Last week was exciting – we joined Casual Connect as a supporter of the Indie Showcase (“sponsor” sounds so formal). Big thanks to Yulia for inviting us!
It was a great customer development opportunity — we got to talk to over 50 indie developers — play their games, chat about them and their challenges and introduce polljoy.
The initial reactions were interesting…
Spot polo !
- Roughly one third got it immediately — they could see quickly how it could help them. Mainly for product feedback (especially in beta and leading up to launch) but also collecting bug feedback and also community management for launched games. Some expressed interest in using it for just getting more 5 star reviews in a thoughtful way ☺
- Another third needed to digest it, as it was a new concept to them, and education would be needed to see how to use it and incorporate it into their dev process. But they did start to see the use for it after explanation, these people would need to ease into it.
- The final third didn’t think it useful — roughly split into two: the group that were already getting lots of feedback from forums and reviews and emails and didn’t really mind it was coming just from the “vocal minority” and didn’t think they needed more. These tended to be the more famous indies who had strong fan bases. The other type were the folks who felt strongly that they didn’t really need user opinion — they were making the game as they alone wanted.
The biggest concern for all the devs?
Potentially annoying their users. Once we explained that a) polls could be shown to only a small percent of users, not everyone and b) used thoughtfully, polls actually increase retention (surprising to many), the majority felt comfortable.
As for tech feedback:
- Most of the developers were on Unity or native or web, so our existing SDKs work fine. Glad we prioritized that a while back!
- Several developers were using Cocos2dx, so we are starting an investigation into how feasible/much time it would take to get a native Cocos2dx plugin
- Finally there were some using Unreal or Corona. We’ll have to look at these later as we have a bunch of other things to do first.
- Feature wise — they generally liked what they saw. Some asked for image polls (it’s in the short term plan), a couple other specific requests like variable substitution in the polls eg- $USERNAME: “Hi Joe, what armour do you like best?”, ability to connect the data into their analytics systems. Oh and some asked if we were in the Unity asset store (not yet, got to check it out)
A few days later we have a bunch of people who have created accounts and already started integrating us — looking forward to the next round of feedback from their deployments!
Overall, learned a lot and inspired by chatting to all the indies — did I mention the quality of games this year rocked?!
