As someone who works in social media, I take part in a lot of conversations daily. The other day, however, I stumbled on two comments that struck a chord in me - not only for their similarity, but their familiarity.
"I mean this one jokingly and lovingly of course. I'm sure this person genuinely enjoys their job but it widely depends on the company I've worked QA for 8 years and ever large company treats QA like a meatgrinder hemorrhaging talent"
- @_TechJess on Twitter (Former QA for Activision Blizzard)
"this is valid! i was already used to it though because being in customer support my whole career, most of the other departments don't even care to interact with us, or we are excluded from company events because we have to work."
- Social Media and Community Managers in Gaming (SMCMG) Discord Member
For those that work in the game industry, it's a sadly common fact that the three roles closest to the players are most often the ones to be lacking resources, taken for granted, and ultimately undervalued in the game development process. These two conversations aren't even taking into account companies like Raven Software laying off over a dozen QA after promising better wages.
When you think about the development of a game, QA (Quality Assurance) is the last stop before being released to the public. The team is completing playthroughs, smoke tests, bug logging and regression, testing core functions, and playing through that one section of a sidequest over and over in hopes that they’ll finally reproduce the crash that happened randomly 4 hours prior. What’s the definition of insanity again? If a game has bugs, the QA are the first to be blamed. That weird clipping you saw in your armor? That was 100% known and logged. As was that break in dialogue, the text on the button being off-center, and floating plant. The problem is that bugs that are deemed lower priority are often overlooked in favor of game breaking bugs. Production feels the pressure from upper-management to get the game or update out the door, which in turn means that those lesser priority bugs get pushed to the wayside.
Not only is QA treated like an entry level position, but they are WILDLY underpaid for the amount of work they do. QA Testers are the closest to being the players (and often ARE players), and know the product arguably better than anyone else in the studio. They spend 40 hours (not including overtime/crunch) a week searching in every crevice of every corner to ensure playability, as well as edge-casing possible scenarios that a player may encounter while immersing themselves in these worlds. Game companies that recognize the worth of their QA by paying them accordingly and leverage the feedback they have for the game (as well as extend deadlines for the B & C bugs that are found and never fixed), would not only strengthen the product, but also the trust within the community that it’s going to. However, if you work in Player Support and/or Community, you know that this is almost never the case.
When a game is released, and the bugs remain, the Player/Customer Support Team are on the front lines answering tickets about double payments, and empathically helping the player who's been killed a million times by those who are exploiting bugs such as the Warzone cosmetic glitch. Not only do they hear the most unfiltered side of a person behind a keyboard, but they also work through stat holidays, company events, and during staggered hours to keep up with ticket load and prompt responses. Much like QA, PST is also, you guessed it, wildly underpaid. When representing a brand, the Player Support Team requires copywriting skills and a large amount of empathy to help maintain the trust between players and the developers. They also receive the backlash first-hand when an issue is unable to be resolved for a player, and feel the brunt of the frustration when there is no known solution to their issue. Additionally, I’ve heard countless horror stories come from PST about trolls, threats of violence, and the occasional NSFW content being sent through the helpdesk. Utilizing QA and sourcing their feedback wouldn’t make up for the hours or the salary, however it would allow additional time for PST to work more closely with those players who have unavoidable, one-off issues that occur post-launch.
Working closely with the Player Support Team is the Community and/or Social Media team. When you make a game, your community is everything. Without a community, the success of a game will crumble. Community Managers are in the public eye of the players, and often are also the face of the product.
With it being such a new role, it’s not clearly defined what a Community Manager does from studio to studio. Do they manage forums? Social Media? Discord? Livestreams? Push notification? Analytics reports? In-game messaging? Influencer management? Email marketing? Yes. Is there often only one Community Manager per title? Absolutely. I once had a fellow CM refer to this as “being an island”, as you are off on your own with limited resources, and the sole owner of any community related initiatives that they create or are asked to run.
The Community Manager is the voice of the players, but also the voice of the game. They are alerting devs at 10pm when the game is down while simultaneously crafting an empathetic response to players' concerns, and manually posting stories to their game’s Facebook and Instagram. With there often only being one person in Community, the ad hoc tasks and hours of meetings take away from the time we can spend deep diving into the community space, further building the trust between players and the game. You can ask almost any CM – burnout is a very real problem in the field. This leaves many Community Managers facing a predicament when they need a day off as they don’t have anyone to delegate their tasks to. This can also discourage them from taking the much needed mental health days for fear of missing deadlines and being overwhelmed with work when they return. Having a minimum of 2 CMs per game, and scaling up as the player base grows, would allow more time for meaningful conversations with players, which will ultimately improve the player experience both in and out of game.
I recently interviewed with a company that had an entire Community team that consisted of a Director of Cx, a Community Lead, and 3 Community Managers for a game that has an average of 40k+ MAU (Monthly Active Users). A large part of why this game is able to stay relevant is by having the time to maintain those positive relationships on social media, and as @VTran spoke about at GDC, by "charming their community”. They’re each able to specialize in the type of Community and Social campaigns they run, answer frustrated players in a timely manner, all while memeing around with their community. They’re also able to better manage burnout with the extra support, and can deep dive into those analytics to get a better sense of their community. With a whopping 800k+ followers on Twitter and growing, they are an amazing example of what valuing community and creating a powerhouse CM team can do.
Quality Assurance, Player Support, and Community Managers can provide an over abundant amount of value that many game companies just aren’t leveraging. By utilizing feedback from QA, and allocating more resources for player facing roles such as Community and Player Support, games (and companies!) can really foster community growth and maintain a trusting relationship with their fans for years to come. When it comes down to it, isn’t that what game development is all about?
Work in any of these roles? Share your thoughts below!
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