Case study:
Global Gaming Company

Game on: keeping virtual world players safe from online harm

The multi-billion dollar Virtual World gaming market gives players of all ages the ability to team up, compete against, and engage with one another globally, 24/7. Unfortunately, it also attracts bad actors intent on doing harm to others, especially children.

As one of fastest growing Virtual Worlds games, our client recognized the need to provide a safe environment for users, and contracted a range of partners to help moderate player engagement.

At first, this approach was successful at identifying common threats to players, predominately in English. However, these threats started to evolve dramatically, particularly as the popularity of the game expanded and new users joined who spoke new languages.

As one of fastest growing Virtual Worlds games, our client recognized the need to provide a safe environment for users, and contracted a range of partners to help moderate player engagement.

Challenges

At the height of its popularity, this game attracted 1.4 million players daily across North America, who spoke 11 different languages. Hiding among these players were bad actors, who not only spread illegal content on the gaming platform, but also attempted to groom unwitting children and teenagers. In order to stay undetected, these bad actors constantly changed their approach and used new evasion techniques on a daily basis. This posed some business-critical challenges for this beloved Virtual Worlds game, including:

Scalability

The sheer growth of players around the clock resulting from the game’s popularity, meant more Trust and Safety resource to monitor the wellbeing of users than was currently available.

Evasion techniques

As new threats were identified and addressed, bad actor communities would learn, adapt and evade the safety measures put in place by the gaming platform, which meant new iterations of the threat would appear on a daily basis.

Multiple languages

Add in the complexity of multiple languages across different cultures, and the ability to detect and address threats to players became almost impossible - almost, that is.

Solution

Crisp partnered with our client’s Trust and Safety leadership team to develop a platform-wide Illegal Content Defense plan. We identified the most dangerous bad actors behind the majority of the threats, and delivered rapid intelligence on a reoccurring basis to guide Trust and Safety teams on how to remove emerging threats and stop them from coming back.

Threat assessment

Using Crisp’s best-in-class threat taxonomy we worked with our client to create a standardized policy that established a baseline for safety and success.

Ongoing guidance

Working in collaboration with our clients, we calibrated our solution to make sure they were first to know and act on emerging threats.

Time-sensitive alerting

To monitor and address active threats, we provided Flash Reporting to escalate urgent threats made to vulnerable users within minutes.

Platform intelligence

To identify and prevent future threats, we provided Monthly Intelligence Reports about the gaming sector and platform- specific risks to avoid.

As a result, our Virtual Worlds gaming client has been able to remove hundreds of illegal actors from their environment. Due to Crisp's intelligence offerings, its Trust and Safety Team have also been able to make significant policy changes to their community guidelines to keep up with the ever-changing behavior of online bad actors.

Today, Crisp provides social and gaming platform clients with rapid intelligence to detect and prevent a full range of illegal and harmful content. To date, these efforts have contributed to the safe online experiences of over 2.2 billion users globally, including an estimated 450 million children.

Crisp Solution:

Crisp Products:

15 years of online harm detection experience

2.2 billion safer user experiences globally

450 million safer user experiences covering children

The highest standard in Platform Trust and Safety Defense and Intelligence

We protect over $4.5 trillion of market capitalization by monitoring over a billion actors and their conversations to detect millions of harms, aimed at thousands of targets and prioritize hundreds of alerts within minutes, each and every 24 hours. Find out why Crisp is the highest standard in Platform Trust and Safety Defense and Intelligence today.

Let’s talk