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Boost Player Retention Through Smart Community Management with Tim Smith
48 Plays24 days ago
Episode Summary: In this insightful episode, Greg sits with Tim Smith to discuss COHEZION, a community-focused tool designed to streamline player engagement and community analytics. Tim shares his journey from gamer to entrepreneur, highlighting how his platform helps studios understand and leverage their community data for increased player retention and satisfaction.
Key Takeaways (with timestamps):
- Community-Driven Development (07:10): Engaging communities early significantly boosts loyalty and advocacy.
- Value of Data (17:07): Leveraging qualitative and quantitative data from player feedback provides deeper insights into community needs.
- Optimizing Workflow with Automation (35:09): Automation reduces burnout by streamlining tasks, allowing community managers to focus on meaningful player interactions.
- Early Community Building (07:46): Building communities early in the development cycle is critical to long-term game success.
- Importance of Feedback Loops (37:39): Keeping players informed on issue resolution enhances satisfaction and trust.
- Evolving Role of Community Managers (12:07): Today's community managers require diverse skill sets, from analytics to direct community engagement, highlighting the importance of supportive tools.
Notable Quotes:
- "In traditional SaaS, they would kill for this amount of data." – Tim Smith
- "Community managers are your allies; you just need to get them the information so they can bring it to the appropriate sources." – Greg
Links:
- Connect with COHEZION: COHEZION Website
This weeks episode is sponsored by Nexys Wireless. Check out the REDMAGIC Pro 10 - www.nexysmobile.com/redmagic
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Transcript
Introduction to Tim Smith and Cohesion
00:00:00
Speaker
hey everybody. Welcome to Player Driven. Here's what you're about to listen to. Today, we're talking to Tim Smith. He is the co-founder of Cohesion. Cohesion is a community-based management tool. And we talk about how community itself is the key to standing out in a saturated market with so many new games coming out.
Leveraging Player Feedback in Gaming Studios
00:00:16
Speaker
How do you make sure that you know that you're getting noticed and you're people are spreading the word of your game? We talk about how studios are sitting on a ah gold mine of player feedback and data, but they don't know how to use it, which is crazy because data is living in all these different systems, including their own internal system. So how can studios use this data to make it smarter, more informed
AI and Automation in Community Management
00:00:34
Speaker
decisions?
00:00:34
Speaker
And we talk about how AI and automation are essential for scaling community management without burnout. It's really fun conversation. Cohesion is a really cool tool. And tool and if you've been listening to the Player Driven podcast, be sure to check us out on LinkedIn. You can go to playerdriven.io.
00:00:48
Speaker
We'd love to hear from you, our listeners. It helps understand the type of content we want that we want to create for you. And just also always nice to hear from you. So don't be afraid to reach out to us at Player Driven. hope you enjoy this week's episode.
Sponsor Message: Nexus Mobile
00:01:04
Speaker
This episode is sponsored by Nexus Mobile. They sent me the Red Magic Pro 10 to bring along with me to GDC so I can film some clips, play some games, and check it out. And first of all, this screen was a beautiful screen. It it is a 6.85 inch AMOLED screen. You can see it's 144 hertz refresh rate. It was a fun phone to use on my flight. Check out the Red Magic 10 Pro on Nexus Mobile with plans starting as low as $25 month.
Tim Smith's Career and Cohesion's Mission
00:01:27
Speaker
Hello, everybody, and welcome to Player Driven. Today, we are we are joined by Tim Smith. He is the co-founder of Cohesion, a community-focused tool that helps you build and grow your community. And I think there's some really cool insights that we're from Tim today.
00:01:42
Speaker
He has been a solutions architect. He's been DevOps lead. He's had his hand in all different types of technology throughout his career, and he finally decided to start his own business. So let's figure that out. So Tim, thank you so much for joining me today. Is there anything you'd like to say about yourself?
00:01:57
Speaker
Saundersen, Thanks for having me glad to be here and have this discussion. Saundersen, Ph.D.: Little bit about cohesion, yeah know, this is not only company i want to build as a passion product for me, you know, play video games my entire life I got into engineering because of video Nicky Saundersen, Ph.D.: you know now i have the opportunity to to build something meaningful and impactful to the entire industry.
00:02:18
Speaker
And, you know, to give a little backstory about what Cohesion actually you know, we're building a entire platform that helps studios better understand their communities so they can make more data-driven decisions to increase player LTV and player engagement.
00:02:34
Speaker
I think that's
Competitive Edge through Community Engagement
00:02:35
Speaker
cool stuff. I think if you're watching the world of gaming right now, you're seeing a bunch of these indie studios pop up, right And as good as it is that all these new creatives and indies are are coming to the forefront of the pack, it's also going to be really hard to stand out when there's a whole bunch of games. So what's the best way to stand out is to engage your community and have your community also be your cheerleaders to help kind of build out this game. And I think it's really cool. and I'm excited to talk about how you're doing this data.
00:03:02
Speaker
Before we get into the nitty gritty, what was the game that you played that you're just like, i want to do this for a living? I'm sold.
00:03:10
Speaker
um That's a great question. So Total Annihilation was the game that got me into engineering. And this was back in 1997. And I've been programming ever since.
00:03:24
Speaker
The game that was kind of the catalyst for cohesion was actually Path of Exile.
From Forums to Discord: Evolution of Gaming Communities
00:03:30
Speaker
I had been playing a solo self-found hardcore character, ended up losing it to a bug.
00:03:36
Speaker
And yeah I went to go report this bug to Grinding Gear. And I was kind of flabbergasted in the approach they took to collecting community submitted bug reports, feedback, you know anything like that.
