Caroline McDonald joined Side in 2025 as our Global Director of Player Support. Bringing more than 15 years of experience across customer experience, gaming operations and large-scale transformation, Caroline has held leadership roles at EA and Arise and supported major developers and publishers, including Warner Bros. and Ubisoft.
To mark her first year with Side, we sat down with Caroline to discuss her journey into games, the emotional investment behind every player interaction, the evolving relationship between technology and human judgement, and her vision for the future of Player Support.
Tell us about your background and what drew you to a career in the games industry.
I’ve always worked in customer experience, but originally in much more traditional industries and roles. Then in 2011 an opportunity came up to join BioWare in Player Support for Star Wars: The Old Republic.
Gaming honestly wasn’t an industry I had ever considered for myself, mainly because I’m not a gamer. I’ve tried many times, both growing up and since joining the industry, and I’m just genuinely terrible at it.
A few leaders I had worked with previously encouraged me to apply. During the interview process they explained that they were deliberately looking for a mix of gaming knowledge and strong CX experience within the team. They knew I didn’t bring the gaming background, but I did bring the CX side, and that was really my way into the industry.
Since then I’ve had the opportunity to lead so many different functions and learn pretty much every facet of Player Support. What has kept me here is that it never really stands still. There is so much passion in this industry and so much opportunity to be creative. You’re also constantly dealing with new technology, new player behaviours and approaches that tend to be much more cutting edge than you see in more traditional CX environments.
I also feel really fortunate that the journey keeps evolving. Today I get the opportunity to work across multiple publishers and see different games, different challenges and completely different approaches to Player Support at the same time. Even after 15 years, I’m still learning, and I think that’s a huge part of why I still love working in this industry.
Can you describe your role as Director of Player Support at Side and what your main areas of focus are today?
My role at Side is to lead our Player Support business globally, but a really significant part of my role today is strategic and consultative.
I work directly with publishers to think about what Player Support should actually look like for their games and their players. That can mean designing a completely new support model, looking at how an existing operation needs to evolve, preparing for a major launch, or thinking through how AI, automation, quality, insights and different support channels should all fit together.
Sometimes they come to us with a very defined problem, and sometimes the starting point is simply, “We know this needs to be better, what would you do?” I really enjoy that part because it gives us the opportunity to challenge some of the traditional thinking around support and design something that genuinely makes sense for that particular game and player community.
Then obviously, we have to be able to bring what we design to life. I work closely with our operational teams globally around performance, capability and leadership, making sure that the strategy we create with our partners actually translates into something that works day to day.
The people side is also hugely important to me. We can design the best model in the world, but ultimately we need great people and strong leaders to deliver it. I want our teams to understand the players and games they support, to understand the purpose behind what they’re doing and to see Player Support as somewhere they can genuinely build a career.
You’ve worked on some of gaming’s biggest franchises, including FIFA, Star Wars, Madden and Need for Speed. What have those large-scale live environments taught you about what players expect from support?
I think the biggest thing those environments have taught me is just how deeply personal a game can be to someone, and therefore how high their expectations of Player Support can be.
Players may have invested hundreds or even thousands of hours, built years of progress, earned content they really value, and formed friendships and communities around that game. There is a huge amount of emotional investment there, as well as financial investment, and they naturally translate the experience they have with the game into the experience they expect when they need support.
If that support experience doesn’t match those expectations, the impact can resonate much further than one bad interaction. You can take somebody who absolutely loves a game and, at the moment they need help most, give them an experience that fundamentally changes how they feel about it. In the worst cases, that can contribute to them leaving the game altogether.
It also teaches you that players don’t necessarily want support. They want to get back to their game. So speed absolutely matters, but relevance and effort matter just as much. A really fast response that doesn’t understand the problem or sends somebody through unnecessary steps can actually make the experience worse.
It’s also why I don’t believe every interaction should be treated exactly the same. Someone asking a relatively simple question might be delighted to get an immediate automated answer. Someone who has lost access to an account they’ve invested years in needs something very different. Context matters, the severity of the issue matters and understanding the player behind the contact matters.
Ultimately, I think players expect the support experience to respect the investment they’ve made in the game. At scale you absolutely need process, technology and automation, but you can’t let the scale of the operation make the player feel like they are just another ticket. That balance is probably one of the biggest lessons I’ve carried with me throughout my career.
Quotes
“Players may have invested hundreds or even thousands of hours, built years of progress, earned content they really value, and formed friendships and communities around that game. There is a huge amount of emotional investment there, as well as financial investment, and they naturally translate the experience they have with the game into the experience they expect when they need support.”
Player Support and Community teams have access to an enormous amount of direct player feedback and operational data. How can studios make better use of those insights to improve not only support, but the wider player experience?
This is probably one of the biggest opportunities I see for Player Support and Community today. We are sitting on an enormous amount of player intelligence, but historically we haven’t always used it as intelligence.
Players are telling us every day what they’re struggling with, what they don’t understand, what frustrates them, what they love and where there is friction in their experience. In many cases, Support and Community are also some of the earliest places where an emerging issue starts to show itself – whether via private chat, Reddit threads, or Discord channels.
Traditionally though, they have served different purposes:
- Player Support tends to give us very direct and specific insights: I can’t access my account. I’ve lost something. This feature isn’t working. I don’t understand what happened.
