To succeed in 2025, game studios need to listen more to their players. But listening to players uniquely challenging. We're building Kinn to solve that problem.
On November 5th, 2012 I stood in front of a Gamestop at midnight for the last time of my life.
It was the release night of Halo 4. My roommates and I all cancelled our plans the next day, skipped class, and played as many rounds of splitscreen SWAT as we could manage on a Red Bull-fueled morning.
I can’t help but think how things have changed so much in those, shockingly, 13 years since.
I had played games all my life.
I still remember the sound my Super Nintendo cartridges made when I would aggressively blow on them, crossing my fingers that the opening menu of Super Mario World would show my 72% completion, rather than three empty save slots.
I recently heard of the phrase “cousin games.” Even before it was described to me, I know exactly what it meant. We all remember those games that weren’t quite best-sellers, but not so obscure to have slipped through unnoticed. They were just barely popular enough that you had a single friend or cousin who had it tucked in their media cabinet. When you spent time at their house, that’s all you played.
It was a time when games were released with bugs, cheats, and glitches, but it was the way it was. You played them because that’s all you had.
But as time moved on and technology evolved, the way we consume media has changed with it.
There were 15,422 games released on Steam last year. That’s 42 games per day!
Yet the lifecycle of games is almost the longest it’s ever been.
Fortnite turns 9 this summer.
GTA 5 in its original form will be 12.
World of Warcraft will be legally allowed to drink the in the US.
We’re inundated with more options than ever, but we’re still downloading emulators of our favorites, sticking with titles we’re familiar with, and more resistant to the now common $70.00 for a AAA release.
I still fire up Castle Crashers, Command and Conquer: Generals, and Bioshock Infinite at least once a year.
Some argue that this is a golden era of games.
Is it not an amazing achievement that we can still be playing our favorite games for over a decade?! It’s a player’s dream!
But if you’re the one building games, your challenge is now harder than it’s ever been. And your success is determined by your ability to combat that.
How are you going to stand out among 15,422 others?
(By the way, I would love to discuss this further with more seasoned experts on this front!)
As players become more adept at catching bugs and finding exploits, it’s now a standard practice to need to support your game for at least the first year after launch. And if things are going well, you’re probably considering DLCs or regular content schedules.
If you’re a AAA studio, the free-to-play model continues to be lucrative, but is an incredibly fragile balance of constant patches, tweaks, seasonal content, and updates that cannot slip without risking players going elsewhere. The moment the community turns toxic, it’s one of the toughest hurdles to recover from.
Streaming, casting, and forums have completely changed the way we talk about games. Whether you’re watching streamers on Twitch, discussing the latest meta on Discord, or just lurking on Reddit, people are always saying something about your games.
Along with this volume of commentary comes expectations and hiveminds. If you’re unaware of a new trend, desire, or complaint about your game, it can quickly push players away and make the game feel abandoned.
We are more surrounded by media and content than ever before. As a game developer, you’re not just competing against the newest games, you’re competing against the entire libraries of Netflix, Hulu, AppleTV, Steam, Nintendo, Playstation, Xbox, TikTok, and Instagram all at the same time.
Building something that breaks through that is already incredibly difficult, and it’s only getting harder.
As these changes have evolved, I’ve realized one of the most key markings of a successful studio was how well they listen to players. It feels so obvious, but it’s easy forget how bad it can really be.
Concord cost Sony $400 million dollars in the days following launch.
Bioware made staffing cuts after missing sales expectations by 50% for Dragon Age: Veilguard.
But not all hope is lost!
Hello Games turned around No Mans Sky to now be #48 in Steam top sellers!
Ubisoft delayed the release of Assassin’s Creed: Shadows by an entire quarter, and then sold to 3 million players in 2 weeks!
But why can’t every studio be great at this? Is it really that difficult? To figure this out, my co-founders and I dove head-first in to what it takes to listen to players.
Turns out, its actually really hard, and most studios are not equipped to succeed.
We’ve been watching studios struggle as community teams beg for more resources, influencer complaints on live-streams go unnoticed, and players beg for changes on forums, only to feel like their opinions aren’t heard by the very heroes building the things they love.
But even if you commit entire armies to this problem, managing and organizing incoming feedback is incredibly complicated. So much feedback is unhelpful, in a language you don’t speak, or just gets lost in the busy cycle of game development.
We know that things can be better and that it shouldn’t be this difficult.
We want every team, regardless of how large or small, to know how it feels to build a game players love.
So we’re building Kinn.gg to help make that possible.
We connect all incoming sources of commentary about your games, whether it be unorganized text, forums, video collections, or live streams, and distill it all to find patterns.
With these patterns we are able to index all content and turn it in to a knowledge base for your games. It is searchable, connected to your releases, and shows how player feelings change over time.
Want to know how players feel about the Season 8 maps? We’ve got that.
How about the most important bugs according to your streamers? You can get that too.
We’ll even translate everything in to any language you need.
Kinn is the ultimate way to discover how any cohort of players feel about anything in your game. With that knowledge, your team can make player-friendly decisions faster.
Looks for anything from every source at once. This means you can literally search for anything about your game, and we will find videos, comments, forums, and conversations players have had about that question. Everything is filterable and sorted for easy discovery.
Kinn understands the context of your game. This isn’t your typical keyword search. Kinn understands your game and how it works. A simple example is “player movement.” Kinn understands that this can involve vehicles, controls, perks, and abilities that all effect how people move around your game. It will find everything it can and sort it by relevance.
Your game is played around the world all day every day. But your team can’t work that much. Computers can. So we collect and index everything you need and let you know what you missed.
We think data is a cornerstone of success. That’s why studios collect so much information and telemetry on on their games. Code is really good at understanding how people play your game. But feedback is best at knowing how people feel about your game. We think both, paired together, is the way forward.
With Kinn, the content we collect is direct feedback from your players in the places they share it most. Whether it’s organic conversations in a Discord chat, or a custom form you link to from your menu, it’s all generated by your actual community.
We’ve heard, time and time again, how community managers are expected to perform far beyond their capabilities. We get it. Budgets are tight, teams are slim. Our goal is to make your team more capable than ever thought possible. With better data and faster feedback cycles, your team can make stronger decisions easier with Kinn.
I think it’s always a good idea to be honest and discuss what we want to build and how we think about building this business.
Here’s what we’ve agreed on so far:
We have so much more we are working on, and can’t wait to see things evolve.
Visit our website at Kinn.gg to learn more or schedule a demo with our team to see how it works.
I am also always available for questions, feedback, ideas, or general chit chat. You can find me on LinkedIn or reach out at hello@kinn.gg.
Cheers!
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Listening to your players is a necessary, but impossible task. We’re building Kinn.gg to solve it.To succeed in 2025, game studios need to listen more to their players. But listening to players uniquely challenging. We're building Kinn to solve that problem.
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