Customer Story
Wargaming
Using social insights to learn from gamers
10 Minute Read
About Wargaming
As a global business with offices across 15 countries, game developer Wargaming operates 24/7, attracting an audience of over 150 million.
The company’s mission is to “deliver legendary online games. Globally. With passion” and has a vision ‘to make every player happy.’
Wargaming has created almost 20 free-to-play games, most being strategic, military player-versus-player games.
Its most famous game is World of Tanks, featuring early to mid-20th century era combat vehicles, and other popular Wargaming titles include World of Warships, World of Warplanes, and World of Tanks Blitz.
Voice of the player
Elena Loucaidou is the Voice of the Player Senior Manager at Wargaming, based at its headquarters.
Elena’s role encompasses everything to do with player experience. Her aim and ultimate goal is player happiness, and to make sure Wargaming’s players are happy with changes and updates to products and offerings.
Gamers communicate frequently, across multiple platforms, day and night – so there’s plenty of social data available to take insights from.
Wargaming teamed up with Brandwatch Analytics to better understand its players, using this social data as look into the players’ world.
Social listening: the drive
Wargaming’s drive for in-depth social listening is to listen and learn from its player community.
The challenge was that player feedback was collected manually, locally, without a tool to allow consolidation.
Before using Brandwatch, we would pick up different information from forums and blogs - it was a very manual process. Now we are able to bring everything under one umbrella. We’re now able to understand the sentiment of our customers, what is trending and what conversations they are having.
Brandwatch provides a 360 degree view of the player’s experience, displaying data in a structured and organized way, allowing Elena and the team to dive right into relevant conversations.
Data, insights, action
As a global team, working with a social listening platform that has a global presence is incredibly important to Elena.
“We have different community teams working on different titles and across different regions. Brandwatch covers a lot of social media, and blogs and forums, which is really important for us. It also covers all the languages we operate in, which is not very easy to find in a listening platform. Using Brandwatch, we are able to adopt a global approach.”
Working across multiple departments, teams and continents, Wargaming was looking for a platform that was easy to use, so the teams could get up and running quickly with the platform.
The contact and interactions Wargaming received from the Brandwatch customer success teams really stood out.
The training was brilliant; we found it was actually quite easy to build the Queries - even someone like me can do it, and I’m not an expert analyst.
Voice of the customer: distributing insights
World of Tanks is one of Wargaming’s most loved games.
When it was time to launch the 9.19 World of Tanks update, Wargaming first made the changes live on the North American server.
Once the release was live in America, Wargaming used Brandwatch real-time analytics to gauge the reaction to the announcement and to keep track of the discussion from its fans.
Wargaming immediately saw a spike in conversation, an overall positive reaction from its players in North America. Digging into the different platforms it was noted that forums were attracting a higher volume of negative sentiment.
We used Brandwatch to understand what that spike meant. Where were the comments coming from? What was the sentiment behind it, and why?
Brandwatch provided a single source of truth for Wargaming during this launch.
The team was able to categorize what the common topics were, which platforms its players were concentrating their attention to, and what the overall sentiment was around the announcement.
When the update launched in other regions, the Wargaming team were able to share the feedback so they knew what to expect from the launch, and more importantly, how to respond faster to player comments and questions.
Player feedback didn’t stop there.
Insights and feedback from the announcement were shared with product owners and development teams, so that they fully understood how the changes were perceived by the players, and decide on next steps.
Thanks to Brandwatch we avoided questions like ‘What is this?’ and ‘How do we deal with it?’ because we already had the answers.
The voice of the player was shared across the organization.
Now, ahead of future updates, the teams use Brandwatch to ensure they are listening to its players, understanding their reactions and sharing insights across every team and region.
The future: reactive to proactive
Wargaming is committed to working with Brandwatch to follow the online reaction to its marketing campaigns, game updates and releases.
Up next is making improvements to Wargaming’s onboarding process.
“At the moment we are very reactive in the way we use Brandwatch, but we want to move into a more proactive approach. Tracking information live, and on a daily basis, in order to be able to provide feedback to the wider team about what’s trending.”
As the voice of the player, Elena wants reach a point where Wargaming fully understands its players’ needs and behaviors, as well as their future expectations, so the organization is proactively ready and able to deal with any question.
This is where my vision is: understanding needs and behaviors, and how to get to a point where we can measure current and future emotions of our players.
Brandwatch is excited to work with Elena and Wargaming on their ongoing activities. The teams within Brandwatch will be on hand to support Wargaming from data, to insight, to action.