- Community gives us a different lens: Players are reacting badly to this change. Sentiment is shifting. This conversation is suddenly gaining momentum. Players really love something we’ve introduced.
Neither view tells the complete story on its own.
That’s why I think connecting the intelligence from Support and Community is so powerful. They are different listening points into the same player experience. When you combine those signals, and then connect them with game and operational data, you start to understand not just what players are contacting you about, but what they are actually experiencing and why.
Historically, we’ve also been very good at reporting what happened. How many contacts did we receive? What were the top contact drivers? What was our CSAT? How quickly did we respond? Those things are important for running an operation, but they don’t necessarily tell a studio what it should do differently.
The real value comes when we start asking why. Why did this contact reason suddenly increase? Why are players dissatisfied? Is it actually the support experience causing that dissatisfaction, or is it something within the game, a policy, a process, a technical issue or something we simply haven’t communicated clearly enough?
Technology and AI give us a huge opportunity to do that at a scale we couldn’t before. We can analyse enormous volumes of unstructured player feedback, connect signals across different channels and identify patterns much earlier. Something that looks like ten unrelated contacts to ten different agents could actually be the first indication of an issue that will ultimately affect thousands of players.
There also needs to be a genuine feedback loop into the studio where Support and Community can say, this is what players are telling us, this is how significant we believe it is, this is what appears to be driving it and this is where we see an opportunity to improve the experience.
And just as importantly, we need to close that loop. If we change something in the game, adjust a policy, improve communication or change the support journey, did contacts reduce? Did sentiment improve? Did we actually make the experience better?
That’s where I see Player Support continuing to evolve. It isn’t just the place players come when something goes wrong, and Community isn’t just the place where we engage with players. Together they represent two of the richest sources of direct player intelligence a studio has.
The opportunity is connecting those signals, turning them into insight and making sure that insight actually influences decisions across the wider player experience.
If you could change one common misconception developers or players have about Player Support, what would it be?
Probably that Player Support is there primarily to answer tickets.
I’ve worked in Player Support for 15 years and across some incredibly large live environments, and one thing I’ve learned is how easy it is to become focused on the queue. How many contacts do we have? How quickly are we responding? Are we meeting SLA? All of those things matter, but they’re not really the end goal. The end goal is the player.
For me, great Player Support is about making the player whole again, whatever that means within the values and philosophy of that publisher. Something has happened that has interrupted their experience or damaged their relationship with the game, and our job is to understand what happened and find the right way to restore that experience.
Sometimes that is simply fixing the issue. Sometimes it’s explaining something properly, restoring something they’ve lost, recognising the investment they’ve made or just making a good judgement call rather than rigidly following a process.
I’ve seen throughout my career how powerful that can be. A great support interaction can take a player at a point of real frustration and completely change how they feel about the game. That means Player Support can genuinely drive engagement and protect the relationship a player has with a title, rather than simply resolve the contact in front of us.
Answering the ticket is just the mechanism. Making the player whole and getting them back to enjoying the game is the outcome.
What do you see as the biggest challenges and opportunities facing Player Support today?
I think the biggest challenge is that the gap between what players expect and what many support organisations are able to deliver is widening.
Player expectations are moving incredibly quickly. They experience personalisation, immediacy and increasingly intelligent technology everywhere else in their lives, and naturally they bring those expectations into gaming. The challenge is that operational maturity doesn’t always evolve at the same speed.
That’s also where I see the biggest opportunity.
Technology, AI and automation give us an opportunity to fundamentally redesign the support experience. Not just answer the same tickets faster, but ask why the player needed to contact us in the first place. What can we remove completely? What can we resolve instantly? Where does personalisation matter? And where does a human genuinely add value?
The challenge is making sure we don’t confuse what we can automate with what we should automate.
There are interactions where the best player experience is never speaking to an agent because we can solve the problem immediately. Equally, there are moments where the player needs judgement, empathy or somebody who understands the context and investment behind their issue.
So for me, the opportunity isn’t really AI itself. It’s using technology, data and our people together to close that experience gap and fundamentally rethink what great Player Support looks like.
Looking ahead, what would you like Side’s Player Support offering and teams to be known for?
I’d like Side to be known for pushing what Player Support can be, but also recognising that there isn’t one version of great Player Support that works for every publisher.
Every publisher is different. Their values are different, their titles and player communities are different, the platforms and technology they’ve built on are different, and ultimately what they want the player experience to feel like is different.
That’s where I think Side can really differentiate.
We have this amazing opportunity because we’ve work across so many different publishers, games and player communities for over 30 years now. We can see different challenges, different approaches and what is working across the industry, but our role isn’t to take one model and replicate it everywhere. It’s to bring that experience to the table and help each partner design the right approach for their players and their business.
I want publishers to see us as a partner they can come to and say, “This is what we’re trying to achieve, how would you approach it?” and trust us to help design the answer as well as deliver it.
And I want our people to reflect that too. Curious, adaptable people who understand the games and players they represent, think beyond the contact in front of them and are empowered to use judgement.
Ultimately, I’d like Side to be known for great execution, but also for the thinking behind it. Understanding what makes each publisher and their players different, and helping them build a Player Support experience that genuinely reflects that.