.
For instance code for maximum ammo capacity as a curio (up to +20% at max lvl) or another item rarity level we never got.
As much as I occasionally berate @MarxistDictator, I have to admit that his guess about the 2 year timeframe for Darktide’s release being too early was accurate.
What we will have post-itemization patch is probably the actual launch state they had envisioned. And that’s appalling that they (were forced to?) push the game out this much earlier. What we got to play in 2022 was not a beta, it was a late alpha really.
To be fair, with outrage culture and how much non-sense is stirred up these days, it’s a perfectly reasonable response to SOME of the public discussion.
But not all of them, especially not when the person making the “fake excuse” is the party who tried to push the envelope this much further.
It’s ironically always the people and companies with the least grounds for a “sorry you feel that way”, who push this type of word-play the most. In example: Ubisoft, Activision, those react guys who tried to leave YouTube for their own 10$-per-month service, etc.
Yeah, I was among those sticking up for Fatshark. Thing is, I can emphasize why someone would do that - But I dislike the dishonesty.
If they had just said “We have to release early, because we are economically forced to do it, but we’ll do our best to give you XYZ”, maybe it would have also felt different to the other party.
Alas we live in a world where asking for forgiveness pays off more than asking for permission. In the majority of cases anyway.