00:03:49
Speaker
And this triggered for me, like, how how are they actually turning this into actual insights, especially a game like Path of Exile, where they have massive communities, they have so much going on.
00:04:00
Speaker
How do they take all this information and start to actually utilize that in instead of it just collecting dust within the forums? what Can you kind of take me back to that experience, right? What what year was this around? Was community really like...
00:04:15
Speaker
the thing then or were you in a forum not saying it's not a community but like i'm curious what what was this like um so this was 2018 so you know only ah only a stone throw away right yeah um but yeah i mean especially with grinding gear they've always been big on their forums that that's been kind of their whole thing is they wanted to have a lot of community engagement but they're one of the few that have actually attempted at that time, I think, to really have a strong community outside of the game directly.
00:04:47
Speaker
um And we're starting to see a lot of trends in the industry, you know, to your point earlier about indie studios, you know, taking this community first approach, but we're even seeing that with AA studios. If you look at Dreamhaven, Michael Morhaime's new publishing company, all their studios and all their partners all have very strong stance in community being first.
00:05:11
Speaker
And if you look at how that's evolved from 2018 era to what we have now, we're seeing a lot more engagement across social platforms like Discord, where players are growing these communities into massive amounts. you know We're seeing Discords that have north of a million members, and even their subreddits don't compare to how big their Discords are getting.
00:05:36
Speaker
No, it's wild to me and I love it, right? But, you know, I think you and I have both been in tech, it seems, long enough where, like, we started at forums, you kind of go to Reddit, and now you're having back kind of a, it almost brings me back to AOL ah chat rooms, you know, where it's like, hey chat rooms are coming back. Discord is basically a giant chat room with sub chat rooms. And I'm I love the real-time communication on tools like Discord, right? Because again, it it goes even beyond gaming on Discord, right? I'm in some, I mess with LED lights, right? So in a few, few Discords with LED lights. Like it really is something where you can have this real-time conversation with these fans, but it's not a Reddit back and forth conversation. You can troubleshoot things real quick. And I love the fact that
00:06:21
Speaker
you're building these directly into Discord. You realize, hey, everyone is here. If you're reporting a bug, why am I going to make you go to a website? Why am I going to make you send an email? You're already in Discord. We might well keep you in Discord, right? So I love how you recognize that.
Challenges of Multi-Platform Feedback
00:06:35
Speaker
And are you noticing, i guess, through community, are there any other channels that we should be keeping our eye on that are starting to kind of make more of a play into the mainstream?
00:06:44
Speaker
Well, I mean, I would say that all social platforms have an impact. um And we see any amount, like any any data being generated across all these platforms, some TikTok, YouTube, X, Reddit, that there's so much that's being created and and players are freely giving this this feedback feedback.
00:07:08
Speaker
to the developers, and they just don't really have the the tools or processes to be able to capture all this data at scale. And what's even more difficult is when you start to look at these different cohorts that exist between the different platforms, because they all have their own microcosm of how they they view the game experience, the things that they like to see improved, and you know being able to understand how these different branches of your community are are receiving the changes in your game and the things they like or dislike In traditional SaaS business, they would kill for this amount of data.
00:07:43
Speaker
They would absolutely be over the heels to have this. And you know to me, this is a really untapped opportunity for making better decisions from a studio perspective, but also a great opportunity to start driving more engagement.
00:07:59
Speaker
Right. Because there's there's all this stuff that's being created. How do you start leveraging that to to to pull in your community and not necessarily get them on one social platform, but at least be able to to communicate with those specific cohorts and identify what's important to them and streamline those processes?
00:08:16
Speaker
We talk with a lot of indies and it comes down to understanding when should I time it? I could count. Countless, I guess that's the word I'm for. Studios are like, I want to get my game out there first and then I'll worry about launching a community. And then we have the other people that are launching a community, getting people into the lore of whatever they're building and and going from there.
00:08:36
Speaker
Have you seen a best practice? If you were building a studio, would you have one approach over the other? Or is there things that kind of make that decision change?
Timing and Strategy in Community Building
00:08:45
Speaker
Yeah. So great question.
00:08:47
Speaker
ah and And this one's kind of loaded because it's also going to depend on the the beliefs of the studio, right? You know, what what are they looking to do and accomplish?
00:08:58
Speaker
And, you know, we've seen some games launch as early um as you know, what what would would be considered traditionally is like friends and family testing. They're already starting to build communities around their game, bringing in players for that early testing.
00:09:13
Speaker
But then we've also seen where there's a real big, push to build those communities right before launch. Those we haven't seen as successful, especially in today's market where we're seeing that players are definitely starting to vote a lot more with their wallet um and buying less of the games that are completely buggy or don't have a community around them.
00:09:35
Speaker
and you I don't think that this necessarily has a negative impact on early access games, but I think it does reframe the focus around what an early access game is and and could be.
00:09:47
Speaker
you know With these early communities, they do a very good job of framing this as This is early access. There's going to be bugs. There's going to be things that don't work as intended.
00:09:58
Speaker
That's great. We understand it. We really want to understand, like do you like the game mechanics that we're going for? And do you like the gameplay loops that exist? And that's where we're seeing the most success.
00:10:09
Speaker
Yeah, i love that you say that, right? We're we're talking and the podcast going to come out for a couple of weeks, but it's it's March 4th and it's the end of the Steam Next Fest. And, you know, it's so cool to be able to see ah especially being on LinkedIn, where you see all these indies kind of talking about their titles that are out there, right? And...
