You are developing a game, your to-do-list is loaded with ideas, and you can't decide what to build next? Your players happily anticipate the next update - make sure it contains the right new features. Running a feedback page with idea voting on Productific is an easy way to start. This how-to document describes how game developers can collect user feedback.
Your users (players) know exactly how the games feels, what's good about it and where the painpoints are - they know what to improve. Listening to your users is an easy way to find out about improvements that make your game more attractive.
To collect feedback you can email, surf communities, build comprehensive in-game solutions - or simply use a tool to collect new ideas and run idea voting to identify the most attractive ones.
Email
Posting an email address like feedback@my-game.io can enable users to get in touch with you. They will simply write an email. However, not all users are happy writing emails and responding to emails does not scale well. For example, keeping track of emails that represent similar feedback usually requires you to manually count and maintain a backlog somewhere else, e.g. in Trello or Jira. In general, a feedback email address provides user engagement on a personal level but does not scale well once numbers go up.
Communities
Places like Quora, Reddit, Facebook Groups and any other community are a good way to collect user feedback. You can engage with users and find out about what they like about your game and where improvements can help. Moreover, users can interact with other users and exchange info, so the interaction can happen without your moderation. Managing a community can also be a challenge. You need to invest time. Lack of moderation can have users turning sour without you noticing and further amplifying, so showing presence in and moderating communities in advisable.
In-game solutions
You can build anything in-game: feedback buttons, rating, gathering stats - anything you can think of. Though, usually, this comes at high development cost. Usually, in-game feedback is ideal for highly specific feedback inside the game, combined with statistics. Running general user engagement (idea collection, voting) is difficult with in-game feedback and comes at high development cost.
Feature voting and idea collection
Showing you care about your users' gaming experience will turn users into fans. In addition to the above mentioned ways there is an easy solution to collect user feedback for games: setting up a feature voting page on Productific. Getting started takes only minutes:
- Step 1:
Join Productific on the free trial of any plan, ideal for testing and exploration (time required: 1 minute).
- Step 2:
Create a feedback page for your game. Describe your game and list the ideas you already have for voting by your users. (this takes 5 minutes)
- Step 3:
Publish the URL of the feedback page to players. The URL can be added in-game, on the website or simply published in a newsletter or Facebook page. (5 minutes)
- Step 4:
Monitor feedback data and voting results to identify the most attractive enhancements for your game. Re-engage with your users on a frequent basis to get additional feedback, check our how-to for getting more user feedback.
Productific is a user feedback tool made to collect new ideas from users, run feature voting for identifying the most attractive ideas, and to engage with users. Productific is a lean tool ideal for game feedback and made for small companies and indie projects.
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