After working on gaming’s biggest titles, Sprung wants to make player feedback easier to find.
Have you ever pressed “start” on Call of Duty, Halo, or Apex Legends? If so, you’ve interacted at least a little bit with Sprung Studios, a Vancouver- and Brighton, UK-based video game co-development studio.
“To become part of the lexicon of websites that game developers like to visit on a regular basis would be the real win.”
For 20 years, Sprung has been the name in the credits, not on the box, for the work it’s done supporting big-name titles with both user interface (UI) and user experience (UX). That’s changing, with the release of its new AI-powered tool, Sonar, that launched this past fall. Sonar is a free platform that aggregates player sentiment from across the internet so developers (and gamers) can find out what people like and don’t like about a video game.
Sonar “is a celebration and distillation of all of those player voices” talking about a game, Sprung Studio CEO James Chaytor told BetaKit in a December interview.
Chaytor added that while Sonar isn’t the studio’s “bread and butter,” it does cement its place as an expert in the industry.
Sonar is not as simple as a Metacritic for video games, as the tool isn’t just grabbing scores from reviewers. Instead, it sorts specific feedback gathered from YouTube videos, and articles from around the world, to capture the sentiment around a game’s features. For example, Canadian-made Balatro has an 88-percent Sonar Score, meaning 88 percent of the 370 insights Sonar captured from 56 sources were deemed “positive.”
This is further broken down into a variety of categories, like player agency, where Sonar users can see, for example, that one YouTube video said Balatro features engaging and strategic gameplay, while another article notes that the game’s tutorial doesn’t properly explain game mechanics.
Chaytor recounted how the tool was born out of a team of four he assembled in February, 2025, as AI “raised its head” to explore the technology’s potential uses and threats.
“Any business would be crazy not to look at that,” he said.
Within a few months, the small research and development team had built a tool for users to investigate different components of the games they were interested in, whether it’s a role-playing game or a shooter. After positive reception at the External Development Summit in Vancouver in September, Sprung Studios polished Sonar and launched it in November.
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Of course, when consulting the internet at large for opinions on a video game, studios have to be discerning. It’s common for groups of gamers to launch a salvo of negative online reviews for any number of reasons, including predatory business practices, or due to political motivations.
This is where the human element comes in. After Sonar gathers the data and insights, Chaytor said his team vets the feedback that eventually gets published to the website. He added that he’s watched hundreds of YouTube videos himself to decide if input is worth including.
“Are they simply just screaming into a microphone about a game, or are they giving really salient points and really thoughtful insight into that game?” Chaytor said.
Since it grew out of a side project, Chaytor said he doesn’t want to put too much weight on Sonar. It “needs a bit of a push,” so Sprung will put a little bit of money into marketing, otherwise, he’ll let it grow organically.
“If we get a huge amount of visits and are able to monetize in a way that pays back some of the money that’s gone into creating it, that would be an incredible outcome,” Chaytor said. “To become part of the lexicon of websites that game developers like to visit on a regular basis would be the real win.”
Feature image courtesy Sprung Studios.