The gaming business is a booming industry with billions of gamers finding their daily dose of entertainment in its products. Adopting a customer centric approach, gaming studios have been successful in engaging gamers in meaningful interactions on different forums. These interactions provide the basis for building more robust gaming projects in the future, earning these companies more revenue than ever.
So, what does the working process of gaming studios work like, and how do they go about building a new game that they are sure would create new ripples in the market? The answers lie in seamless collaboration between different departments that comprise a gaming studio, and the ability of the studio management to unify them into a unified force.
Read on to understand more about what gaming studios are and how they function, the strategies they deploy to achieve better player satisfaction, and the future trends and challenges that the gaming industry is facing.
What are Gaming Studios and How do They Function?
Gaming studios develop video games for customer entertainment, and as an industry, it bags a current total revenue of 396.2 billion dollars, catering to more than 2.6 billion gamers worldwide. Gaming studios employ people from a variety of disciplines, like artists, developers, designers, and other technical professionals. Therefore, the product they manufacture needs a seamless collaboration between these teams, which is no mean feat in itself. Therefore, as a gaming enterprise, a business has to oversee a lot of areas, including
- Organising the business into different segments, which might become individual companies with upscaling
- Ensuring good cooperation between teams, such as art and sound design, programming and testing
- Making sure that the technical departments have transparent communication with the HR and management teams
- Fostering a creative environment for artists and developers so that they can give their best on a project
- Liaising with publishers to acquire rights to storylines that can be used to build a game narrative
Therefore, it can well be understood that a gaming business needs a robust collaboration framework between creators and funders to ensure player engagement and generate a sizable revenue.
What are the Gaming Studio Strategies for Enhancing Player Satisfaction?
Gaming businesses employ a host of strategies to ensure that gamers are hooked on a game. Ensuring the game has a good storyline, immersive sound design, and realistic graphics is important for an initial interest among gamers. Let us take a look at how gaming businesses build systematic strategies to enhance player satisfaction.
Personalising the Gaming Experience with Big Data
Understanding the trends in a dynamic gaming market is key to having a good grasp on the pulse of customer preference. The use of big data in having crucial insights into gamer behaviour plays a great role in the way modern games are designed and marketed. Tailoring the game features to suit the needs of gamers is achieved by the gaming businesses in the following ways:
- Leveraging Big Data to Understand Gamers’ Choices: Since individual gamers produce more than 50 terabytes of data every single day, the big data repository on gamer behaviour is colossal. By monitoring gamer interactions in the middle of games, gaming businesses can have a fair idea of how to adjust difficulty levels, pacing and in-game challenges. A good understanding of how gamers respond to these metrics based on their skill levels helps build player centric game design and provides a basis for game upgradation. For instance, popular games like Assassin’s Creed make use of data on the individual gamers’ skill levels to upgrade the enemy strength in real-time so that the gamers face new challenges and must upgrade themselves to succeed.
- Strong Marketing Campaigns: Gaming studios make use of data on gamers’ preferences, demographics and purchasing behaviour to inform their marketing strategies. To ensure gamer retention, these studios and businesses introduce in-game promotions, discounts and reward systems so that the players are immersed in the game. Mobile gaming franchises like Clash Royale offer personalised gifts and rewards based on the individual gamers’ activity to enhance customer satisfaction.
- Enhancing Player Engagement: Maintaining consistent player engagement is a big challenge to navigate around for big gaming studios. Major but infrequent upgradation of the games can increase gamer engagement by 11-49%. This data could be a good starting point for gaming businesses new to the market on how to deal with gamer retention and lower attrition rates, owing to gamers opting out of further in-app purchases.
Building a Strong Community
Implementing this strategy does not need much effort from the gaming businesses because gamers are prone to freely building gaming communities. The business just has to systematize and standardize such customer messaging platforms so that they can reach out to an ever-expanding pool of new gamers. Working in its best interests, a gaming business must have messaging support services that regularly monitor customer reactions to game features and respond to queries that gamers post on these forums. Such interactions go a long way in building a strong relationship with all stakeholders.