00:10:25
Speaker
It gives such a great opportunity for people to play your game and get that feedback. But it's just as important for these studios to ask for that feedback. Most players don't willingly give feedback. and It's just kind of the human nature. and We're just going to be passive people. But if something pops up at the end of the demo, did you enjoy this? What didn't you love? Or if you're in Discord, where a lot of these people already are, right? Like I was watching the video on the Cohesion site, right? And I love how, you know, you have your own Kanban boards on Discord.
00:10:54
Speaker
cohesion and then you can automatically push data to JIRA or whatever other tool your developers are using. Something we've learned over time is that developers, everyone doesn't want to, they don't want to leave their tool that they're commonly using, right?
00:11:07
Speaker
So by collecting the data from Discord, having a cohesion and pushing the data that's important to the engineers to be able to say, hey, people love this feature, but don't love this feature, right? especially when you're in early access, when you're in beta and you haven't committed everything into the game, or maybe you have at that point, right? You can make that educated decision on making a change before you go fully live.
00:11:27
Speaker
And I think that's the beauty of it. It's just being able to get out there and talk to those people who are playing your game. Because for a while there, people always thought if you build it, they will come. And that's not really the case and in gaming, right? Because there's so much being built that...
00:11:40
Speaker
you know, we play a game and if it offends us within the first X amount of minutes, we're going to go to the next game and kind of the wild west out there. Yeah. And, you know, kind of to your point earlier, you were talking about, you know, with so many games being released, it's kind of hard to break through the noise.
00:11:56
Speaker
I believe last year there was a game released on Steam every 25 minutes or so, which is mind blowing in itself. But, you speaks to the volume of how much,
00:12:08
Speaker
game content is is being created globally. and And you know those' those players you get during NextFest that come in, join your Discord, and want to actively participate in the development process, you know these are the players that are going to be your advocates.
00:12:25
Speaker
They're going to be the ones selling the word of mouth getting out there and like, hey, this game was cool, played it in Nexus. I'm to get all my games or all my play all my friends invested in this, bring them in together. And we're going play this game together because way I enjoyed it so much.
00:12:38
Speaker
And, you know, leveraging that is a great way to help your community grow even further. Because the more you can get those players involved early, the more they're going to be like, hey, you know, other friends I haven't talked to about this game yet.
00:12:51
Speaker
This is a lot of fun. and Go check them out. Yeah, you're basically creating a whole sales team for yourself, right? They're going out there selling their friends, hey, download this game. It's on sale. It's free. It's whatever, right? Like, those are the best words of mouth that you can get, right? It doesn't
Evolving Role of Community Managers
00:13:05
Speaker
matter. And the kind of goes into this whole notion of what is a community manager?
00:13:09
Speaker
Is it a support person? Is it an influencer? Is it a mix of both? We've spoken to community managers that are social media people as well, right? It seems like the role of social or community manager is starting to expand to have different subsets of it.
00:13:24
Speaker
um Are they becoming more influencers? what When you look at a community manager, is there a definition associated with that anymore? Is it starting to change? Yeah. This is a really this is really interesting, at least from my perspective.
00:13:38
Speaker
So what we've seen, you know since we had the early community managers to where we're at now, the d jobs that they have to do has has grown tremendously.
00:13:49
Speaker
you know They're no longer just the person that's communicating with the community or posting patch notes or blogs or those type of things or even you know community events.
00:14:00
Speaker
They're also the ones that are wrangling all the bug reports and player feedback that's g being generated across all these different social platforms. They're the ones that are trying to advocate for players and what their needs and wants are. And you know that kind of continues to grow, especially with you know the how much data we're seeing generated for any game.
00:14:22
Speaker
um But they're also very overloaded, would say. And that kind of detracts from them being able to fulfill more of the role of being a community manager and driving that engagement across these social platforms and having to put way more time into corralling that data. um um You're thinking about like the community managers for Destiny too.
00:14:47
Speaker
ah that That community management team, in my opinion, did a really good job. they you know They had a whole team for this, but typically you had one person that was kind of out in front. They were like the the the face of the company, if you able face a Bungie.
00:15:01
Speaker
um But then you had this whole support team behind them that was helping manage all the other operations that are happening behind the scenes. So there's there's pros and cons of that. you know One thing that I noticed with that is by having an individual face ah that's kind of you know predominant is they're more prone to community attacks, unfortunately.
00:15:22
Speaker
a patch comes out and players don't like it, you know they they don't go to the the producer or or anyone else like that. They go directly to the community manager. So it's it's nice to have some separation, but it's also good to have a ah face that's there to kind of continue that that tone and the the ways of communication that they've already built.
00:15:43
Speaker
I love the way you put it, right? Unfortunately, people tend to associate the face that they can see or the face that they could talk to as the person that caused this problem, right? It's like, yeah don't shoot the messenger. We're here to lay the information needed to the people there, right? The the community manager at the end of the day is your is your ally and you just need to get them the information so they can bring it to the appropriate sources. And I love how it's growing. I think it's, it's fascinating. I think, you know, back in the day, you think of a community manager as more of an entry level position, which I think it still is, but I think it can grow into something so much more.
00:16:16
Speaker
had my first job as a tier one support rep. And I remember the visibility you have on everything that's happening at the company, right? Like you don't know what's happening at the top, who's making those decisions within your company, but you know how your customers feel.
00:16:27
Speaker
You know what pisses them off. You know what makes them happy. ah And it's your job to relay that to the product team. And the product team then kind of stack ranks. How how important is this fix? Does need to go out there? I think you can learn so much from being a community manager for a couple of weeks, a couple of months, right? And you can really...
00:16:42
Speaker
to say, hey, you know what? I love the engineering and debugging of these issues. I want to go there. Or I really love breaking down the support and understanding what's going wrong. I want to go there. Or I want to do this. right I think it's like your your gateway drug, for lack of better words, into the gaming industry. And it gives you full visibility on the good, the bad, the ugly. I often was told told my employees, like it's a thankless job at the end of the day.
