Build movements for your community

[Music] hello everybody I'm absolutely delighted to be starting off the living games track here at Pocket Gamer this is something that Phil Mansell our CEO was talking about last year and it's wonderful to see that really take hold inside in the community and have people engage with it today I'm gonna be talking about how you build movements for your community and I found the clicker so to give you a little bit of a summary my name is Connor Crowley I'm the game development director at jagex now Jagex is best known for the franchise runescape RuneScape's been in live operation for 18 years we can now hire people who are younger than our game we are number of years ago about

five years ago we launched old school runescape and that was a snapshot of the game from 2007 both of these games have brought the franchise to a grand total of about 1 billion dollars in revenue and we are now at the highest peak membership we've had in the history of runescape overall so what I'm going to talk about is how you can try and mobilize your community and generate movements for them to really bring your game forward huge numbers of people to play but I'd like to go into what a movement is and a movement is a group of people with a shared purpose and they're creating change together now that comes from them seeing a brewing discontent and having a positive vision in the future and then a path forwards to that positive vision now that's something major in terms of

social change but when it comes to games and how we can build them within games let's look at what all of those elements are a brewing discontent can be an element in your game that players are having an issue with communities are finding a challenge with a particular part of the game they're looking for new rewards they're never looking for new challenges that's where your discontent can come from doesn't have to be as negative as that particularly sounds the vision is something that you can listen to your community for you can look it for ways that they would look to solve it or things they're looking for you to put into the game that can be the vision that's there it can also be a vision that you put for yourself your own designs and your own understanding of what the game is the path forward is how to move in that place and this is how do you allow your community come along in that journey it's a different for it's different to a mandate or our mandate would be you specifying what that positive is vision is and telling players they're going to get it what you want to do here is allow the players to bring that information to you and work with you through its delivery to give you an idea old school

runescape has a 75% majority vote on every change that goes into the game that is an extreme way that you can have engagement between your player base and your developers in delivering new elements for the game so that's a lot about how you talk to players but let's look at how would we look at actually building this into a release get release schedule and today inside in this room you've heard a lot about how to run live ups how to run events and how to consider how to make those events most effective when I look at an event that kind of see blocks and building pieces that bring various events together you have your features you've your rewards that are coming together maybe creative that's talking about it and they'd all be part of one singular event but over over time you have these scheduled one next event the next event what I'm talking about in movements is something that sits above all of that a movement is something where you are seeding ideas

early in that process be it through a teaser trailer maybe a small thing that's dropped during a live stream that you're talking to your players about are just something when you're communicating to them on social media on reddit or Facebook or whatever your channels are on what you're doing through this entire process is playing on that idea encouraging the communication and giving your community something that they can start to rally behind encourage the conversation on the first seed that you drop and allow them to speculate in question those speculations can help you understand what are you going to try and deliver in a future update it allows you to better inform what your future is going to be and make sure that you're delivering what your players are actually looking for and this can keep going time and time again you're building that snowball you're making sure that your future events are as effective as they possibly can be now to give you an idea of a couple of examples from runescape and from old school now runescape this is one of the bosses that we had on an event our an update called God Wars dungeon - God Wars dungeon - as you can expect was a sequel to God Wars dungeon 1 which came

out early in the lifecycle of runescape we launched this update in 2016 the update itself was very much feeding against our fleeting their need for new challenges and new combat abilities inside in the game we had a lot of bosses we have a lot of dungeons in runescape after at that point it was 15 years of development you can expect there's a lot of content there but players are always looking for more and looking for new ways to challenge themselves this is a way for us to start dealing with that who's also looked for nostalgia players always engage with things when they've fondly remember being engaged with something in the past and this allowed us to play to that and understand what was good in the original and how can we improve it in the future and also we had a large-scale story going at the time and this was a very strong story beat for us and was something that would encourage the players to get engaged with that story and make sure they're coming back for future updates as well now the path forward and how we work through that was we announced our we released this as part of a option for future votes our

future releases where we allowed the players to vote on what updates they were most excited by I mean that's a very easy way to figure out what do the players want right ask them now some things they asked for they didn't actually want and we've shipped those too and there's a completely different talk and getting the difference between what people say they want and what they actually want but in this case they did want this and then we also made sure that we were live streaming the entire development we put forward teasers we put forward suggestions we did a guest that boss kind of like guess that Pokemon to try and see if people could understand who the bosses were going to be what gods they were going to be for it allowed us to understand what players expected from those bosses and how they expected to interact with them and engage with them that meant that we were able to ensure that those were the things we emphasized during development that kind of iterative cycle during the development process where we're receiving ideas now when it came to actually putting that in the game so going beyond our communications we made sure that we were releasing pieces early the release process for this particular

