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Feedback on audio using analytics ?

studio13

I'm looking for feedback from anyone having experience with a game / app that has used analytics to provide visibility into how long it takes players to either turn the sound off entirely or change the mix using sound options. By analytics I mean information being collected and sent back to the developer on when in the game experience people either turned the sound off or changed the mix.

Further I'm wondering if this might be a useful tool for me as a freelance sound designer to start asking my clients to incorporate. My hope is that there would be some kind of measure for success for audio.

Or is this career suicide ?

Thoughts and feedback would be awesome thanks !!

Mike

I think it's a really great idea. I don't know of any but could see it being easily implemented now that most devices are connected to the internet. Not sure how expensive it would be to track this stuff at run-time though. It would definitely help shine a light on issues for a post-mortem or mix updates through a patch.

Some simple things I would look out for:

Check what part of a level the changed the volume
What sounds were being played
What type of listening environment were they one (headphones, home theater, TV speakers)
What the sliders were actually changed to (dialog louder? SFX turned down)

studio13

do you think this info could be a measure of success or failure for audio design ?

For example if the game is launched and the dev realizes that 70% of people are turning the sound off we would see if 'improving' the audio design in a patch or update resulted in 40% of new players turning the sound off

or am I setting up a bad business situation ...

Mike

studio13 wrote:
I'm wondering if this might be a useful tool for me as a freelance sound designer to start asking my clients to incorporate. My hope is that there would be some kind of measure for success for audio.

If the dev needs a tool to see where people are making adjustments because it's mixed poorly or the content isn't sufficient, they probably aren't doing their job right and are wasting the team's money. Trying to fix it later after getting this info would sound pretty incompetent in my opinion.

But in general, I think getting the adjusted fader values from the options menu is an interesting idea. It would be great to see if this is a trend across a lot of gamers and games. I know a few people that boost the dialog fader right away.

studio13

In the Mobile / On-Line / Indie spaces budgets are often so low they don't allow the resources (content, middleware, code support, design time) required for a successful audio experience. I'm trying to figure out ways to prove setting the quality bar this low results in people just turning the sound off.

Mike

The mobile market has so many variables to why people would turn off the sound. It would be interesting to see if something consistent could be found. I rarely listen to sound on mobile games because it usually annoys people in my surrounding or it's too loud to hear anyways (I don't carry headphones with me everywhere).