9 Rules for Talking to Players: A Strategy Guide for Game Devs
push to talk #19 // a guide for writing difficult messages to video game enjoyers
Every game dev has run into this situation:
You're going to announce something—maybe it's a new game, or an update to a game you've already put out. And, for whatever reason, you have a feeling like this could go wrong.
Maybe it's something to do with monetization, or you have to ship a changes that's gonna piss off a vocal minority of your players. Even if you know you're doing the right thing, how do you make them understand?
These situations can be incredibly stressful. If your game is a banger, your players are probably pretty passionate about it, which can make the stakes feel high—you want to do a good job for them!
But, let's be honest: a lot of developers are scared to talk to players online for good reasons.
Everyone who's worked on games for some time has seen at least one of their peers get massive player backlash for the way they communicated about a decision that—they thought, at least—was the right one. I have friends who've left the industry for good because of the stress and emotional toll they took after a message to players went wrong.
It doesn't always feel like "fair feedback," either. Although most players are just normal people who love games, there's always some small segment of haters who get a kick out of their own performative outrage, and who'll take any opportunity to start a pile-on.
I know a lot of game developers who see this sort of thing happen over and over, and they start to get cynical. The haters get to them, and they start to lose their passion for games. They think: why do I wanna put my heart and soul into something just for it to be torn down by people like this?
You hate to see it, but it happens.
The good news is it doesn't have to be this way. Talking to players can feel a lot less perilous if you keep some basic ground rules in mind.
What follows is a set of steps that—if followed—will meaningfully de-risk whatever message you have to convey to your players. Even if you don't think you're very good at communicating, I believe anybody can use these tools to communicate successfully online. And I know it works because it's the same tools I've been using to help game devs in my comms and marketing roles at games studios over the last decade.
1) Ask why you're saying anything at all.
Many devs get stuck in a purely reactive mode where they feel like they have to respond to every comment they see online. And it's just not the case. It's okay to silently absorb some feedback, or let some salty comments flow past like debris in a flood.
Good reasons to put out a message include addressing widespread concerns, announcing and explaining actions you'll be taking, or correcting misinformation that seems to be getting a foothold in your community. If something really damaging is being said about you, and it's being taken for gospel truth, yeah—you probably ought to say something.
But if you don't have a specific outcome you're looking to drive, maybe sit back and cool it for a bit. Don't just start posting off the cuff. Think a little harder until you have a clearer idea about your purpose.
And, no, "calming people down" with some tripe like "we hear you!" is not actually worth most of the time. By and large, people only want to hear from you if your words connect to some specific action you're taking. More on that in a second.
Once you know why you want to say something at all, you're ready to move on to to step two.
2) Start by imagining the reaction you want.
There's an easy exercise I like to do for any complicated message, which is to imagine what the top comments or replies on my post will look like. What do I want people to say? How will people summarize it? What will the memes be?
In other words, you start by imagining the end of the process. Imagine you've put out your message—for the sake of example, it's a tweet. What do you want the replies to look like? What do you want the title of the Reddit thread linking to your tweet to be? That might sound like a joke, but if you're saying something kinda spicy, that's what you're actually going to get. So figure out what you want it to look like.
Write these imagined reactions down, in the exact words you'd want them to use (keeping it realistic, of course).
These are your Targeted Takeaways.
Wow, what a thoughtful Reddit user! And so many upvotes. Let's see what the YouTubers have to add:
So true, @A_Real_Commenter.
Admittedly, this is basically just a visualization exercise, but it will help with the next step.
3) Figure out your key messages.
Let's move one step back in the chain. What do you need to say to get to the reactions you imagined in step two? How do you get to those targeted takeaways?
This is the start of the actual writing process. You're basically going to get all of the most important details of your message into a bullet-point outline, with as little fluff as possible.
If it's a complicated or spicy message, the initial outline should almost always follow this exact flow:
Start with the headline. "Because of X, we are doing Y."
Briefly acknowledge the situation's impact on players
Add valuable information (state the facts and give context)
Clarify how you're handling edge cases
Explain a bit more about what comes next.
Once you have that outline done, it's time to condense. Your key messages really need to be no more than three points you want players to remember, and they should almost always center around actions you're taking instead of feelings.
This is basically the most condensed possible version of your message. It's the stuff that you want absolutely everyone to understand, even if they take nothing else away from your message.
If possible, I almost always recommend giving readers a single sentence or 2-3 bullet "TL;DR" or "headline takeaway" at the top of your actual, published version of the message. Most won't read further, and it gives advocates something to run with and share. Often you'll see people in comments sections or replies repeating your bulleted TL;DR almost verbatim, if it's worded in straightforward, everyday language.
