Having recently taken on Player XP services, Hutch are already reaping the benefits. In this case study we find out how the leading mobile games studio are using Player XP to access a wider range of detailed sentiment analysis.
Who are Hutch?
Hutch are an award-winning mobile games studio with a focus on cracking cars on mobile. Their three live games; F1 Clash, Top Drives and Rebel Racing host thriving communities of avid players across multiple social and community platforms. Hutch understands the importance of working closely with their communities to continually improve the experiences they offer, and have grown a highly-skilled Community team to manage this area of the business.
Situation
Understanding player sentiment is really important to the team at Hutch. Until now, they have used other social listening platforms in order to gather sentiment data. They recently recognised various elements of detail and accuracy in the sentiment analysis tools they were using were not being achieved. One of these important elements is Discord, which is a heavily used platform for game-specific conversations around the world. Hutch Games recognised tens of thousands of feedback opportunities were being missed due to the lack of reporting on their Discord servers. Another resource they were missing was sentiment reporting on their in-game forum using the KTPlay platform. Both of these sources represent a huge slice of overall community interactions from their players.
Where Player XP Comes in
Originally attracted to our platform due to it being tailored to the games industry, Hutch were ready to take the next step in understanding and measuring player sentiment. Understanding Hutch’s pain points, we were happy to shape our product around their needs. Now, Hutch is able to automatically receive data from a vast number of platforms including Discord and KTPlay.
With their personalised live dashboard, Hutch can access and categorise large quantities of data, which can easily be summarised and shared with their product teams and throughout the wider studio. With our simple options to export this information, team members can report back to their colleagues about how their features, events and updates are being received. As a result of this, Hutch have told us that our results are used to fuel their Community and Social Team’s weekly sentiment reports.
“These reports now include data from Discord and KTPlay, and give teams a better sense of how our core communities are reacting to our live changes.” – Chris Hohbein, Hutch Games
Outcome
With the ability to understand and contextualise feedback from Discord and KTPlay, Hutch can now place findings alongside their other social and community platforms. This extra detail allows them to understand and react to crucial feedback within the wider context of their community, which ultimately improves player sentiment around their games…
As well as increased accuracy and contextualisation of player feedback, Player XP has also provided the ability to analyse more subtle trends appearing on their channels. The community team can use this data to back up the more anecdotal trends they see during their daily interactions with the community. As well as the obvious internal advantages, PlayerXP is enabling Hutch to be even more responsive to their community’s needs.
“This, in line with game metrics, gives our studio a more complete picture of the overall health of our live games, and allows us to respond in real-time to player requests and feedback.” – Chris Hohbein, Hutch Games
When asking Hutch what benefits they found from using Player XP they responded:
“A major benefit is being able to finally report on Discord and other forum channels we operate, which have historically been impossible to report on using traditional sentiment analysis platforms.” – Chris Hohbein, Hutch Games
Discord is a fairly recent integration into the platform which we introduced late last year. We are always listening to what our clients seek from our service and are introducing new updates and features all the time!
Summary
As well as the Community & Social team, Hutch have told us how they utilise Player XP data to inform their Development and their Analytics teams. We have always aimed to create a platform that can support the whole studio, and we are pleased so many at Hutch are referring to Player XP.
“Having access to a complete demo of the platform and being given the freedom to play around with it for a good period of time was a major factor in us signing up. It’s a complex platform, and I don’t believe a simple demo would do it justice. Cost was also a factor, and it’s competitive against other rival listening platforms” – Chris Hohbein, Hutch Games
If you would like a trial using Player XP, do get in touch and we will help you get a taste of what our platform has to offer.
Overall, we have loved working with Hutch over the last 12 months and look forward to helping them access new insights in their data that were previously out of reach.
“Using Player XP has given us a level of contextualisation and insight we’d previously been lacking, which is enabling us to make more informed decisions about our games.” – Chris Hohbein, Hutch Games
