25 Years of Building Community at Wizards of the Coast

[Music] so ammount failed II I'm a vice president of marketing at Wizards of the coast and joining me here on stage is Michelle Satterfield she leads all of our influencer relations types of efforts between us we have some pretty diverse a Dupre diverse background in gaming myself I've worked on kind of different franchises different platforms so I've worked at Activision Blizzard on hearthstone most recently and before that on destiny and Call of Duty also worked in San Francisco here for a little while at a company called pocket gems and machello has a ton of experience in kind of working with influencers and helping them kind of build themselves up as business businesses and brands and and so yeah and so for the talk today we're gonna talk a little bit about Wizards history and a little bit about the company and how that history has applied itself to what we're doing and digital today and the hardest thing about these talks is you know there's so many different people here and different companies you know we really spent time thinking about who do we think this talk

is for and the lessons were kind of sharing with everybody and there's really two audiences I think one is small and medium-sized game developers and publishers you probably have a community your influencer program and you're looking for new ideas or ways to be creative creative with it so hopefully our talk will help inspire you and then the other one is you might be an influencer who's up-and-coming who's trying to figure out how to break out I think Michelle will share some advice at the end for people who kind of fit that that profile and so I have this Unduli task of boiling down 25 years of company history into like a slide and a half to kind of help you understand what what we're about and so when I was debating on how to explain this I thought of baking cakes because I figured everybody likes cakes unless you're an evil person and so personally I love I love that ice ledges if there's anything less leches fans out there and so the cake you see if there's actually our twenty-fifth birthday cake from last summer I believe Cake Boss or someone associated with Cake Boss bake that for us so if you

were baking a cake and that cake is Wizards of the coast you know what are the the key ingredients that you would put in that cake so to put it simply there's kind of three that I want to share today one is that from the beginning we've been about community and fellowship been all about bringing people together over a shared love of gaming you know historically speaking our most famous products have quite physically brought people around table you know tables to enjoy a game or play a game so that's been with us that's been in our end DNA since the very beginning another piece is we are huge you know fans of fantasy so whether it's deep storytelling world-building deep and rich characters you know we're huge fans of fantasy and that's in our DNA and then the last piece is strategy we you know I think everybody here especially if you're a game dev you understand that the the stickiest games or the games that are pretty easy to pick up but are really difficult to master and so for us we love these deep deep experiences and in games and if you've if you've had a chance to play Magic the Gathering I think you'll understand what I mean and so how do I explain people what we do

when I go to a dinner party well we're the company that owns and publishes Dungeons & Dragons we're also the company that owns and publishes Magic the Gathering the the strategy CCG game and about a year ago we did something that was very different for our company which is we in-house developed what we consider a very high quality digital version of our Magic the Gathering game and we we called it Magic the Gathering arena it's it's an open beta today and it's free to download if you if you want to check it out a lot of the things we're gonna be discussing in this talk have to do with some of the innovations we've been doing over the past year kind of really fine-tuning our marketing for Magic the Gathering arena for reference so so let's talk a little bit about Magic the Gathering is history this is a you know it's a game that's been around 25 years so this is a very abridged version of our history just to help you help set up some context so where we started from the very beginning local game shops were incredibly important to us and our success so these shops are where people come together to not just buy the product but they come

together to actually experience it and play and make new friends the other thing that's really interesting about our history is that from the very beginning we had sort of a homebrew culture develop among our players so people would take the game that we created and then would go and create their own rules or variations we often refer to that as their own formats so this homebrew you know homebrew has been around in the PC world for a long time and even now you know there's modding cultures and so we with our with our physical card game saw that very early on so that was the beginning as the company continued to grow and it was more successful I think the company did something really really smart which is it really listened to players and watched players and and tried to understand hey where can we invest as a company or where can we insert ourselves to kind of make the play experience better and from that was born things like professional play and tournaments if you look back at the history of magic our first Magic the Gathering World Championship actually aired on ESPN in the 90s and so I know there's a lot of investment and things happening with eSports today so it's kind of really

it's really neat to look back and see our history of the 90s and what we were doing back back then the other piece is that you know we ourselves our players and end gamers and so we invested in programs that I think we just saw and sort of the play patterns and behaviors and a very kind of in famous one is what we call Friday night magic which is this formal program where if you go to a local game shop on a Friday night you can go and either learn how to play magic or play or play with others and then the last piece is that as the company continued to grow and the success of the product grew anytime there was a new technology or a new social media platform let's say you know Facebook or even before that myspace you would you would find Magic the Gathering communities kind of blossom so that was a really interesting thing for the company to kind of experience and live through having been around for so many so many years so where are we going so having kind of a new new digital game that were invested investing in and building it opens up new avenues and so one of those avenues is that we're able to work with a much broader spectrum of influencers and we're going to show a lot about that later in this

