I'd like to ask your idea about customer support and games. Do you think good customer support is necessary for games? And if so, should it be outsourced?
I don't think it can be outsourced, only the devs can really know what is wrong with the code, sure you can hire someone to handle it, but at some point the dev would have to handle it. I think it would be best to hire a free student intern just to handle the requests, and then ask the devs, that way it is almost free.
You'd be surprised. I used to work in a support capacity for some non-game software. A lot of what you get is not bugs but people misunderstanding functionality, or having the same issues over and over again that could be answered by a nice FAQ, problems related not necessarily to the software but their internet connection, account, hardware, and so on. Only a small percentage actually reported bugs that required developer attention. Having people to filter that can help the developer focus on more important things.
For that stuff, I had suggested hiriing a free student intern to handle it. On TA, I realize that alot of it is true bug reports, but for the mass audience who are not experts, yeah, I can understand what you are saying for sure.
I get your point there. Indeed, even with existing FAQs, people tend to ask questions anyway because they think that's the quickest solution to their problems. Free student interns are indeed cost-effective and better than outsourcing because they can communicate with the dev team easily. But what about games with a huge number of players? I doubt these students would be enough to handle all the questions for all the games.
