Player-Driven QA in Heterogeneous Game Environments: An Empirical Study of Feedback Systems

Research output: Contribution to book/Conference proceedings/Anthology/Report › Conference contribution › Contributed › peer-review

Abstract

Quality assurance for shipped games is closely linked to user perception and commercial performance. Even games that are positively received from a design or artistic perspective may suffer from reduced adoption if technical issues negatively affect the player experience. In this paper, we study a player-driven QA system deployed in a commercial game played by over 132,000 unique users and analyse 8,002 production-relevant feedback reports collected over 3.5 years. Our approach transforms multilingual user feedback into a unified representation and defines operational metrics for environment heterogeneity, report richness, reproducibility cues, and actionability. The analysed reports span 91 countries, 277 GPU models, 598 CPU models, and 47 game versions, demonstrating broad runtime coverage across heterogeneous environments. However, only 54.7% of reports contain explicit reproduction cues, indicating a substantial gap between user-reported issues and reproducible technical problems. Report richness is strongly associated with reproduction-cue rate, which increases from 18.3% in the lowest richness bin to 75.0% in the highest. These findings indicate that player-driven QA is an effective mechanism for post-launch product improvement, while also highlighting the need for structured feedback collection and hybrid telemetry-assisted approaches to improve reproducibility.

Details

Original languageEnglish
Title of host publication2026 International Conference on Intelligent Multimedia, Networking, and Security, IMNS 2026
PublisherInstitute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE)
Number of pages6
ISBN (electronic)979-8-3195-3022-6
ISBN (print)979-8-3195-3023-3
Publication statusPublished - Aug 2026
Peer-reviewedYes

Publication series

SeriesInternational Conference on Intelligent Multimedia, Networking, and Security (IMNS)

Conference

Title2026 International Conference on Intelligent Multimedia, Networking, and Security
Abbreviated titleIMNS 2026
Duration3 - 4 August 2026
Website
LocationKennesaw State University
CityAtlanta
CountryUnited States of America

External IDs

ORCID /0000-0001-8469-9573/work/227511863

Keywords

Keywords

  • bug reports, feedback systems, game analytics, game testing, heterogeneous environments, player-driven quality assurance, post-launch QA, reproducibility