This is based on a presentation I gave to the Barcelona Game Creators meetup. You can watch a pre-recording of the “How to get player feedback” presentation on YouTube.
I strongly believe that listening to player feedback will make your game better.
But what if you’re not yet getting any player feedback?
What if your game’s not yet fully released or was launched to very few players? How do you get that feedback loop started, that you need to improve your game?
I have three tips for getting players to give you feedback. The tips are simple:
- Ask
- Make it easy
- Acknowledge
Tip 1: Ask
First, ask for feedback.
This may seem so obvious. It may seem even ridiculous to you that I’m saying you need to ask. But you’ll be surprised how many people overlook this. They share their game, they release the game, but they’re not clearly asking players to give them feedback.
Ask clearly
Let’s look at one example of how you might ask for feedback. Let’s say your game is still under development and you’re sharing it with an acquaintance, a friend, or somebody you met in a meetup.
Rather than just sending them the link to the game and telling them to enjoy it, make sure that you’re asking clearly for feedback.
In this example mail you can see that half the entire email is dedicated to just asking for feedback. Look how simply and clearly I’m asking for it. Just nine words.
That’s as complicated as you should be asking.
Ask repeatedly
You need to ask repeatedly. Now this means two things:
First, it means over all the channels. On your Steam page if you have one already, on your own website. in any marketing newsletter, in-game, and via personal emails.
Secondly, it means you need to be asking the same people over and over. We’re all getting asked for feedback and reviews for almost every service and product we use these days and we’ve kind of learned to ignore those emails.
So let’s go back to this scenario where I’m writing to Joe asking them to give me feedback. If I don’t hear from Joe I’m going to write again 3 days later, asking again for feedback.
Then if another week passes and I still haven’t heard from Joe, I’m going to ask even more directly.
At this point I’d probably stop asking if I didn’t get any response from Joe because this is verging on being annoying. But the principle I’m trying to show here is you need to ask multiple times.
A reason for asking repeatedly is because people might not actually have any feedback at first. People typically want to share feedback if there’s some really positive experience or some really negative experience. They are the moments in which they want to tell you what they think about your game.
It might take the second, third, or even fifth time playing it until they find that a boss is too difficult or a weapon is unbalanced or a map is confusing. That’s why you need to ask repeatedly.
Ask in the right place
Asking in the right place is a bit tricky. Ideally you would ask at exactly the time in which the player is suffering some type of frustration. You could ask by interrupting the gameplay, but that’s going to be annoying – it’s going to do more harm than good.
You could ask in your opening screen, your pause screen, or when the player quits the game. Perhaps you could open a browser upon quitting, and open a tab in their browser that goes to your feedback page. You would only want to do this with dev builds, and not with a fully-released game.
What works exactly depends on how your personal approach, your game, and the platform you’re using. But keep in mind that you’re going to improve the chance of getting feedback if you ask in the right place.
Ask personally
The most powerful way of asking is to ask personally.
If you ask somebody personally I estimate you’re 5 times – or maybe even 10 times – as likely to actually get feedback, as opposed to writing to someone via an automated mailing list.
So when you’re asking, if there’s a way you can indicate that it is personal make sure you do it: coming from your own personal email address, making sure there’s something in the email that shows that this is not autogenerated, and so on.
Tip 2: Make it easy
The general rule here is if you make giving feedback complicated, you won’t get any feedback. But if you make it simple, you will get feedback.
In reality, there is a continuum between making it complicated and making it easy. But in general, any barrier you put in the way of people being able to give you feedback is going to hurt your chances of getting feedback.
Use a simple webform
A simple web form is good. Something like Google Forms, where people don’t need to sign up for a service or an account.
I like using Google Forms for this, because you can assume that almost anybody playing your game has a Google account and therefore they won’t need to sign into Google Forms.
Avoid Discord
You might be a little bit surprised that I recommend avoiding Discord.
As you are in the video games industry, you’re probably on Discord all day. But most of your players aren’t. And of those players who are on Discord, most of them are not on your server.
Look, it’s fine to accept feedback over Discord, but don’t make it your principal means of gathering feedback. If you do you will bias your feedback towards a certain type of player and you will dramatically reduce the amount of feedback.
Email is fine
If you’ve written to someone via email, let them reply via email. It’s not your player’s job to find the right channel and to do everything the way that suits you.
You need to make it easy for them to give you feedback in any channel they can. And then it’s up to you to put that into whatever system you’re using.
A fine example of a feedback form
I have to make a disclaimer: I actually designed this form. It’s from my platform, Feature Upvote, as used by one of our customers, Timberborn.
- There’s a title field which is required but has a 100-character limit. This forces players to write a short and snappy description of what the problem is.
- There’s a description field, which is optional, and allows up to 1,000 characters. I put in this reasonably low size limit because what you don’t want is people writing you endless pages of feedback. That is not helpful to you.
- Players can add an image such as a screenshot. A screenshot is worth a thousand words, so it’s great if you can get one. But again, don’t make people have to do it.
- We make name and email required because we want to be able to communicate with the player afterwards.
Notice what we’re not asking for: we’re not asking for “platform”, we’re not asking for “build number”, we’re not asking for “screen resolution”, we’re not asking for “localization”. Although knowing this stuff will help you, requiring it will be a barrier in the way of people giving you feedback.
Every time you add one of these required fields, the amount of feedback you get will drop.
You can always follow up with somebody one-on-one if you need to get additional information.
Tip 3: Acknowledge
If somebody sends you feedback and they hear nothing from you about it, they’re going to assume they sent it to a black hole. And they will be very unlikely to send you any more feedback.
So at the very minimum, you need to send an acknowledgement email. Especially in the days when you’re trying to get the feedback loop started.
Personal thank you
What I recommend is a very short email acknowledging they gave you feedback but without making any promises.
Prioritise and fix
The next part of acknowledging actually requires you to do something with the first few pieces of feedback you’ve received: you need to fix something!
Here’s something you will discover when you start collecting feedback for the first time: say you get ten pieces of feedback. Well, at least five of them are all going to be reporting the same problem.
There’s going to be some big problem or barrier or headache in your game that you are blind to. It’s going to affect almost everybody and it’s going to get reported over and over.
This is good! This is how a healthy feedback loop works. This is why you need to be listening to player feedback: you’ll discover what you need to fix now to make your game better.
So find that most reported problem to fix, go ahead and fix it, and then do another release.
Inform if feedback is used
Then write individually to the people who reported that problem and tell them it’s fixed. They don’t know that they are one of many people who reported the problem. All they know is that they reported something, you fixed it or changed it, and now you’re telling them about it.
This will turn them from a player into a fan. And maybe even an ambassador.
Release notes
In your release notes, make sure to thank all the people who reported that #1 problem you identified with their help. For privacy reasons, thank them by first name or by player handle.
That public acknowledgement will give them a brief moment of pride. Again this will help turn players into fans. Which is the best thing for your game.
Conclusion
It’s never easy to get player feedback, but with these three tips – ask, make it easy, and acknowledge – you will have a solid chance of getting that feedback loop started that you can use to make your game better.