presentation the other piece is eSports we recently made a pretty big announcement we have a 10 million dollar prize pool for competitive magic the gathering clay which I believe now it makes us one at the top you know eSports in the industry and then the last piece is we are also doing a lot of kind of interesting things around community programming the the screenshot is actually calendar of just I think it was like two weeks a few weeks ago and so we're doing a lot of interesting things of how we program for for that community but let's take a minute and let's talk about game shops so I mentioned how from the very beginning and even to and through today game shops have been super super important to our success so if you if you stop for a second and think about the local game shop from the lens of a marketing person such as myself and start to kind of understand okay what a game shops bring to their local the local players let's just go down the list right so my family in Houston they within a couple miles of their house they have two different game shops one has I think it's like 10 to 15 game play table tables the other ones

much tighter much smaller has I think around 2 game tables so they come in all sorts of shapes and sizes the other thing that you'll understand about game shops when you visit them is that they each have their own kind of personality their own culture it's often it often comes from owners and the staff that work there they oftentimes serve as social hubs for a local local community of gamers so if you go to Friday night magic or you go to D&D sessions at local game shops if you're a regular kind of player there you'll start to see a lot of the same people and and you'll likely end up making brand new you know brand new friends which is kind of is really really neat the last pieces they offer you know a variety of programming for everybody if you've never played D&D if you've never played magic you can find your spot at a local game shop and then the last piece is that they're a great place to kind of check out new games so maybe there's a new board game or a new card game that's released oftentimes that could be your first stop to kind of kind of understand from from tastemakers you know what that that game is like so so if you take it if you take a step

back and look at game shops from a marketing lens they should start to sound very familiar because they do to us which is they start to sound a lot like a modern influencer right it's just influencers oftentimes to work on a much different scale and obviously a different platform so I think it shouldn't be much of a stretch to understand that that you know what we've experienced in our history working with with game shops and sort of the physical analog world there's a lot of things that kind of a crossover into the digital world and I think amongst those things is that oftentimes the things that make game shops successful also make modern-day influencers very successful right so having a variety of programming having programming for all skill levels even the way we you know we treat our you know our partners and game shops and our partners that are influencers I think is is the same I mean if influencers succeed streaming your game you succeed and if the game shop succeeds you know our games succeed and then the last piece is this the sense of homebrew culture I think that from the very beginning we've

learned to kind of learn from our players that our players are very creating homebrew I think is just an easy way to say you know players are creative and so I think we all we've also brought this homebrew culture with us into the digital world and we'll talk a little bit more about that in just a second so so what happens you know what happens when you listen to the community you put influencer relationships first well a lot of really fun ideas happen the screenshot that you're seeing up here and we'll go more detail in just a second is an in-game event where we pair it up day nine who is one of our most famous magically gathering influencers with Danny Trejo who hopefully some of you in this room recognize and they did a what's called a singleton weekend over Valentine's Day so hopefully we thought we were being clever hopefully you guys understood singleton and Valentine's Day but let me show a quick a quick trailer before Michelle comes up and goes way more into detail on our influence or program and I think is the audio good all right let's show a quick trailer about it

you know so this Magic the Gathering arena Valentine's Day event it's called singleton cuz you play single copies of cards not cuz it's suggesting a date or anything would you look at all these shoes minestrone singleton grabbing a four day special Valentine's Day event for singleton we chose the alternate card art that people could win do you want to share something that way will you order two entrees and both get so well whether you're with your significant other your friends or just with your fine self for this Valentine's Day come join us for singleton all weekend long yeah unless you've played a rat calling wait what were you Tommy I think I'll try the rigatoni

now which is the one with the curly noodles it's nice to see you out of the bathroom Danny this is my no bread is for winners so the the back story behind that is we actually paired Danny and day9 up for we did a trailer when we announced our open beta for Magic Arena and it just shows you having really you know what happens when you have great great relationships with with your creative community in our brainstorming calls around what the premise of the video is I think it was day 9 himself that came up with the concept hey wouldn't it be funny I mean if Danny Trejo and I were roommates cuz like nobody would ever expect that and so that created this whole cascading effect of creativity where we we and we asked you to suspend your disbelief that day 9 and Danny Trejo are roommates so yes and

