From 5-Day Reporting Lag to Real-Time Player Intelligence: How thatgamecompany Put Player Signals in Every Team's Hands
The Challenge: When Intelligence Moves Slower Than the Problem
thatgamecompany runs Sky: Children of the Light — a global, always-on live service game with one of gaming's most devoted communities. When something went wrong, it moved fast. Their reporting chain did not.
Player signals had to travel through a five-step escalation chain before anyone who could act on them even saw the information. By that point, the window to respond — and the trust of a global player base that never sleeps — had often already begun to close.
Discord → Regional Community → Global Community → Ops → Leadership. Each step introduced time delays, interpretation bias, and the risk of a signal being diluted or missed entirely.
Community teams spent significant time on manual Discord scanning and spreadsheet-based reporting — especially during high-stakes live events like Days of Bloom, where the volume of player activity made it near-impossible to keep up by hand.
Without a reliable early-warning system, the team was reacting to problems after they had escalated — overreacting to loud minorities, missing emerging issues, and spending more time firefighting than preventing fires.
Leadership and engineering couldn't see what was happening in the community in real time. By the time a critical incident reached the right person, the damage was already underway.
"A major incident can hurt our business fast, especially with a global player base that never sleeps. Real-time visibility isn't a nice-to-have — it's the difference between getting ahead of it and losing the community's trust."
The Shift: Collapsing the Chain Between Signal and Action
Levellr didn't just improve thatgamecompany's reporting process — it fundamentally changed who could access player intelligence and when. Instead of waiting for filtered summaries to travel through layers of teams, decision-makers could now see what was happening directly, the moment it happened.
- Manual Discord scanning
- Spreadsheet-based reporting
- Multi-day escalation chains
- Reactive moderation
- Overreacting to loud minorities
- Missing emerging issues
- Near real-time sentiment monitoring
- Direct access to player quotes
- Leadership insight without the chain
- Confident, validated reporting
- Fast incident detection
- Daily workflow integration
"If a significant bug or incident happens, we want to catch it early and we want the engineer who can fix it to be notified early. With Levellr now in place, we've significantly mitigated community risk."
The Results
Time-to-Awareness: Days to Real-Time
The core outcome is simple: the gap between player signal and team awareness collapsed. Teams now operate on near real-time insight instead of reports that are days old — a meaningful business advantage for a live service game where player happiness directly drives revenue.
During a spike in community activity over a weekend, Sky's Community Management Team used Levellr to monitor player sentiment and identify disruptive members in real time — without manually combing through thousands of messages.
"I had to work the entire weekend — and Levellr saved me. I was able to be alerted and keep an eye on some disruptive members in the community."
Intelligence That Reaches the Right People
Levellr is now used by 18 active team members spanning community, ops, product marketing, and the CEO — not as an occasional reporting tool, but as an intelligence layer people check first thing every morning. In the first three months alone, the team asked 110+ questions through Levellr AI.
For leadership, Levellr directly addresses a core business risk: the cost of an incident that isn't caught and fixed quickly. Faster detection means faster escalation, faster resolution, and less damage to player trust and sales.
Community Risk, Measurably Reduced
For a live service game, the business case for community intelligence is direct: unhappy players stop spending. Levellr gives thatgamecompany the early-warning system to act before issues become incidents — and incidents become churn.
"The biggest loss to us as a business is an incident that's not fixed. If our players aren't happy, understandably it affects our numbers — so it is business critical that we are listening to our players and able to react fast."
Because of Levellr, thatgamecompany reduced a 5-day reporting chain into real-time signal — giving 18 team members across community, ops, and leadership the ability to detect, validate, and act on player intelligence the moment it matters.
Ready to put player intelligence in every team's hands?
Join thatgamecompany and other leading studios using Levellr to turn Discord conversations into real-time, trusted intelligence — across every team in the business.