Social Listening

 For this blog post, I decided to do the Canadian Video Game company Behaviour Interactive, and I chose this company because I am one of their customers for their video game Dead by Daylight. Being involved with the game, I am always up to date on the company news, along with the player feedback to updates and what are called "chapters", which is the style of DLC this game uses. What makes this game (and company structure) quite intriguing is the fact that many other companies have tried to make the same style of game, that being an asymmetrical 1 vs 4 game, but each company that attempts to create a similar game ends up not being anywhere near popular, if the game manages to live longer than a year.

What makes this easier on Behaviour Interactive, however more difficult on the player base, is that because Behaviour knows people are going to play their game no matter what, they are able to get away with quite lousy behavior (get it?). Spaghetti Coding (coding with such lack of stability that adding code can easily mess up and bug other prior codes and being a tangled mess) and releasing sub-par content, content that is not properly thought out, boring, underpowered, etc. are easy to be forgotten about because, what other games are people going to go to? 

This easily connects with how Behavior recently let down the entire community by posting this video on YouTube:

Watching it, you feel the new killer is going to be some huge scary terminator-esque robot, right? Instead what we got was a random human killer with a Predator-like gauntlet, and was more about the sex-appeal than being scary or horrifying. Along with the lack of scare, was a very underpowered and underwhelming power that made her extremely weak, to the point where it wouldn't even be worth it to purchase the killer. This has happened in the past too, with a killer called the Legion, where the trailer made him appear as if he could act like he was your ally, but then turn on you. Unfortunately, his power was nothing of the sort, and the community was extremely let down.

You might be wondering where I'm going with this, and no this wasn't just some space for me to rant about video games. This ties in to the company and the relationship of everything in the company "appearing" to seem well and dandy, when they might not actually be. For the past two months (since the chapter was released), Behaviour Interactive on their social media platforms continue to post about how wonderful this chapter is and how great their previous few chapters have been (however, there would be one or two in between that would stand out with positivity), even though on multiple sources, reviews have been considered awful, and the community has certainly voiced their negative opinions on Behaviour's recent inclusions. However, quite recently within the past few weeks, they have made exceptional changes and have made an attempt to show that they are now going to try to listen to the community more, and monitor more precisely the community response to certain additions and changes.

If I were to be the Brand Manager, I would have absolutely acknowledged the negative perceptions much more early on, as waiting for almost a month and a half while other events and updates are still being released is just not a good look. Something else I feel would've idealized more was more attention to the more attached community that we know aren't going anywhere anytime soon, and acknowledging their commitment to our game, if not rewarding them in some way. The most loyal customers should always be treated the best.