00:17:05
Speaker
But it's one of the most important jobs because you have full visibility everything that is happening out there. Yeah, no, I completely agree with that. They they have so much visibility. But one thing that I feel is very detrimental to the role of a community manager in today's market is as they're trying to advocate for players and their wants and needs, there's kind of two things that
Data-Driven Decisions in Community Management
00:17:27
Speaker
I've seen. One one is natural biases that appear. And this isn't a knock against anybody. you just ah It just happens.
00:17:36
Speaker
um And the second thing would would be, you know, they're making their suggestions on how we how the community is responding to things, but they don't have quantitative data in a lot of cases. It's very like, oh, we've seen, you know, some posts on Reddit. We've seen some posts here.
00:17:53
Speaker
And they're trying to make arguments, but they don't have enough solid data to actually be able to do that. which is a problem that we're also working on solving today. You you bring up two great points, and I think we should dig into those and see how they really work together, right? You talked about data and you talked about bias.
00:18:10
Speaker
And I think it's really important because, you know, especially when you're a smaller studio you fall in love with the game that you're making it and you have your mindset like, this is what I want to build. This is what's going to be. This is what it has to be, right?
00:18:22
Speaker
um But then you can take a look at the data and the data can tell a whole different story, right? Maybe you expected the players to play one way, but you're looking at the data and players are playing another way. So I'm going to let you decide here which is the better topic we should start with.
00:18:34
Speaker
Should we talk about kind of how data plays a role in the community itself or how you can help kind of understand what these personal biases are and how you can kind of get over them? ah Let's start with the data. I think that's a a better perspective to start with.
00:18:48
Speaker
um i know for us, when we're looking at all the data and how we create our our insights, is we're never just looking at bug reports or player feedback or community understanding in silos.
00:19:02
Speaker
you know And there's there's individual tools out there in the market that do these things. But where the power really is, is when you start building correlation across these data sets. If you release a patch, you see a whole bunch of bugs that are being created, but then you're not seeing any conversations come from the community. You're not getting any feedback about those bug reports that are necessarily being created.
00:19:23
Speaker
You know that might not really be a problem. And you can apply that same philosophy to like player feedback, you know. Player your feedback is a very interesting topic because everyone has their own ideas and opinions about a game, and it doesn't necessarily align with what the studio has in mind or what the long term goals look like for the game.
00:19:42
Speaker
So, you know, but what's important from this feedback, though, is when you start to identify the trends that are related to that. and And that can really influence the roadmap of the game when you start understanding, you know, we see a whole bunch of posts about matchmaking, arbitrary example, right?
00:20:00
Speaker
And players really want that improved. You're not really seeing any bug reports about it. but there's tons and tons and tons of conversations that are happening where players are dissatisfied with matchmaking. Either it takes too long or they won't oceanic servers.
00:20:15
Speaker
you know These types of things are are concerns that we constantly see all the time. And it's one of those things where In the back of your mind, you know it exists, but because you're not seeing it at a high velocity and you're not seeing a lot of players talk about it actively when you're online, especially with something like DipCord, where it's asynchronous chat, you know, things quickly get lost.
00:20:39
Speaker
So, you know, not knowing about those conversations, you're potentially leaving a whole entire market, you know, excluded from the game. I did a podcast with Thad Sasser from NetEase, and he he kind of broke this down to me that there's both qualitative feedback and quantitative feedback, right? Quantitative is the numbers, right? You can easily take a look at this. Hey, we expected more people to play this mode versus this mode, but we're not seeing that.
00:21:02
Speaker
Then there's qualitative, which is kind of like you just said, like, hey, yeah this game sucks. Well, why does it suck? Give me a little more details here, right? Like, it's great. We could see this all day. This game sucks, but that's not going to help me. fix that problem, right? So understanding and breaking it down. And I'm curious, you you said something great how Discord's asynchronous chat.
00:21:20
Speaker
For cohesion, are you capturing the big picture? Like give me a breakdown how cohesion is taking a look at the conversations that's happening and providing me or an indie developer with those yeah data insights.
00:21:32
Speaker
Yeah. So our our approach to collecting data around conversations on Discord, um very unique approach in my opinion. um But what we're doing is, and I'm not sure if you've ever used Discord's analytics, Greg, but they're very lackluster. They miss a a lot of very important things that you as a community manager would want to know. And they give statistics over the entire server.
00:21:56
Speaker
But you know as part of your community building, typically you're going to have channels that are dedicated to like post pictures of your pet or post pictures of like the building you've built.
00:22:07
Speaker
You know, things that are there for community engagement and to keep players active, but they don't necessarily have meaningful insights into the the pulse of your community. So what we're doing is we look at very specific channels within Discord. So this would be like your your game chat channel, you know, or general chat, whichever is more appropriate for your game.
00:22:27
Speaker
But what we do is we're looking at chat over a 24 hour period and we're identifying the topics that are being discussed. And more like for us, We don't have a predetermined list of topics that we're looking for. We're actually using the conversations to identify what are the big concepts, what are the big ideas here that are being discussed.
00:22:48
Speaker
Then we find all the correlated messages, build a nice summary for it, and then give you the tools to basically treat it like a chat GPT where you can start diving into this data, asking it questions, uncovering things that might not be obvious, a lot of functionality there.
00:23:04
Speaker
But then we're also... in the in the near future, we're rolling out tools that we can start to track trends over time. So we see a continuous trend of players talking about a specific you know game mode or something they're not really happy about, or they could be happy about it as well, but they're actively talking about it.
