CULTIVATING COMMUNITIES:
How Gameloft worked with AppFollow
to strengthen their gaming community & create better relationships with players.
20 years
of work
190 games
available
70M
monthly active users
Client since
Sep 2020
Gameloft has been a pioneer in video game development and publishing for more than 20 years.
It is a leading global publisher of digital and social games for all digital platforms, and its mission is to provide the best gaming experience for its players all over the world.
With more than 190 games available, and over 70 million monthly active users, Gameloft has a large and diverse community. The communities exist across multiple channels — from the app stores to Discord to social media. Gameloft believes that community is the key to keeping players engaged and happy as they continue to build their brand — it gives players a reason to stay loyal and return to their games.
The key satisfaction
AppFollow’s ability to mould itself to meet Gameloft’s evolving needs. They were the only platform that provided this adaptability.
What they hoped to achieve with AppFollow
1. Deep-dive into their games’ performance and player behaviour
2. To understand player perception and uncover pain points
3. Expand presence on the app stores — improving store visibility
4. Improve their games’ overall performance on the stores
5. Improve customer support response time and effectiveness
The KPIs that Gameloft track with AppFollow
Response rate
Number of daily responses
Response time
(aim: under 24 hours)
Reply effect
(how support agent contributed to improving the player’s experience)
Community sentiment
(using Semantic insights)
Community feedback
(using Semantic tags)
Gameloft’s pain points & use case
Last year, Gameloft reviewed their communities and were happy with the progress on Discord and social media but found their community on the app stores in need of attention. What they missed were the technological foundations that would let them gather all the pieces of user feedback from different sources and then interpret the data from a global viewpoint. Integrating store reviews into their omni-channel community mix was a key part of Gameloft reaching their community more effectively.
As the Global Engagement Marketing Manager for Gameloft, a big part of Ana Maria Chelaru’s role is to craft the overall engagement strategy for the company. What this means is looking for novel approaches to nurture community growth and drive conversations with players to build user loyalty and maintain high retention in the community channels. Ana was aware of the huge opportunity for nurturing the community by replying to store reviews. Players who are engaged are often those that leave a review on the app stores with valuable feedback. It was clearly a great channel for community building but had so far not been taken advantage of by Gameloft.
The challenge at hand
But before she could go ahead and begin nurturing this channel, Ana was faced with a number of obstacles. Firstly, there was providing enough manpower to this channel to meet the needs of their thriving communities of players. Secondly, they were also in need of technological tools and frameworks to start driving more conversations with players in the stores.
What’s more, as Gameloft’s games are very popular, they had huge numbers of reviews being published on the app stores. Though they did have a few employees dedicated to engaging with reviews for each game, they could only respond within a particular time frame, and only a small selection of reviews actually got a response.
AppFollow’s review management
changed the game
AppFollow review management tools and automation allowed Gameloft to be more present in the stores and better interact with their player community. Firstly, they could optimize their response strategy for speed and efficiency. Gameloft has implemented automated responses, auto-tags, and template replies, which has helped them get back to players more quickly.
Gameloft loved AppFollow’s user-friendly interface and the fact that it allowed for easy visibility of analytics for a variety of key metrics and offered useful charts to track rating changes.
The fact that they have such a great relationship with their AppFollow Customer Success Manager added immense value to their experience. They greatly appreciate the AppFollow Customer Success team, which always worked to solve any issues that occurred. The Customer Success team at AppFollow also do all they can to accommodate any changes to Gameloft’s needs and make the platform as flexible and adaptive as possible to the fast-changing nature of the company’s continuing growth. This extent of service is something Gameloft feel would not be available with any other platform.
Since July 2021, when Gameloft implemented AppFollow for all their games, there have been some hugely successful results:
Heroes of the Dark (Google Play)
Reply effect* after using AppFollow:
+1.42
Percentage of ratings from reviews that increased after a response:
62%
*Definition of Reply effect: an algorithm that creates a key metric based on whether the review was updated after the developer's reply and how much time passed between the reply and the update.
Average review response time for Dungeon Hunter 5
Before AppFollow
30 days
After AppFollow
3 days
“AppFollow allows us to better understand how our players perceive our games and can quickly spot any pain points and address them to the teams in charge, helping players to actively reach a better gaming experience.”
Ana Maria Chelaru, Global Engagement Marketing Manager
Dragon Mania Legends.
Reply effect* after using AppFollow:
Google Play:
+0.60
*Definition of Reply effect: an algorithm that creates a key metric based on whether the review was updated after the developer's reply and how much time passed between the reply and the update.
Reply rate is the amount of user reviews that received a response on the stores.
Looking to the future
- Bringing the various community environments inside one single management console.
- Implementing advanced multi-language support from AppFollow via an integration to assist players across the globe in their own language.
- Bridging internal systems used by other teams in Gameloft (such as HelpShift) to deliver a better customer experience.
- Continue deep analyses of the games’ performance & trends.
Finally, being able to moderate Steam reviews and forums, as well as providing players with multi-lingual support during real-time interactions from AppFollow are also something that Gameloft would like to have at their disposal. The AppFollow product team is working hard every day to make as many of these hopes a reality.