Nice interview with Bryan Neider, COO of Electronic Arts Labels via the McKinsey Quarterly (sub required) on how they get close to the gaming consumer
“We have marketing teams looking at consumer blogs and social media, providing demos and playable betas to customers and getting feedback that is immediately played back for the development team to incorporate changes. However, the challenge is that parts of the gaming audience are pretty vocal—they either really like a game or they really don’t like it. The trick is to find ways to get feedback from the lion’s share of the audience that is generally silent and make sure we’re giving these people what they want.
One important way to do this is to build telemetry into our games. When players log in, they are asked whether they permit us to use the telemetrics of, for example, their handheld device, to communicate information from their game back to us. Many do. This is a critical tool because it permits us to watch real game playing so that we can understand quite objectively when something is working and when it isn’t.
In addition, online tools allow consumers to direct their feedback to us at different points in a game and after it so that we can filter the feedback into our products. The feedback format needs to be open-ended and nonintrusive—players don’t like feedback requests at critical moments of game play. It’s very important that gaming audiences around the world want to engage with us because tastes differ and a game has to be tailored to preferences in different markets: for example, the China version of a fight game would include more martial arts and less shooting than the US version.”
Photo Credit: Electronic Arts
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