After a game’s launch, customer support is often viewed by developers as an annoying source of frustration that just grows worse with a game’s popularity. In this session, attendees will learn how to flip this idea on its head -- exploring how practicing honest, empathetic customer support turns support requests into valuable moments of community growth. Attendees will: - Closely examine how the language and tone used in response to requests can cause or resolve misunderstandings and frustration, and learn how to avoid making these mistakes. - Hear real support war stories from the Steam early access launch of Clone Drone in the Danger Zone, including a peek inside our “trophy room” of the most heartwarming notes from now-happy customers. - Learn how to coordinate support responses on teams of any size, without eating up your limited time and attention. - Discover what self-serve support options and documentation to offer your players, so the overall volume of support requests decreases without sacrificing the quality of player experience. - Consider how release planning and communication can help ameliorate player concerns. - Review available technical solutions to common problems plaguing games with a high volume of support requests -- how to figure out exactly how common a given crash is, and how to diagnose issues you can’t reproduce yet. - Finally answer the question, “how should we respond to negative reviews, if at all?” About the speaker: Brian Jordan is an indie game developer currently working on Clone Drone in the Danger Zone. Previously at Code.org, Brian lead development of the Minecraft Hour of Code, which has since reached over 30 million students worldwide. At PopCap Games, Brian developed games and prototypes in the Plants vs. Zombies and Bejeweled franchises. Brian is passionate about expanding access to computer science education, entrepreneurship, web development, game development, sound design, automated testing and robotics, and is always glad to talk with and support fellow indie game devs.