“Mobile Game Immersion: How to Keep Players Engaged” Webinar Recap
2020 was rough, but there was a shiny silver lining for the gaming industry: a dramatic spike in mobile activity.
In this webinar, Unity Technologies, Helpshift, and Backtrace, discuss best practices for keeping new and established users happy and immersed in play by proactively identifying in-game problems and implementing quicker fixes. For real-world context, Madison Annibale and Jade Anderson of Halfbrick chime in with specific examples of using crash management, automation, and bots to improve the player experience.
You can watch the full episode now on demand. In the meantime, here are some of the highlights:
1. Provide new pandemic-era players with a smooth gaming experience and they might stay.
“The pandemic and subsequent lockdown fueled an increased interest in gaming to the tune of 2.6bn mobile players, driving revenue of $90.7bn, and accounting for 66% of the App Store’s revenue share. In fact, a new report by market research firm IDC just announced that 75% of pandemic-related mobile gaming activity might be here to stay.” – Carol Trang, Community Manager, Unity
2. Don’t risk losing players over semi-preventable issues like bugs and crashes.
Helpshift used AI to determine the top gaming-related issue reported by players from 300 of our top gaming customers over the course of 90 days. The number one player issue for a whopping 33% involved errors and/or crashes. That means one third of their players had issues–and probably abandoned play–because of errors and crashes. – Erik Ashby, Head of Product, Helpshift
3. Spend less time identifying in-game problems and more time fixing them.
“When you quickly identify a bug using Backtrace crash management, you can determine the potential blast radius, see how many other users have been impacted, and then allow engineering to take that prioritization and drive their fix.” – Jason Davis, VP of Product, Backtrace
4. Always look to automate time-consuming tasks that have historically been handled manually.
“We used to manually reproduce all of the major bugs and retrieve the logs ourselves. That was really time consuming. The QA team would sometimes spend half a day replaying the same 15 seconds of the game just trying to get the crash to happen again. Now, Backtrace does that for us, which saves us a ton of time. Issues are automatically added to our support tickets.” – Madison Annibale, Customer Support Lead, Halfbrick
5. Measure your success and then find new ways to further improve the player experience.
“Using Backtrace crash management and Helpshift bots and automation, our Fruit Ninja 1 response rate went up 7.04% and our Fruit Ninja 2 response rate went up to 14.42%. Our time-to-first response for each game is now zero seconds. And, our average time to resolve has been chopped from approximately 14 days down to seven, which is a big deal since we have such a small team.” – Madison Annibale
For more inspiration on improving the player experience and keeping users immersed in play, see Unity’s full list of Verified Solutions Partners and join Backtrace’s Free Tier Developer Program.