00:23:22
Speaker
We want to give you the the ability to understand how is this trending over time? Are players still excited about this? Are you not excited about it? How has this gone from one patch to the next patch? Just that we have more understanding of like how impactful are the changes that you're making actually impacting the community.
00:23:39
Speaker
That's so cool. I imagine that's something that's extremely helpful. I remember years ago, i went to a studio to try and pitch them something and they asked me the question, like, how am I supposed to know what I don't know, right? Like, I i know crashes are something. I know this is something, but how do I know what's not an issue that doesn't exist before? And I think that's where something like that really helps, right? You can say, hey, what are some things that are creeping up that I wouldn't have expected, right? Then all of a sudden, you start to spit out things that you're like, oh, I didn't even know my game does did something like this, right? Like, it It can help you give you visibility beyond the what you know. And I think that's something that's important and doesn't really exist that much.
00:24:16
Speaker
And that's really interesting that you bring that up. um One of the biggest problems that we, I wouldn't say problem, challenges. I like that better. ah One of the biggest challenges we've had with the community analytics piece is how do we make this actionable and more useful than what we have today. And the reason I say this is because in a lot of cases, you know, when we're talking with community managers, producers, directors, they've never had the ability to to do this before.
00:24:46
Speaker
So they don't even know like what's going to be the most impactful thing for them to be able to do with this, how they can best leverage this. So we know we're working with them to figure out like how how do we translate this into something you can glance at it and be like, OK, cool, this is something we need to action on, something that's important to the community and not just more noise in the pipeline. Yeah, right. It's solutions, not just concepts.
00:25:09
Speaker
um Going back to data, right? ah How much data, or i don't know how you want to answer this question, right? Where is data being pulled by cohesion, right? You get the discord data. Are you pulling any data from the game itself? Are you pulling, are you kind of matching stuff together? Like where is this data coming from?
00:25:28
Speaker
Yeah. So what we do. is we do have bug reporting, player your feedback, and community analytics on Discord today. We also have a web portal for bug reporting and feedback.
00:25:40
Speaker
And we also work with the studio to get game design docs. That way we can enrich our models so that when you're talking about a specific character or ability or world space, we actually know about that with our models.
00:25:53
Speaker
So we're able to enrich that data coming from the players or or from the community as a whole, that way our analytics are more specific. You know, an example like to use when talking about this, not sure if you ever played Command and Conquer, the original, yeah well, yeah I guess i be any of them, but the Tiberium Harvester, right?
00:26:11
Speaker
Pinnacle of Command and Conquer. um But Harvester is ah unique word because it's a noun, it's a verb, depending on where you are in the world.
00:26:21
Speaker
You know, it can be anything from a grocery store to a bar. You know, just that that one word has so many intrinsic meanings. But in the world space of the of the game, it specifically means this unit that goes out and collects a resource and brings it back to the refinery.
00:26:39
Speaker
Right. So for us, it's ensuring that we understand the the the taxonomy that makes up the game space. It is my favorite game of all time. And now that the source code has been released, i i am excited to be able to get my hands back on some classic C&C.
00:26:55
Speaker
We've gone too long for it. StarCraft took over and I'm not a fan of that. And one thing else I want to point out real quick. um So today we are only on Discord and Web Portal.
00:27:05
Speaker
ah We are actively building SDKs for Unity, Unreal, and Godot. That way we can make that process even more streamlined. you know We want to keep players in game for as long as possible. I think that's every studio's goal is how we keep them in the game for as long as possible.
00:27:21
Speaker
So we want to streamline that process, build it natively into game. That way they don't even have to leave to report a bug or get feedback. It's a funny concept and I want to harp on that in game. Sorry. I'm just taking notes here.
00:27:34
Speaker
But before we do around halfway through, I like to do a fireball around where I'm going to shoot some questions at you, not related to any of that. um Good to go. Yep. What do you have for breakfast? I didn't. I don't eat breakfast. All right. No coffee or anything?
00:27:48
Speaker
ah I run on monster.
Tim Smith's Personal Journey
00:27:52
Speaker
Monster. The other drink of champions here. um What is your dream vacation? Oh, so there's this place I go to in Florida. It's a little peninsula. Not many people know about it.
00:28:04
Speaker
The whole population ah of this peninsula is like less than a thousand people. The closest city, you can't call it city, it's a town, is about an hour away. And just being able to go there and disconnect from everything. Yeah, it's amazing.
00:28:19
Speaker
Beautiful. So you told us about your favorite game or your game that got you into gaming. What is the last game you played?
00:28:29
Speaker
I want to admit this. ah so League of Legends. would be the last yeah You get it in every once in a while. If you could live inside a game, what game would you choose?
00:28:40
Speaker
Oh, that's interesting. I've never asked that one before. I just thought about it. No, no. It's a good question. You know...
00:28:54
Speaker
you know Alright, this is going sound kind of probably chaotic, but um probably Shipbreaker. Shipbreaker? I don't know that one. I'll have to look it up. Yeah, it's ah it's a game where like you are in outer space and your whole job is to deconstruct spaceships. Alright.
00:29:13
Speaker
And i don't know, just the idea of floating around in space with with lasers cutting apart of spaceship, hoping it doesn't explode. Sounds relaxing. so Yeah. Um... um You can either say the last movie you watched or the last show you binge watched.
00:29:30
Speaker
Oh, the last show I binge watched would be The Righteous Gemstones. The Righteous Gemstones. Don't know that one either. have to take that one out too. Oh, it's it's definitely worth the watch. All right.
00:29:43
Speaker
right. Then you're off the hot seat. Easy enough, right? yeah um All right. So this is a great one because I was at Help Shift for God knows how many years we've called in-game support and in-game support is important.
