Keywords Studios Sharpens its Focus on Fandom with AI Sentiment Analysis

When videogame publishers need support creating, testing and publishing their latest titles, they often turn to Keywords Studios and its 13,000-plus industry experts. A leading gaming, media and entertainment service provider, Keywords Studios supports publishers with extra firepower across the entire development and publishing lifecycle — from art assets and coding support to localization, QA testing, marketing, player support and community management.

With 24 of the 25 biggest videogame publishers on its client roster, Keywords Studios has developed a unique understanding of gaming fandoms that it uses to keep players motivated and playing. Now, it’s keen to turn this extensive data on communities and their preferences, attitudes and intent into even more value for its clients.

With Snowflake’s AI Data Cloud and Cortex AI, built on Amazon Web Services (AWS), Keywords Studios is finding new ways to apply large language models to analyze customer sentiment and deliver new insights to publishers so they can optimize their game plans across all the titles they develop.

Keywords Studios has three main divisions: “Create” offers support for development, audio and game art; “Globalize” includes localization and QA testing services; and “Engage” helps publishers manage communities and optimize marketing and player engagement.

The publishing support services provider has immense experience across all of these areas. Still, Simon Stokes, Head of Data and Strategy at Keywords Studios, saw a huge opportunity in the community management and marketing space: “As our team has expertise across the entire videogame publishing spectrum, we’re sitting on a potential goldmine of data. The question is, ‘How can our clients use it to optimize marketing and community engagement?’”

Initially, the Engage team at Keywords Studios worked with Slalom, a Snowflake implementation partner, to manually collect essential insights around customer sentiment. These findings are vital for publishers in effectively managing communities for games through their launch, and for fine-tuning marketing strategies to deliver maximum return on investment.

However, manually assessing social media posts, reviews and videos is challenging and time-consuming at best. The difficulty level only rises in a space like videogames, where every genre may have its own unique design and gameplay elements that players will discuss online — whether it’s the quality of character movesets in a fighting game or individual puzzle difficulty in a mystery-driven adventure title.

To make the most of its extensive insights into videogame audiences and development, Keywords Studios integrated Snowflake’s AI Data Cloud with its AWS systems to create a central data repository. 

While the company uses Snowflake in various ways across its divisions, it was in sentiment analysis that Stokes and his team saw a significant opportunity to deliver more value. “Snowflake performed well across our PoC, but the really exciting thing for me was the combination of Snowflake and AI to make the most of our data,” says Stokes.

In just three months, Keywords Studios and Slalom built an AI sentiment analysis MVP using Cortex AI. Accessing a mixture of large language models, including Llama 3.3, Mistral and Arctic, Keywords Studios can use best-of-breed tools for every situation.  

Now, its teams can analyze customer attitudes across Steam, and other major game review platforms and social media sites, to give publishers granular insights into reactions across their game catalogs. Unlike manual sentiment analysis, Keywords Studios’ platform can dig into detailed subtopics for every game genre. For example, it can see what players are saying about the balance of weapons in an action game, or if they’re enjoying the selection of cars in a racing title.

This forms the backbone of Keywords Studios’ new Lens solution: a curated service that offers publishers rapid, in-depth insights in days rather than weeks or months. Using generative AI and LLMs, Keywords Studios Community Management teams can produce more reports across a greater variety of titles, while digging deep into player data using natural language. For example, if they see negative feedback about a particular game, they can ask: What systems are players having issues with? What’s the most common bit of feedback on [character]? This helps publishers and community managers make the most informed marketing and community management decisions.

In the past, publishers relied on manually surveying players to get feedback on games, trailers and other promotional efforts. This could be a slow and laborious process that would only deliver true insights months down the line.

“The videogame market operates at a rapid pace,” explains Stokes. “With Lens, we can ask audiences for feedback in near real time and get immediate understanding. That’s immensely powerful for publishers.”

With rapid insights, publishers can optimize pre- and post-launch campaigns to analyze player trends at scale, focus marketing efforts on the most successful activities and really dig into what makes gaming communities tick.

This insight leads to better marketing ROI, simplified and improved community management and, ultimately, games that play — and sell — better.

When publishers get rapid, granular insights on the attitudes and ambitions of their players, everyone wins. Publishers, of course, get the information they need to develop, promote and publish even more polished games. Gamers then get experiences that are better-tuned to their preferences, and are more likely to discover these games through well-considered marketing and promotional efforts.

For Keywords Studios, Snowflake helps the company deliver even more value to customers and offer more revenue-generating services based on its wealth of industry knowledge. “Our mission has always been to bring fandom into focus for videogame publishers,” says Stokes. “Snowflake and Slalom have empowered our understanding of our audiences, so we can deliver better localization, support and marketing strategy for our clients.”

The Lens solution is already delivering major value to early adopters across Keywords Studios’ client roster. However, this is just one small — if vitally important — part of Keywords Studios’ service portfolio. The next stage of the journey is to find even more ways to extract value from its broad video games expertise and insights.

One particularly rich target is bringing additional AI community sentiment analysis to Helpshift, Keywords Studios' platform for delivering customer support.  By combining rich player insights across social media, review platforms and customer support conversations, Keywords Studios can help publishers achieve even deeper understanding of their players. Beyond this, Stokes is also excited to share data with other Snowflake customers to build even greater competitive advantage for publishers.

“We’re finding more value in our data, and can connect this value across all teams at Keywords Studios using Snowflake,” says Stokes. “It’s like a flywheel: The more knowledge, data and insights we put into Snowflake, the faster the wheel turns. And that means more intelligence we can share with publishers about the industry, the games they make and the players they serve.”