Caring for the Players - Part 2 of ?

The Player Support Newsletter - 13 JUN 2025

Noteworthy News

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1. McDonald’s AI Recruiting Bot Exposes Millions of Applicants’ Data - Another embarrassing blunder by the juvenile use of AI in recruiting and hiring efforts, people have easily gained access into the backend of McHire.com by using the age-old trick of entering the password “123456” for administrators. The Olivia chatbot built by Paradox.ai also suffers from basic security flaws, allowing even low-skilled hackers to access personal data from about 64 million records, which includes names, phone numbers, email addresses, and their chat record with the Olivia bot. No red team, I guess? Sloppy and very unfortunate. I hope they shore up their security soon.

2. Side Opens a New Studio in Riyadh in Partnership with Savvy Games Group - if you’ve got a great idea and are willing to relocate, the Saudi government is welcoming you! The studio will open by Q4 this year and provide development services. To be clear, Savvy is not investing in Side and there are no stakes or other equity agreements. This is part of an ongoing effort by the government to invest in the games industry within the country. Please feel free to reach out to me if this sounds interesting to you, as I know a broker in Saudi Arabia.

3. Krafton Fires Founders of Unknown Worlds Studio - the founders of Unknown Worlds working on Subnautica 2 have filed a lawsuit against their former publisher, Krafton over these dismissals and the $250mn payout that is on the line. Krafton’s reasoning was that they had failed to deliver the promised game within the promised timeline. We’ll see how this plays out in court, but it’s not a good look for an already battered industry.

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Introduction: Player (Customer) Experience First - Support, Community, and Trust and Safety

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Last time, I broadly defined what it means to make the player experience primary in a video game company, especially one that runs live service games. Today, I will start going down one of the rabbit trails on the player experience side.

Executive leadership’s job is to think through organizational design and how groups related to one another. Player support or customer service, community or social media management, trust and safety or moderation, all of these groups emerged dynamically from various crises and felt needs in the video game industry, especially with the growth of live service games. Most companies never think through how these groups should be related or what kind of high level executive should own them from a management perspective. We are most commonly thrown into the publishing group (just because that’s where it’s been at other companies in the past), but my most effective experiences were with product and engineering. Whatever the decisions are at the end of the day, they have to match your strategic approach to the relationship you want with your customers.

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The Relationship Between Support, Community, and Trust and Safety

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In both of my early video game startups, support, community and trust and safety were all rolled into one group. Important and frequent conversations with customers to solve their problems and listen to their desires for the future were present across all functions. All of these teams should be focused on quality of life improvements, and creating understanding between the game teams, company leadership, and their players. Support was usually the starting point with a complaint or suggestion.

While community shared some of these aspects, I always thought it was better to focus them on creating interesting content, conversations with all the different player groups, and social media observations. When I have control, I usually have social