piece of content was over about four weeks it started with us just telling players about the bosses being there then we placed the entrance to the dungeon couldn't open it it existed players could come across it as they wander through the desert it sparked that media point of intrigue and people started asking questions if they weren't following our live streams that could suddenly start following it in game after that we ran a tiny little quest something where people could go out and find more information about those bosses and then just before launch we had a large-scale community event where they were all progressing together to open the dungeon now to show you the impact that that had this is a Diu graph for that period of time to explain when you're running a game over a period of time a Gruen scape work for us to really see fluctuations we go into very tight time periods this is only a couple of weeks where we fluctuate quite rapidly what you'll see is there we go okay so

the pre-release where we first announced it you see some level of engagement increase there was a little bit of intrigue nothing major once we launch the event interestingly that was far more accessible than we could have hoped for while we had a massive jump in our Diu we had a larger jump in our our our pool levels as well I saw our overall monetization and membership levels were increasing at the same time and when we looked at the launch event we had actually brought all those players in and engaged them already which was exciting for us but we didn't have the same drop-off people were coming back in and we held that tail we quite frequently see that drop off after an immediate an initial launch so this was our building and our in our getting interest in players as we went over time as another example Dragon's Lair - now when you have decades of content then it's very easy to find sequels I understand that if you're looking for something that can hark back to players calling on it you may not have that level that depth of content but this can work for any piece of new intriguing content that you're releasing Dragon

Slayer 2 was a sequel to Quest that was launched in 2001 and we launched the sequel 17 years later in 2018 in the in that date players were it was aimed at top-tier players so dragon stairs a much earlier quest but it gave players a chance to understand the story a little better now in this case the brewing discontent that we had was was very much people looking for a story beat and looking for a new story in old school while we had launched old school from a 2007 update we hadn't actually put in very many new quests we had launched one quest before this but it had been live for 5 years in comparison runescape has about 200 quests and had launched about 10 quests in the same period of time this is very strange for us in terms of what players expect from runescape and it gave us players were telling us that they were looking for this and we listened and gave it to them now you may not have the

same polling system that exists in old school runescape but we did start this with an announcement at room fest hearing that rumbling around looking for more story content looking for us to push the narrative element of the game as much as we were pushing things like PvE or PvP content we announced this to huge and very very positive reception now there was a wonderful thing to behold and was great to actually be there when we saw players respond to it we also had the polling system going at the same time and this meant that players were engaged in every element of the content as we were launching it they had to vote everything in at a 75% majority and if they didn't like it we didn't put it in like I said it's a very extreme way for you to make sure you're giving the players what they actually want well then we were also looking at how can we tease this content in earlier updates so this was the first time in old school where we actually put something into the game before we launched the quest itself we did it just

before Christmas a place where we usually see a lull in how people engage with the game and we see a dip in err and our engagement apparently people want to do something other than play old school when they're on their Christmas holidays we also looked to livestream the creation of artwork for this update so we had our artists on livestream engaging with the community taking live feedback and altering the designs while we were building the content making sure what was what the players were looking for and then allow the players to shout about that and engage other people with it giving them that tool to generate that movement to make sure that your improves improving the performance and we took those changes we got direct changes into the game from feedback players felt like they were making difference and that meant that they were engaging others as well now in terms of how that impacted the performance of the product itself this is a very gradual incline but like I said at that period in time we tend to see dips what we see is the pre-release we did it in two parts starting at Christmas than just before New Year's you can see the two spikes are the two lifts as we started to do that now we

always lose everybody at New Year's and I haven't found a way to stop that from happening yet but we will some time in the future but then as we went into launch and people were getting excited for it we started to see that steady climb and continuous increase I was a steady growth over a period of months following this period a lot of what drove that as well was the excitement that players had for getting ready for the content at the very start and we actually had a marathon of a stream for people to be the first person to complete it took about two hours and 52 minutes I think so it was a great start to what we were trying to do here and there was a continuous race to try and beat that time once it had gone live so those are just two examples of how we see this how we've seen this operating in the past now looking forward as to what we're going to do in the future and what how this scales out to more effective means is we've spoken about a single movement will have multiple updates in that movement we'll see the idea early and we'll make sure we're iterating it and driving people's attention to this point giving them

things that they can talk to the community about and allow them to build momentum as much as we are now we will be looking to see how we layer a second one onto that how can one movement build up to a second and we're in the middle of this right now we're looking at things that are going to cross multiple years of multiple months to make sure that we are seeding ideas very early and then snowballing the conversation about what will come in the future and you can see some of that will happen this year with runescape and our next stage will be as we lay on a next movement following out of that how does that go on a multi-year strategy so we will look how we're going to engage players and how we're going to move them through the journey in runescape over periods of multiple years in multiple different storylines in different engagements seeing how can we see it in a single item in first in the first movement something that will cause a change in the third like a larger third movement than what we've got here

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