00:29:55
Speaker
The problem is we always had trouble breaking into console and we wanted to break into console because that's where big AAA titles typically launched and it's changing-ish now. but the problem I always had with this is if I'm a console user, I don't want to be in the game doing support on my Xbox.
00:30:13
Speaker
That is a terrible experience. It's just not good. So we came up with a QR code method where you can scan and then do it on your phone. But even then, and tell me I'm wrong, like, If I'm playing FIFA, right?
00:30:25
Speaker
Are you going to go to EA's website to troubleshoot it? Or you going to go to Reddit or Discord to troubleshoot it, right? And then again, i get why you want me to stay in the game, but there's better solutions. So I always kind of wrapped my head around like, what is the best solution? I don't know if I ever really came up with one, but like, even with console, you think I still want to try and keep them in the game? Or you think maybe it's a better experience to push them to like a Discord?
00:30:53
Speaker
No, actually, our plan when we expand into mobile and console is going to be keep to keep them in the game. And I completely agree, like trying to create a bug report with a controller or even your phone is a very lackluster experience.
00:31:08
Speaker
So what we're what we plan on doing is actually using voice. So think of having an AI agent that's that's chatting with you to collect this information from you. You don't have to type anything. We collect all the data that we need and then we're able to action on it.
00:31:21
Speaker
Yeah, I think that makes sense, right? Get as much data as you can put them in the right place. I love the idea of Discord though, man, like pushing people to Discord, right? Keep them in a community where there's around like people. I think think there's a bigger solution that's going to come in. I don't know if it's going to involve Discord, but I think it's going to much more community focused solution.
00:31:40
Speaker
I just don't know if it it truly exists yet. Yeah, the the biggest problem with Discord in that context is we see that a lot of console players don't necessarily use Discord.
00:31:54
Speaker
Granted, the ones that do are definitely more active and they you know they want to be part of helping grow the game. But just the majority of players are going to be coming from the the PC world, at least on Discord. Yeah, that makes sense. I mean, it's just more natural. we'll see what happens in the next couple of years. So I feel like Discord has been really on a hot streak here. and And we'll kind of see where it goes from here.
00:32:16
Speaker
As someone that has been very developer focused, right? DevOps developer, lead developer, goes on and on and on, right? you You decided to build a tool around community, which I love because developers should listen to their community. But what kind of struck you and said, hey, you know what?
00:32:32
Speaker
We need to build a tool that's more accessible for players and easier for developers. it Was it just the path of exile situation you saw yourself face or kind of a few light bulbs go off at once?
00:32:44
Speaker
ah It was a combination of things. So back in the Total Annihilation days, I built several mods. I was part of some teams that did some very successful mods, you know had a community there of around 10,000 members at the time.
00:32:58
Speaker
ah And I've always created mods for games, just one of things that I'd like to see typically. um So I've always been around gaming communities. I've always had some cohort of friends that I play with, ah you know, even depending on the discord that I'm in on that day, you know, it's a different subset of players.
00:33:16
Speaker
So, you know, really, tight understanding of how communities work. But then doing what I've done in my previous roles, I've always been one for streamlining workflows and optimization about how we communicate, ah so especially with bigger teams. At one point in my career,
00:33:35
Speaker
You know, I was running 15 different teams across the globe and, you know, ineffective communication was definitely a big thing that happened. So, you know how do you how do you optimize those processes to ensure that the team has the highest likelihood of being successful?
00:33:50
Speaker
And then, you know, me me being a gamer, ah you know, and then the path of exile combination just kind of, you know, hey, this thing doesn't exist. Studios don't have the ability to do this today. Well, let's fix that problem.
00:34:05
Speaker
There's so many missed opportunities that are out there. We really need to you know push more narrative around that and show the power of community. On the flip side, I've also seen how leveraging this data incorrectly has had a negative impact on games.
00:34:22
Speaker
um yeah I was an early adopter for Escape from Tarkov. You know, I was one of those people that bought the alpha edition, like $160 a pop.
00:34:33
Speaker
I enjoyed it so much that I bought six of my friends a copy so we could all play together. and I really loved the early days of Tarkov and where it was going, but now they've over-indexed so much on streamers that as someone that can't play 80 hours a week, the game's not enjoyable to me anymore.
00:34:54
Speaker
And this just is an example of how You know, studios don't have the greatest tools or any tools to capture all this data. So they're forced to go to influencers to understand, like, what don't you like? What do you like? And they, of course, have their own microcosm.
00:35:08
Speaker
You know, you don't watch a streamer because you disagree with them. you're You're in alignment with what they think. So you have a whole entire echo chamber around these things. And, you know, how do you take that data in and and remove some of that bias that we talked about earlier and make it more organic across all social platforms?
00:35:26
Speaker
Yeah, too much of anything is too much, right? And whether it be feedback from the person playing 80 hours a week, whether it be feedback from the person that plays one hour a week, right? You got to really spread ah spread it out and figure out from kind of the full landscape of what people think of the game. And I think it's an interesting thing.
00:35:43
Speaker
um With community, I think, and... you guys are utiliz lot utilizing a bunch of different automations to help make it easier for players to submit tickets to do things, right?
00:35:55
Speaker
um You know, we we're kind of at this point, and I like to, i don't know if you ever heard the Gartner hype cycle. It's kind of when a new technology comes out, like it gets super hyped up and AI was all over it, all the way at the top of the hype cycle, right? And now I think it's starting its decline on the hype cycle. It doesn't mean AI is going to die, right? It means that right all the fad products that came out, all the, everyone can do everything in two seconds, right? Like,
00:36:16
Speaker
That's all going to die out. And now the product will start to mature. Right. So, you know, you're utilizing AI and community management. And I think that's good. I think it's smart. Right. But I think the human element also still makes sense. So where do you think AI belongs in community management? And how do you keep the human element still front and center so that when the player needs to talk to a human, they're there?
