How Ganymede Games uses open-ended feedback to disrupt the video game industry

Video games are a multibillion-dollar industry (and growing), with countless playing styles, genres and platforms.

But industry veterans Jerry Prochazka and Rob Thomson observed that some of their most loyal and lucrative customers were leaving, so they set out on a mission to understand why, and to create a tribe of gamers looking for something new.

To do that, they surveyed 7500 adult gamers and turned to Fathom to make sense of their rich open-ended customer feedback.

Ganymede Games is an independent games studio in Las Cruces, NM. They create worlds that inspire exploration, adventures that spark curiosity, and unique gameplay that respects the time and busy lives of gamers.

Ganymede Games was formed by industry veterans and is composed of seasoned gamers, adventure seekers, nature enthusiasts and animal lovers whose passion for exploring new worlds infuses everything they do. They value humility, passion, curiosity, learning and healthy doses of creative risk-taking and personal adventure.

Setting the stage

Jerry is the co-founder and CEO of Ganymede Games. He’s spent time in the business as Chief People Officer at some of the biggest studios.

He created Ganymede Games with his co-founder Rob out of a desire to innovate, understand, and truly connect with their ideal customers. Adult gamers are some of the first early adopters, but now that they’ve grown up, they don’t have the time to dedicate to a 100-hour campaign.

“Modern games ask for too much of a player's precious time.” Jerry paints this picture for those who aren't gamers: ”Imagine if every show on Netflix asked you for 15 seasons just to get to the end of the story. As a busy professional, it'd be really tough.”

A survey to understand adult gamers

The Ganymede team decided to start by surveying and sourcing respondents from Reddit and other social media platforms. “There’s a belief in the industry that gamers don’t know what they want - we’re trying to buck that trend,” says Jerry.

The response was overwhelming, with over 7500 gamers completing their survey.

Understanding the quantitative data was easy, but tackling the open-ended questions was challenging. Jerry recalls that “some people wrote pages - they were very passionate about what they thought,” and with all that content, the team had more information than they could process.

When a word cloud doesn’t cut it

“We needed a partner who could get us a nuanced look at our qualitative data, and Fathom came highly recommended.”

Reading through thousands of written responses wasn’t practical, and Ganymede realized they needed a technological solution. But other tools they’d used in the past left them unsatisfied. “We knew we needed a partner who could get us a nuanced look at our qualitative data, and someone recommended Fathom,” says Jerry.

With Fathom, Ganymede could take their raw open-ended survey data and distill it into information they could use quickly and accurately. The themes and insights they found helped them hone in on and understand early adopters and informed the creation of crucial customer profiles.

A partner and a platform

During the kick-off call, Ganymede made it clear they needed a partner they could trust and turn to. “We need to be able to talk to the team, and when we reached out for a little bit of extra help, Fathom had a rapid turnaround.”

When it comes to his experience, Jerry said, “the platform was easy to get into and gives us the flexibility we need.”

He also noted that due to segmentation and management of themes, exploring the insights continues to deliver value

“As we go through this data more, and dig into the research, we find more nuggets.”

Uncovering hidden gems

In addition to validating some key assumptions about adult gamers, Ganymede found an emerging trend among female gamers looking for better representation in their games. “Female gamers were likelier to highlight strategy as a great part of their favorite game systems. And sometimes that can get overlooked,” says Jerry.

This wasn’t something the team expected when they set out to ask gamers what they wanted, but this discovery from their open-ended feedback has impacted Ganymede’s strategy for this target market; without it, the team may have inadvertently focused their resources on the wrong things.

Forging a better way forward

Jerry says Fathom is a no-brainer for organizations looking to make sense of their rich, open-ended customer data and recalls a throwback quote from Henry Ford - If I had asked my customers what they wanted, they would have said a faster horse.