One of the hardest messages I've ever worked on was last year's announcement that Odyssey Interactive is moving on from its first game, Omega Strikers, to develop new games in the same universe.
This was a seriously scary message to put together, but we felt like if we just honestly explained why we were doing what we're doing, players would understand. But just to be safe, in every single venue where we posted our message (which wound up being a 6-minute video) we also included a TL;DR with four bullet points to reiterate exactly what was happening.
There were a lot of nuances to explaining exactly how we'd wind down Omega Strikers while continuing to support online play, balance, and bugfixes, so we wound up breaking the "three bullets max" rule-of-thumb. It worked out pretty well for us in the end, but if I could go back now and redo it, I'd simplify that part of the message even further.
4) Tell the truth and talk like a human.
Now comes the part where you REALLY figure out a complete draft of your message. This is the hardest rule to follow consistently. It's way too easy to slip into corporate jargon and weak, sloppy, dishonest writing whenever you're writing something potentially scary or difficult. You must communicate using direct, down-to-earth language. No corporate pablum.
There is a trick to pushing past the tendency to write BS and get to an honest, human-sounding first draft, though—I wrote a longer post about this one, called How to Talk to People on the Internet, and you should read it.
The TL;DR version is that for your first draft of just about any message (whether it's a blog post or a video script or whatever) you should just explain what you're doing the same way you would explain it to a smart co-worker who you trust. Tell the truth, in everyday language. And don't worry if it sounds too harsh or inappropriate for the audience or whatever. Just write it down the way you talk in real life. This will make your message sound more authentic, and your audience will naturally pick up on that authenticity and respond to it.
I advise devs to literally go find a smart coworker in person and tell them what you're planning on saying as part of this process, because it'll help you put your intentions into words. And—crucially—if you tell someone you trust what you're planning on doing and it's sounding really wrong to your own ears, that's a great sign that it's going to sound wrong to players as well. In those cases, you might have other issues you need to solve before you're ready to draft some comms.
5) Take ownership of problems and screw-ups.
It's fundamental to human nature that we hate to hear whining and excuses, especially from people in positions of power. So if somebody has messed up, or there's a problem only they can solve, we want to hear them take responsibility for the situation. The desire for ownership only goes up the more we perceive the speaker as being powerful. It's merely annoying to see a game designer at a studio blaming players for his games' problems, but if a CEO does it? It's an outrage.
The implications for communicating online cannot be overstated: you have to take ownership of problems and focus on what you're doing to fix them. It's fine to point out mitigating facts, but ultimately your message has to hinge on the actions you're taking next.
This rule is one to keep in mind whenever you're editing your message down. A big part of ownership mentality is avoiding anything that comes across as passive aggressive or weak.
Some examples of weak comms approaches:
Playing victim, whether that's highlighting that people are being mean to you or by trying to make it about how some members of the audience are misbehaving.
Being sarcastic or trolly toward critics who have a valid point
Lame cliche phrases like "we hear you" or corporate nonsense like "accordingly we will be actioning these priorities…"
Turning off the comments section (weak!)
Particularly in American culture, the public aversion to weakness extends to the point that I often advise people against apologizing at all. Saying "this is unacceptable and here's what we're doing about it" goes 10x further than "we're sorry."
Even the biggest companies in the world fail to understand this point. Apple recently made this mistake when it apologized for its viral smash-happy iPad Pro ad. I was astonished to see their marketing VP come out and say "We missed the mark with this video, and we’re sorry.” What's the point of that? It earned them zero goodwill—all it did was establish the incident as a big fat L in the otherwise illustrious history of Apple advertising, without explaining why we should believe Apple will do anything differently going forward.
A better response would have been: "Yeah, actually that ad sucked. We fired the senior leader and/or agency responsible for it, and we're already working on a new ad that matches our values a lot better. Look for that soon."
That's what I'd do, anyway. If Steve Jobs was still running Apple he'd have gone further and had the firings televised. People do not want apologies—they want acknowledgement of the situation and action to solve it.
6) Always write a "rude Q&A," even if you don't publish it.
A Rude Q&A is like a more realistic FAQ. It's not the questions you necessarily want to hear from players, but any questions—however cynical or nitpicky—that you can imagine getting upvoted in the Reddit thread that follows. You write these questions down, and then prepare answers that earnestly address the question to the best of your ability.
Despite the "rude" framing, I don't want you to get confused and think this is only about questions that mean or rude players might ask. This is actually your opportunity to think through questions that any players might have, and get prepared with an answer. Think through different segments of your audience who might be impacted by your message differently—what are European players going to ask versus American players? Hardcore grinders vs. casual enjoyers?
