The Fans & Audiences Update

Fans & Audiences

New feature: Your studio now has a fuller audience layer. You can see who follows you, how they feel, what they want, and what to do about it. This replaces the old standalone Community screen as the main place to manage fans, while keeping per-game community tools inside the same hub.

Where to find it

Studio → Fans (formerly labeled Community in some builds, now Fans in navigation)

From there you have five tabs:

• Overview

• Segments

• Research

• History

• Game communities

What changed at a high level

Before this release, community management was mostly per-game. Now the game tracks a studio-wide audience model built from sales, releases, marketing, game communities, franchises, and player behavior.

Two numbers appear everywhere and mean different things:

A game can have tens of thousands in community reach while active studio fans stay in the thousands. That is intentional.

Overview tab

Click path: Fans → Overview

What you see:

• Active fans, Community reach, Latest net change, Satisfaction, and Audience reach

• Fan relationship bar: Casual, Regular, Loyal, Core, Lapsed, Detractors

• What needs attention: actionable warnings (fatigue, vocal minority skew, lapsed fan opportunities, positive advocacy)

• Largest audience segments: top three segment cards with portraits

Open Marketing from here if an insight suggests a campaign response.

View all segments → jumps to the Segments tab.

If you load an older save, you may see a one-time banner:"This audience breakdown was recalibrated from your game communities, sales, and release history."That is normal for migrated saves.

Segments tab

Click path: Fans → Segments

Your audience is grouped into audience segments (for example Story & character fans, Competitive players, Tech enthusiasts & collectors). Each segment is a blend of:

• Engagement tier (Potential, Customer, Casual, Regular, Loyal, Core, Lapsed)

• Genre and platform preferences

• Motivations (story, competition, social, and others)

• Spending tendency

• Satisfaction, loyalty, and vocal intensity

Each segment card shows:

• A portrait image for that segment type

• Population estimate

• Genre and motivation tags

• Current concern (for example "Satisfaction is falling")

Click a segment to open its detail view: portrait, tagline, preferences, behavior, and opportunity notes.

Tip: Segments are estimates built from cohort data, not individual simulated people. Populations are rounded and grouped for readability.

Research tab (Audience Research)

Click path: Fans → Research

This is the big new player-facing layer. You can ask your audience what they want, get imperfect but useful answers, then act on the findings.

Sub-tabs inside Research

• Commission – start new research

• In progress – running surveys and live polls

• Results & actions – latest completed study waiting for your decision

• History – past research with status

Sample scope (choose before commissioning)

• Studio-attached: potential customers, buyers, active fans, and lapsed players with a studio relationship. More precise.

• Broader community reach: includes game-community members who may not be studio fans yet. Cheaper, wider, noisier (higher margin of error).

Research instruments

Research topics (Commission tab dropdown)

• Next genre appetite

• Price & monetisation tolerance

• Franchise direction

• Platform preference

• Feature priorities

• Trust repair

• Concept test (project-specific, see below)

How results work

Research does not give you perfect truth. Every result includes:

• A headline finding with percentage and margin of error

• A confidence band (Low / Moderate / High)

• A plain-English verdict

• A full breakdown bar chart of all options

If your vocal minority gap is high, you may see a warning that forum loudmouths skewed the sample.

Follow-up actions

When research completes, you get 2–3 follow-up choices, for example:

• Align marketing with this finding – hype boost and better targeted campaign efficiency for matching segments

• Publish a community response – trust and satisfaction boost studio-wide

• Hold back premium plans – trust recovery when audiences reject premium pricing

• Tease a revival – nostalgia and hype for dormant franchises

• Commit to the concept direction – conversion boost for a linked project

• Commit to the poll winner – timed boost if you ship matching content (live polls)

• Ignore for now – no benefit; strong findings may cost trust if ignored

You have 12 weeks to act on most follow-ups (26 weeks for live poll commitments). Expired options are shown as disabled in the UI.

Click path to act: Fans → Research → Results & actions, or open a completed study from History.

History tab

Click path: Fans → History

A log of audience changes with:

• What happened

• Which week

• Explicit deltas (satisfaction, trust, hype, and others)

• Severity (positive, warning, critical)

Survey completions and follow-up actions also appear here with [c]survey.*[/c] cause keys.

Game communities tab

Click path: Fans → Game communities

This is the familiar per-title community dashboard, now nested inside Fans:

• Total members, average satisfaction, EA games, games needing attention

• Per-game cards: satisfaction, trust, toxicity, engagement

• Community manager assignment

• Quick actions: Dev Blog, AMA, Patch Notes, Sneak Peek

• Live poll panel per released game

• EA roadmap tracking where applicable

View studio audience → links back to Overview.

Click path for live poll: Fans → Game communities → [pick a game] → Live poll section → Start live poll

Choose question template and sample scope, then let votes accumulate weekly until the poll ends. The winner opens a timed commitment window in Research results.

Project integration

Click path: Projects → [open a project in development] → Pre-release audience fit panel

On active (non-released) projects you see:

• Interested audience estimate

• Likely conversion (exact % or a range after concept research)

• Best-fit segments

• Open Fans & Audiences – jumps to the Fans hub

• Run concept survey – commissions a studio-attached concept test tied to that project

After a concept survey, conversion shows as a range (for example 20–28%) instead of a single precise number, reflecting research uncertainty.

If you commit to the concept direction from survey results, you get a temporary conversion boost on that project.

Marketing integration

Click path: Marketing → Launch campaign → Audience segment dropdown

When launching a targeted campaign, segment options now show"Validated by research"if you recently ran a focus group or aligned marketing on that segment. Validated segments are more efficient targets and less likely to backlash.

You can also reach Marketing from Fans → Overview → Open Marketing when an insight suggests it.

Founder Assistant and alerts

The Founder Assistant [c]studio_fans[/c] topic may recommend audience research when:

• Satisfaction is very low

• The fanbase is divided

• A live poll action window is almost expired

• You ignored a high-confidence finding

A non-blocking status alert"Consider commissioning audience research"can also appear on the main game screen in similar situations.

How the simulation works (under the hood, for curious players)

• The game uses 28 aggregated cohorts, not individual fan NPCs

• Cohorts promote, lapse, and react weekly based on releases, marketing, communities, and controversies

• Vocal intensity is separate from population. loud forums do not equal majority opinion

• Audience fit can affect weekly sales e.g., by ±15%

• Existing reactive community events (feedback surges, sequel demand, and others) still happen; player-initiated research complements those, it does not replace them

• Save data migrates automatically on load (save version 178); older saves get empty research history and preserved fan data

Quick reference: common click paths