so all of this before I toss it to Michelle is is we don't do this in we don't do this in vain at the end of the day we have a game that we want to be successful and I think everyone here that works on a game would agree that for us you know engagement and retention is the most important if people aren't playing your game you have nothing and so for us we see great results when it comes to player engagement with the influencer activities that we've done and so we hope you know we hope you'll also partake and having fun with your influencer community so now let me welcome Michelle up to the stage to kind of go more into detail on our program thanks Alan hello everyone you're a very lively crowd today like Alan said I'm the influencer manager for Magic the Gathering arena and what a wild ride that's been in the past year already and I'm so excited for what we have in the future this is basically an overview of who I will be talking about today how we want to work with our influencers is we want to make sure that our influencers

are influencing our community not just in the way that we want them to download and play our game but actually how they interact with each other in real life at events or even online so we want to make sure that we're choosing the right influencers to do that and we are all building on those relationships we keep those relationships ongoing through the special events and other features that we do for those streamers or other Creators and we invest in them we hope that they invest in us back and that's why it's important to work further than the relationship itself and work on those offerings and then progression from that you saw we had a streamer event the the day nine and Danny Trejo we do that with other streamers as well we work closely with them and our developers and create a basically homebrew format inside of MTG arena centered around that streamer it's a really great opportunity for ourselves and the streamer because it allows them

to get amazing reach I mean that's crypts face inside of our game that's pretty amazing but it also gives us some really great original content not only for the streamer to play but for the viewers to watch and also for the players inside the game this is something new that they get to experience so what sort of influencers do I reach out to and why do I reach out to them we have a lot of amazing values as Wizards of the coast you can google them right now some of those values include inclusivity stewardship empowerment and we want to reflect that in our community so and we look for influencers we don't just look for the people that are bringing in the the most views on Twitch the people there that are going to you know have thousands of downloads of a game although those things are great and we still look for them that's not our deciding factor our

deciding factor is which influencers can we work with that will influence our community to be a better place and to be more involved we look for passionate players and not just passionate in the gameplay itself but passionate with the brand and IP we also use a mix of our top tier creators going back to numbers and our micro and mid tier influencer and we found that when using a big bulk of these micro influencers it brings so much more to our events and our numbers on Twitch than just using top tier alone we also get more sincere creations from them and just great community involvement overall with the micro influencers so we've seen a lot of success with this new way of thinking for for Wizards of the coast we've

really only been overhauling influencer work for about a year since the drop of the NDA for MTG Arena and with that drop we actually saw you can see there that number our unique streamers grew year-over-year 477 percent through the the relationships and the offerings that we have given these streamers and having them all work together so going back to the streamer events that we do in game here's two examples for you we have Amazonian on top she's probably one of our micro influencers reaching into mid tier right now and then we have Gabby sparks who was mid tier now reaching into top tier influencer Gabby smarts when she did her event it was all about big monsters and getting them on the field as it was greedy is just a greedy greedy draft and we loved it so much she actually doubled her viewer average viewers because of that event alone and not only did they come in for that event

to watch her they stayed and she has actually told me in emails that that of a event alone has brought her to the next level for her streaming ability and being able to just have her own business as a streamer which is really great for us to hear because that's what we want to make sure it is happening right we want to make sure that the offerings that we are giving streamers is an investment not only to us but it's an investment to them then we see Amazonian Amazonian is awesome if you don't know her she is she's a mechanical engineer she actually used to work for Amazon building robots of all things and she loves magic the gathering so much she quit her job as a mechanical engineer at Amazon and now full-time streams MTG Arena so she created this amazing amazing draft and ended up being the top special event draft we've ever run inside the game it was so successful

that we ran it twice with her permission and she was very excited when we did that and of course great for us great for them now working with all of these streamers we said earlier I work with like thousands of streamers you know and building those relationships is very important because we can get so much more out of just you know a sponsorship pay here do this here we have our early access events and if you watch the last one Ravnica allegiance we had over 400 streamers be part of that event and not a single one of them were paid and they all wanted to do it because they love the game they love the exclusivity and they love the community it's a huge event that they all get together I make a discord for them and they just love talking with each other it's just it's just a fun time for them right and therefore they will invest their time even if it's a non paid event and you