For example, imagine you're rolling out a new required sign-in system related to a major games platform. You might want to ask "how will this sign-in system affect players in countries where that major games platform isn't available?"
These are purely hypothetical scenarios.
The more you talk to your players and pay attention to the sorts of questions they've asked you in comment threads on previous announcements, the more you'll build up the ability to foresee questions or edge cases and prepare answers accordingly.
As part of this process, you will almost always think of something so important that it should be added to your actual message, either as a public FAQ at the bottom of the post or as something you're saying in the main body of your announcement.
Sidebar: When the Rules Aren't Enough
Even if you're really good at talking to players, and you follow all the rules, sometimes things in the games industry can get pretty weird and toxic. A quick side story along those lines:
Back when I lived in Los Angeles, my next-door neighbor was an environment artist working on a sequel to a very, very large and popular AAA game that—before it was ever even released—was the subject of an unbelievably intense online backlash campaign from fans of the first game in the series who were angry about the supposed plot direction of the new title. Some of you can probably guess which game I'm talking about.
My neighbor was an artist—a person capable of making beautiful game worlds. He had immigrated to the United States to pursue his dream of working on games, and this game release was supposed to be his big moment. I was excited to talk to him about the game he was working on, but he was strangely hesitant. He changed the subject, and went inside.
Afterward, his wife quietly explained that he'd been feeling overwhelmed and depressed because of the online outrage surrounding the game. She didn't understand the details, but she got the gist: "The people online, they say horrible things. They say it's a bad game," she said, her eyes reflecting the pain he was feeling.
A few months later, my neighbor left that studio for a tech job. It paid better anyway, he said. He and his family moved away.
This story is kind of an extreme case, but it's not that uncommon in the games industry, sad as that is to say.
I don't know for certain that I could have solved the particular comms crisis that hit the game my neighbor was working on. I have some ideas about what I would have done differently, but the point I want to make by sharing this story is that sometimes developers get shit on for stuff that they have absolutely no control over. It sucks that it's part of our industry's culture, and I hope it changes.
7) Pick a channel and message format that makes sense for the message and the audience.
Sometimes I think devs and even experienced marketing teams can be guilty of mindlessly defaulting to putting out every message through their biggest channel, even if the message isn't something that everybody needs to hear.
One infamous example of this would be Blizzard announcing their mobile Diablo game at Blizzcon, a convention that has traditionally been for hardcore PC gamers. It was the wrong audience, reached via the wrong channel, and the resulting memes identified this, mocking the idea that Blizzard thought they were talking to mobile gamers when actually talking to PC gamers.
I don't want to belabor this point, so I'll just summarize this one up into a couple of questions you can ask yourself to figure out whether your channel matches your message and audience:
Is the channel I'm using going to reach the right people?
Is the channel I'm using targeted enough to avoid spamming a bunch of people who won't care or—worse—who will actually be annoyed?
If the answer to both of those questions isn't "yes" then you should probably pick a different channel.
One other note on this thing: I always see teams waste a bunch of time arguing over who a message should come from. Do we put the CEO's name on it? The lead designer? The comms director?
In my view, the question of "who should this come from" is usually only important if the message is a fairly complicated one or if it involves serious trade-offs for people impacted, in which case the most accountable person should be the spokesperson. If there's a bug that you have to fix, it's fine if the message comes from the brand account. If you're doing layoffs, you need the CEO owning that.
8) Keep it as short and to-the-point as possible.
The best statement is one that fits on a single phone screen without scrolling. Do not make people go to a website to read some long, drawn-out statement. Edit relentlessly to get your key messages across in as few words as possible.
9) Speak the audience's language.
Often you'll see narratives—or even just little memes—start to form in YouTube comments or Discord discussions about your work. Players love when you give a little nod to these grassroots memes, even if it's something as simple as a throwaway joke or reference to something that the most engaged players in your community would get.
One of the greatest examples of a game dev nailing this in recent memory was in the cinematic reveal trailer for Battlefield 2042, which immortalized a widely-recognized player-created trickshot jet maneuver in CG:
The original video referenced by the trailer is part of the language of Battlefield—something any serious fan of the franchise would recognize. As one viewer put it:
For all the talk of fear and disaster and controversy, this part is what makes talking to players online actually fun. If done well, you can lift up people and create something players love.
That’s it for this week. I’m gonna go into the most toxic gaming subreddit I can find and try to convince people that game devs are humans.
See you next Friday.