The Brighton-based start-up's new platform analyses Steam reviews to find out what players think, and what studios should do next
If you can't understand something, you can't fix it. That's the motivation behind a new platform that aims to cut through the noise of Steam reviews and find out what players really feel about a game, what the developers need to address, and even what game they should think about making next.
"Years of building, pitching, and raising for games made the same failure painful to watch," says Justin French, co-founder and CEO of the start-up GameDataCore in Brighton, UK. He tells GamesIndustry.biz that the problem is that studios, publishers, and investors often make decisions about the same game based on a "different version of reality," through different assumptions and interpretations. What's needed, he thinks, is a shared understanding.
The trouble is that player feedback can be difficult to analyse. We've all seen stories of players leaving a negative Steam review after spending more than a hundred hours playing a game – yet clearly it couldn't have been all bad. How did they really feel about it?
"What people say and what they mean are different things, and the useful bit is in the gap," says Simon Sparks, co-founder and COO of GameDataCore. "One review usually holds three or four different things: something praised, something complained about, a comparison, a bug, a claim. A thumbs-up flattens all of that into one signal."
There are already tools available that can sum up player sentiment towards a game based on reviews, like SteamSummarize.
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