AI's Role in Optimizing Community Management
00:36:36
Speaker
Yeah, so we're definitely not trying to replace community managers. We're just trying to augment their work. And i think that's very important. We definitely want to keep that human involvement in there. But for us, it's more along the lines of how do you optimize these workflows?
00:36:51
Speaker
um And I think a lot of players don't necessarily understand how much... data, bug reports, player feedback is being created across all these platforms is kind of mind blowing, to be honest.
00:37:05
Speaker
And, you know, from our perspective and from our talks with our customers is there's just so much of it that it's really hard to separate signal from noise, but then turn it into something actionable.
00:37:17
Speaker
You know, if you if you look at other social listening tools in a lot of cases, they show you like, oh you had so much engagement on this platform and that platform. That's great. I'm glad that engagement went up. But like, what's what's the the value there? How do I start understanding that data at scale and, you know, correlating it across all these other social platforms?
00:37:39
Speaker
So it's more about the automation, building out summaries of what's going on. being able to create high fidelity data. In a lot of cases, I say most cases, players aren't QA.
00:37:50
Speaker
They don't know how to write high fidelity bug reports. So that goes back to the community manager where they're like, you know, hey, Greg, saw you created this bug report, um but we really don't understand this. You can give us more details.
00:38:02
Speaker
And then there's a whole long back and forth process. Then finally, the community manager, when I do have enough information, is having to manually go create this bug report, put it into their internal management tool or project tool.
00:38:14
Speaker
And you know it's so it's ah it's a big headache. really. So being able to optimize those workflows where we can and still keep that human element in there is pinnacle for us.
00:38:24
Speaker
And that's even why we built feedback loops into our system. So if you submit a bug report, we let you know, hey, it's been submitted. It's going into review. It's going through triage. It's been released.
00:38:36
Speaker
You know, just that you as a player feel like, hey, my my efforts are being at least heard, rewarded. I know that something's being done about this. It's not just going into a black box somewhere.
00:38:47
Speaker
It's so funny you say that because you show that off on your video on your site where you, every time you moved the Kanban to the next thing, it updated the player on Discord. And I feel like that's so important and often overlooked so much is just give the player some feedback on what's happening.
00:39:05
Speaker
It could be, hey, you probably won't hear back from us for 72 hours, but we're looking at your ticket. Great. Great. Nine out of 10 times, this thing goes into a black hole and you never hear about it again. And being proactive, even if you're being reactive at first, hey, someone brought me a ticket.
00:39:20
Speaker
I'm going to proactively update you on every step of the way. First of all, that should be completely automated, which it is with you guys, right? yeah But like, it just is such a better experience when I know what the hell is going on behind the scenes and when I submitted a ticket to you that it's just, it's mind boggling that it,
00:39:35
Speaker
And there might be other solutions that do stuff out there like that. I know when I was with my company, it did not do that. just like, how do we not updating these people on what's happening? Like they come to you, they spend stupid and amounts of money in your game and you're not telling them, Hey, we're looking at your ticket. You're just leaving it in a queue until next Thursday when we finally updated at that point, they probably quit your game and said, screw you. Like, I love how you're basically creating the feedback loop by automated updates. And it's simple, it's easy, but it's so important to update people. I guess, is this something you built in right away? Or did you get feedback from people like, where's what's up with my ticket? Like, I don't know. I know it's so simple, but it blows my mind.
00:40:12
Speaker
Yeah, no, this was actually like part of our original plan. And and the reason why, you know, going back to my experience with Path of Exile is, you know, I got the generic, we you know, we got your bug report. If we need any other information, we'll reach back out to you and never heard anything back.
00:40:30
Speaker
I still don't know if that bug was fixed or not. But I also haven't gone to go back and check because, know, you know At that time, I had spent roughly $1,000 in Path of Exile.
00:40:41
Speaker
And for me, it's like, wow, you know this is the level of customer service and support that I get. And not to put them on blast. don't but It's not an attack against them. This is just a limitation that existed previously that we're trying to rectify.
00:40:56
Speaker
Don't go attack ah grinding gear. the The other thing you mentioned, which I think is often overlooked is having these automations within your workflow allow you to scale without burning out.
00:41:07
Speaker
I remember my, my, job as a tier one support rep, I've probably reset more passwords in my life than I ever want to see in my entire life. And there's no reason a reset password should be a manual process for anyone. i mean, it's something that should be fully automated.
00:41:20
Speaker
The beauty of fully automating means maybe the two hours I spent every day resetting passwords, I could study engineering. I can study a craft that interests me from what I've learned at my tier one support job.
00:41:33
Speaker
And then you can start to start study these other things that enables me to do more. And I think people are so taken aback by saying, hey, this automation is resetting all the passwords that I reset. In reality, it's like a glass half full. Like, hey, I could take this time and use it to study something else. I think it's such a great way to scale your team um without causing burnout.
00:41:54
Speaker
Yeah, I completely agree with that. And, you know, we've seen where like, just as an example with Once Human, their community at release was generating close to 6,000 pieces of player feedback a month.
00:42:08
Speaker
So if you can imagine trying to to parse through that and understand like what's actually important to the community, what's not important, ah it's it's very chaotic. yeah And then on top of that, you know, that's not the only thing that they're doing.
00:42:20
Speaker
They're also having to monitor this discord that has over a million active users in it and make sure, you know, we're not having cases of toxicity. Yeah. Everyone's being cordial, all that good stuff that like the whole community actually like management piece never goes away.
