TikTok Crisis Management ❘ Ex Amazon & Meta ❘ Senior Advisor ❘ Resilience ❘ Continuity ❘ Policy
Let’s talk about HELLDIVERS 2 🥇 It’s an online game where you spread freedom through cooperative bug-squashing. Why does that matter? Aside from the fact that you finally get to live out starship troopers? 🚀 After achieving immense success with the game, at times having 400,000 concurrent players (for context, in some places like the UK, this was at times the most played game, and in the US the best-selling game of the year so far), Sony forced players to link to the PlayStation Network for greater player security. Now normally when a game does this, it can be disruptive to the experience. Yes, certainly other companies have done similar too, see Microsoft, Ubisoft, OG Activision Blizzard, etc. However… some countries do not support the PlayStation Network. More than a few actually... 121 countries per Insider Gaming. Meaning this would impact loyal helldivers (customers) in Latvia, Philippines, Vietnam, Venezuela, Jamaica, Morocco, and far beyond. The problem here was that these players already bought 💰 and had been playing the game. A lot. And the real problem being that… they loved the game. Now to underline the problem, there was no solution. The creators of the game were left seemingly just as lost as the rest of us, responding "I don't know", to customers asking what they should do. Here’s the good part: The players made their voices heard, and within a couple days, had “review bombed” Helldivers 2 with 200,000 negative reviews. Enough to bring the ratings from “overwhelmingly positive” to “overwhelming negative”. Sony, to their immense credit, walked back their account linking requirement (and is reportedly even thinking of clever in-game cosmetic ways of celebrating the will of the player base)... taking it quite in stride. And again to the credit of the Helldivers 2 player base, they launched “Operation Clean-Up” to reverse their negative reviews with 74,000 negative reviews already reverted. You can pick out a lot from this journey: 🤝 How Seller and Customer listened to each other and no bridges were burnt in the process 🤝 How to take failures in stride 🤝 It's Always Day 1 🤝 The absolute camaraderie in certain communities If you’re looking for more evidence of the last one see the endless salutes for a young Helldiver who lost his best friend: https://lnkd.in/gXDyrqC8 These communities are special. They mean a lot to young people and we love to see the cross-generational support we can always use more of. As always: any views, theories, or conclusions are my own and not of my employer nor clients nor colleagues.