Customer Support and Communication
Having a robust customer service system is important for the gaming industry for the simple fact that 76% of customers expect to get a reply to their query within 24 hours. In this context, Atidiv’s services, like social media support and live chat outsourcing, are some of the best avenues of responding to the gamers’ queries and issues. Furthermore, having in-app customer support is also necessary to address concerns quickly. The customer support facility takes care of two very important aspects:
- Transparent Communication: It is important to have the customer on the same page as the business when it comes to product expectations. Gaming businesses that do not pay much heed to this onboarding process and focus only on sales might see a dip in customer satisfaction.
- Proactive Support: The key to providing a good customer experience is solving the gamers’ issues before they escalate. Any customer would not like to see only tickets being raised against their queries, with no effective steps taken by the company.
Fostering a Customer-centric Culture
Successful gaming businesses always instil in their employees a customer centric approach that they follow in their daily workflow. Businesses ensure the consistency of this strategy by
- Building a centralised repository of customer data allows employees to refer to it at all points before proceeding with work. After all, important functions like game building and marketing must be informed by available data on customer response pertaining to them.
- Rewarding employees who successfully incorporate a customer centric approach in their workflow, such as when interacting with the customer and solving their issues. Thus, the business value is silently incorporated among employees, and everyone starts living up to that standard.
What Challenges does the Gaming Industry Face Concerning Player Satisfaction?
Despite the customer centric approach that the gaming industry employs to achieve player satisfaction, it still faces some challenges that need to be resolved. Let us take a look at a few of these:
- Dealing with AR: The implementation of augmented reality (AR) remains a challenge for gaming. With AR taking popular sports to the people and giving them a simulated feeling of the real game, the online gaming industry must step up. This gap in the market must be filled as soon as possible to avoid dwindling interest from gamers.
- Addressing Data Security Risks: Since the gaming apps and websites deal with sensitive user data like financial details, they must invest in a robust cybersecurity system. These systems must be upgraded from time to time to deal with the increasing number of data breaches. Failing to win the customers’ trust might spell catastrophe for a business. Furthermore, adherence to GDPR is necessary to ensure data safety.
- Avoiding Legal Issues: The gaming industry, just like the sports sector, has to deal with the gambling market. It could be a tricky thing to handle while being on the right side of the law. Gaming studios and agencies should have a competent team dealing with local law enforcement to ensure that company operations are not jeopardized at any cost.
FAQs On Customer-Centric Approaches in Gaming Studios
1. How do I leverage big data in my gaming business to build products that customers would appreciate?
Big data on gaming behaviour is easily accessible because of the huge number of gamers worldwide who regularly purchase gaming products. Monitoring customer behaviour and using AI to sift through such data has the potential to reveal trends that can be a game-changer for the marketing teams of gaming studios. It is these data that are leveraged to issue updates and build marketing strategies so that sales shoot for the skies and revenues take a big leap forward.
2. Why must marketing campaigns be personalised for individual customers?
Marketing campaigns are not exactly personalised for individual customers, but they cater to customers categorized into different groups. Gamer behaviour has to be taken into account while making the offer of rewards, otherwise, they may not hold much value for the gamer. For instance, a casual gamer may not value the in-app rewards like free cash so much as a serious gamer would. Furthermore, any reward or discount offered by gaming studios often comes with a purchase, and surely the purchasing pattern of these customer groups would not be identical. Therefore, it is necessary to segregate customers strategically and offer personalised rewards and discounts.
3. Does rewarding employees help build a customer-centric approach among them?
Rewarding employees is a good way to remind them of what is expected of them and what they must do consistently during their tenure at the company. Building a customer-centric culture is important for any company because it then becomes a norm to prioritize customer issues at all times. Doing so immeasurably enhances customer satisfaction, effectively reducing churn, and thus increasing the annual revenues for the business consistently.