00:42:37
Speaker
There's just always more work that gets tacked on to what they're already doing. Exactly right. um What's the typical probe profile of a type of studio that signs on for a tool like Cohesion?
Community-First Approaches in Gaming
00:42:48
Speaker
ah Definitely the studios that are thinking more community first or you embracing the concept of community driven development. ah Those seem to be the most early adopters.
00:43:00
Speaker
um But we're also starting to see some of our customers that you know I didn't expect to have yet that were like my five year plan for Cohesion. um But I can't really talk about those yet. But you know there's there's big changes that are happening at a lot of the studios that are brand names.
00:43:18
Speaker
they're They're reevaluating how they engage and interact and manage their communities because they're they're starting to see the writing on the wall that we need to really start capitalizing on our communities and leveraging their them where we can so we don't continue to release games that are missing the mark.
00:43:35
Speaker
For yourself, someone that's been solution architect oriented, developer, DevOps oriented, what's your day-to-day like today as co-founder? um Way too many meetings. that yeah the The founder life, definitely chaotic.
00:43:50
Speaker
you know Even in my previous roles, you know solution architect, like That was a lot of meetings because of who I was working with at the time. ah But this is a whole different level.
00:44:03
Speaker
It's customer meetings, it's meetings of with VCs, it's internal meetings with our team to figure out like what's our next priority, what's important, what's going on. um And then outside of that, you know of course, development, figuring out how we move the needle on our product, how we solve these problems that haven't been solved before.
00:44:23
Speaker
so I love it. Well, I guess maybe not the meeting side of it, but you know it's one of these things. It's like a 24 hour job. i have two kids myself now. and When they go to bed, it's like I i can kind of start being creative and start doing stuff on my computer. It's quiet, no meetings.
00:44:37
Speaker
It's like, i this is the time of day that work needs to get done. Everything else is just meeting. And it's just like, you got to do what you got to do to try and build a company, right? Yeah. Well, it's it's funny, you know since we have global customers,
00:44:50
Speaker
you for me personally, meetings basically anytime during the day. So I don't even have a ah schedule anymore. It's just whatever's needed yeah at the time. I think this is my last question. We'll go based off your answer, but you know, you've been in now ga gaming communities since at least 2018 when, when, when you had total annihilation problems.
00:45:08
Speaker
Um, But how do you
Future Growth of Gaming Communities
00:45:11
Speaker
see them evolving? they've They've evolved a lot since you were there part of it in the beginning, right? As forums, now Discord. like How do you continue to see this evolution to grow for both communities as well as community managers?
00:45:21
Speaker
Yeah, you know, communities are going to continue to grow, um you know, and ah especially like if I think back to like during to the pandemic, when we really had to not go out into the world and everybody started playing video games, um we definitely saw a huge spike then.
00:45:38
Speaker
But that whole process is still going to continue to grow. and And we're starting to see growth even in the mobile space, which I thought was rather unique, where mobile devs are starting to build up Discord communities.
00:45:51
Speaker
And surprisingly, we're seeing pretty big numbers in those communities, you know, north of a million in quite a few of them. So, you know, those communities continue to grow. And especially with the landscape of the gaming industry today, you know, we've seen so many layoffs, unfortunately.
00:46:08
Speaker
But out of those layoffs, we've seen so many new studios pop up that are thinking more community forward. So you know they're gonna continue to grow these communities. They're gonna become more of a vital part of the development process, help them you know build out their roadmap and kind of guide the game in direction that fits what they're looking for.
00:46:29
Speaker
So I don't see any of that going away. It's just gonna multiply over time. And for community managers, um without tools for any type of automation,
00:46:41
Speaker
or are things that help them in their processes, it's going to be overload. You know, yeah even today, yeah they're pretty overloaded. You know, some of the discords that I'm in that are using bots that are just kind of ah dumb, not saying that in a negative way. They're just not, you know, yeah using AI behind the scenes to help with the processes. It's just kind of player input thing. And it goes into discord.
00:47:06
Speaker
You know, that's a prime example of like, it's part of the solution, but you're not fully there yet. You still have a lot of manual processes you have to do. I'll say it for Tim. There are a lot of dumb bots out there. You might look at one of these bots that has automation built into it to make your life easier. Because when you put when you put makeup on a pig, it's still a pig, but you can reformat this whole thing to make it work for you so you could do less work. So Tim, I love what you're building. As someone that has been in community for a long time, I think there needs to be more tools that help enable community managers to do more at scale.
00:47:42
Speaker
ah You can figure out... what your superpower is by a tool like this. Cause again, you have a little bit of freedom. You can say, Hey, do I want to be more of a support rep? do I want be more community manager? or Do i want to be social media? Do I want to be marketing? go Whatever the world is your oyster when you're ah when you're a community manager, I think you got the boots on the ground.
00:47:58
Speaker
ah view of everything that's happening. I think it's super cool. And I think what you're doing with Cohesion is super cool. And I'm excited to see how it continues to grow out both in console, in mobile, how you integrate all that with SDKs. I think it's going to be super cool stuff. And studios would be foolish not to be able to look at a tool like this.
00:48:14
Speaker
Before we do go, let us know where we can find you, where we can learn more about Cohesion and your... Yeah, you can just check us out at cohesion.ai. You can email me directly, Tim at cohesion.ai.
00:48:25
Speaker
um We're also on LinkedIn and X, so you can find us there. Cool. Tim, this has been so cool. Such a fun conversation. I really appreciate you taking the time. um I guess that's all I got for you today. So thanks a lot for coming and being on the Player Driven Podcast.
00:48:41
Speaker
Awesome. Thank you for having me.