How to get feedback from your users

There are a whole host of reasons why should be listening to what people are saying about your game, and indeed your competitors.

Discover bugs
The most obvious reason is that it enables your users to inform you about the bugs they may discover whilst playing your game.

Get Feedback
It is great designing a game that you love, but you also need to make sure other people love it too. Getting feedback from users as to what they like and don’t like about your game is a great way to improve your product.

Add new features
Finding out what people like about your game is a great start, but to really create a product love it’s worth considering adding in features that other people are asking for.

Check the price
If it’s one thing people will complain about it’s the price of your game. Charge too much, and no one will play, charge too little and you’ve lost potential income. Listening to what people think it is actually worth will help you set the right price.

The obvious starting point is asking people you know for honest feedback. But this will only get you so far. Broadly speaking there are two main ways to find out what people think about your game. You can ask them. Or you can listen to what they are saying elsewhere.

Asking for feedback.
If you are going to ask for feedback you have to ensure that people have a way of replying. This is especially simple if you have a blog or website for your game. Enabling comments on a blog can enable you to regularly ask questions of your readers about a variety of different things.

You can also add a contact form or adding contact details to your site. If you are using software such as WordPress this is especially simple as many great plugins have been created such as Contact Form 7.

For a more structured approach to getting feedback there are specialist software that can be added to your site. One of the best solutions is getsatisfaction, being used by big and small to ask for and receive feedback for products and services. There is a monthly fee so it’s not for everyone. However, for those with a limited budget, Google has created a very similar, free product called Google Moderator. Definitely worth a look.

Finally, if you have established Twitter and or Facebook pages you can use them to ask for feedback from your fans and followers.

Listening to what people are saying
If you are lucky, people will be talking about your game of their own accord. You can set up search alerts on Google, Twitter and Facebook so you know what people are saying about your game. The next post will give a tutorial on how to set up these alerts and how to use them