“Respect player love and loyalty enough to give it a seat at the table and watch how your game - and maybe your purpose - is reinvigorated," said Scopely’s Senior Vice President of Games, Alex Peters in a recent VentureBeat article.
Alex Peters recently sat down with VentureBeat’s GamesBeat to share his wisdom and insights from collaborating with “MARVEL Strike Force” players to spark game-changing transformation
In Alex’s piece, “Turn Players into Teammates: The Power of Collaboration in Game Development,” you will hear how passionate player communities can transform game development. Read the full interview on GamesBeat or below:
“MARVEL STRIKE FORCE”: HOW COLLABORATION TURNED PLAYERS INTO TEAMMATES
“Giving players a seat at the dev table had a profound impact on our game, ‘MARVEL Strike Force,’ and on our team.”
Traditionally, when developers want to know how a game is perceived, they hire research firms to organize focus groups or scour message boards on sites like Reddit to get a pulse on player sentiment. But recently at Scopely, we tried something a little different.
Communities are the heart of everything we do at Scopely — we’ve never created a game that didn’t have a digital community. We’re guided by the principle that life is better when we play together, and we truly believe that. Recently, we saw another valuable facet of this core belief when our “MARVEL Strike Force” (MSF) General Manager, Ryan “RJ” Jacobson, received an invitation to speak directly to our players. More importantly, our players spoke directly to us, and the results have been pretty remarkable.
About a year ago, the game makers behind MSF — our action-driven RPG set in the MARVEL universe — were at a crossroads. RJ was in his first year as the game’s GM, and engagement was fairly stagnant after nearly six years in the market. A longtime player of the game, RJ came to the role with feedback he was seeing in player communities — the events we were running weren’t as impactful as our players had hoped, and we were releasing characters too quickly. Many of these comments echoed his own take on the game.
As RJ and team were mulling over next steps, several members of the MSF player community happened to send us a 43-page report with their recommendations for the game. Yes, 43 pages.
Any game maker will tell you that there’s generally a cohort of the player base that makes requests outside the realm of possibility and basic business constraints. But the considerations in this player document were extremely mature, realistic and made with care. They also represented a range of player demographics and experiences.
Instead of filing their complaints away or discussing them privately, RJ and the MSF team invited the authors of the document to a conversation.
In the meeting, the document’s authors had valuable feedback on topics ranging from our gold hoarding events to the cadence of new Super Hero releases. But most importantly, we heard that they wanted to impact the game with us as partners. They loved the universe we’d created together and the community they’d built. All they wanted was a seat at the table and a regular voice.
Our players were willing to give us their most valuable resource: their time. And we felt it was our responsibility to give them that voice and our time in return. So we kicked off a partnership to create the first-ever MSF player council, spearheaded by the community who submitted the report.
This group took it upon themselves to gather applicants, host voting and execute elections to set up a council of representatives with different playstyles.
The council drives agenda topics ranging from player feedback to upcoming features and is a forum for our game team to present future content. We also share meeting minutes, so the broader community can participate and have visibility.
Soon after we launched our council, player engagement increased almost immediately. Today, overall community sentiment is at an all-time high.
RJ said that players feel heard, and our team of game makers have found new direction in their work. Now, when our game makers are creating something, it’s common for someone to say “Hey, did you run this by the player council?”
Here are a few tips on how to collaborate with your players.
First, just listen
When RJ first invited the authors of the player report to sit down and communicate their thoughts, he knew it was important to give them the floor. He said: “We had a two-hour session with them. And as they vented, I didn’t try to explain the rationale behind our decisions, I just listened.”
In the meeting, the document’s authors had valuable feedback, which the team might have missed if they’d been preoccupied with defending their decisions or steering the conversation.
Establish basic parameters, then stay out of the way
The council, which is self-governed, consists of a rotating set of representatives who gather topics from fellow MSF players on Reddit and other message boards and community meeting places. These representatives include low-, medium- and high- spenders to gather different perspectives.
Importantly, Scopely “doesn’t have its hands in the pie,” as RJ says. The players determine their own leadership, and the council could disband at any time, or change its members or its terms without our approval or input. It exists at their discretion.
Keep it consistent
Initially, the MSF team met with the council once a week to go over progress on key recommendations from the document.
Now, the council meets biweekly. Its members speak directly with MSF game makers about their notes, and the MSF team regularly runs new ideas by the council. These include changes to the features economy, events — and any topic really. RJ says the team tries to be as open and honest as it can be.
Follow up on feedback and progress
RJ dedicated one of the team’s managers to act as a concierge to the group, to field regular questions and suggestions from the council as it makes changes and then push feedback to Scopely.
To their credit, the council understands that not every suggestion they make will be acted upon — but we act on many of them.
This kind of representation may not work for every game. But for a title like MSF, with a dedicated player community that finds connection within a game world for years on end, the passion of this core audience can be your development team’s greatest asset and partner. You can get early feedback from various players and archetypes to see how a new feature fits into their daily experiences with the game.
The takeaway here is that almost any game-making team with a hyper–engaged, dedicated community can do what we did. These ‘virtual’ or online groups are, in a way, their own mini societies. Creating the space for them to organize into representative councils (with some guard rails, of course) helps to keep these communities vital.
If you do that, you open up a new level of understanding the experience you’re providing. You also start a priceless dialogue with people who’ve come to love what you do so much that it’s bonded them together. Respect that love and loyalty enough to give it a seat at the table and watch how your game — and maybe your purpose — is reinvigorated.
Alex Peters is Senior Vice President, Games at Scopely.