know hearing all this philosophy of you know oh the philosophy of if you help the streamers and they grow and it's really rewarding it is really rewarding not only do we see you know alias V she came over from Gwent she is now a full-time streamer for MTG Arena but we see this type of conversation I get it in emails DMS and just out on Twitter all of the time this is not just oh I was scavenger through and found this from like a year ago no this is a very very regular conversation that is in our community and it's wonderful to see that because you know we talked about our community having 25 years and about the cake and you know all of these different ingredients when we drop the NDA and we started focusing on influencer work not only are we growing the community at large but we now created a new subset community and that's our streaming and creator community and I'm only one person I work with a lot of streamer and so when we build these relationships

with them they are now not only advocates for the brand but they help me I've had so many new streamers come to me because of referrals from other streamers their top tier you know influencers referrals because of the way that we we treat them I've been in many conversations in the past uh sorry most recently theis who's one of our competitors for the mythic Invitational if you know him he's uh he's a pretty big deal on Twitch I had a conversation with him the other week on the phone and he mentioned to me that what we do at Wizards of the coast for influencers is nothing like he's ever experienced before in other companies and this is a top tier creator so you know he's been working he's had lots of sponsorships with other companies and I asked him oh that's interesting you know tell me more about that because what I think I'm doing you know building their relationship putting values first is not new it's just correct right and so when

I asked him about that he said yeah most people don't care and they just pay you or they offer you something and then they move on you know you're putting the the effort into building a relationship and making me feel comfortable in the new community you're also offering me opportunities far beyond just monetary value and that's something that is very original it's refreshing its new and I appreciate that again not the only streamer especially top tier creators that has told me that and if you're gonna take away anything from this talk it's that you need to care more about your streamers when you have happy streamers you have those happy relationships you will get so much more than then you could ever imagine so let's talk more about the advice I have

some advice for developers and for influencers and a lot of this advice can actually go hand in hand because developers they work for a company streamers you should think of yourself as a company you are your own personal brand and you should be acting as if you are a business so the first thing that you need to do for either developer or influencer side is recognize what are your company values what is the the values of your brand what are the goals that you're trying to reach right as an influencer think about what's your brand what are the values that you hold what are the goals that you're trying to reach and hopefully those two value the the values and the goals of both parties will align and when those align you will get the best product possible for both sides developers again don't just go in there and say I want the top tiers right invest invest invest invest in your

micro influencers and mid tiers because they will grow with you and only will they grow with you they will stay with you when they grow and that's where you're gonna want to be you don't want to lose someone because you didn't invest in that relationship when they break through it has happened it will happen so invest in people micro influencers will benefit the most from your support that is true but the top tier creators when you start putting them together with micro influencers can also reap the benefits of that so really encourage that community building not only for the streamers themselves because they'll start taking care of each other they will they'll start supporting each other far far beyond what we can offer we can only do so much with featuring streamers daily or the special events there's a lot of things that happen in between that we can't always just be throwing out sponsorships and you know featuring them but what's

happening in between to help build that community it's the streamers and the influencers themselves when they start supporting each other with the raids and hosts and you're really fostering that community to make it a very supportive the stewardship value right environment everyone starts growing together and it's a really not only just beautiful thing but the data shows it works I mean we grew over 400% in one year of unique streamers and it's really because of the community itself so yeah for streamers if you don't get an opportunity that you you know we're really hoping for I'd say this though don't get discouraged now every opportunities for you and that's okay we only have certain spots for certain opportunities or sometimes we have over 400 for a special event right I've gotten emails before people saying oh you didn't use me for this event did I do something wrong oh no on the

contrary we love you we want to invest in you this opportunity just wasn't for you right so you can't take things personally you have to just keep going keep doing what you are supposed to be doing and and build that relationship of positivity and the community around you and you'll grow regardless as a streamer so what's next for us we are investing in eSports as Alan has said and we have our magic Pro League in the in in play right now and you can actually see our magic Pro League with some of our fan favorites influencers and eight players who qualified through the game this next week in Boston Massachusetts we will have our mythic Invitational and it's gonna be super exciting I suggest you all tuned in to twitch.tv slash magic there's gonna be a 1 million dollar prize pool on the line and it's just gonna be an amazing opportunity to see

what we have in store for magic eSports moving forward and not only competitively but also showcasing our amazing community of influencers who do reflect the community as a whole and also I think I should plug in that we're hiring so please check out our job board online we would love to get some resumes in and join our amazing team yeah we will yeah I'll code so if you have any well do we have any more time for questions here should we we have two minutes if anyone has a question now if not we can and we'll just go over to the alcove and and have a casual talk over there but if you do have a question there's a microphone right there in the middle [Applause]