Building Hits with the Power of Community

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Brands grow increase revenue and ensure player satisfaction worldwide and since the company draws from almost a decade of battl tested experience including with notable customers like bunge Capcom Ubisoft and hundreds more gam sites attribution platform meets the unique needs of PC console and web 3 games notably gam site brings display social influencer and affiliate marketing into One dashboard for easy comparison marketing attribut ution for PC and console games is complicated but whether your game is free to play premium or supported by DLCs gam site has you covered to learn more about how gam site has served other games teams and how it can help yours simply visit gamesite doio or check out the link in the show notes and with that let's jump into the episode so welcome welcome welcome everybody to another packed episode of the navic gaming podcast I'm your host Manu and if I sound slightly unwell to

you uh then it's because I'm still recovering from a pretty major cold uh from last week uh I'm not entirely sure why it's taking so long uh to recover fully but my apologies in advance for sounding little stuffy and maybe nasly anyway uh you know that doesn't mean we cannot do a podcast uh and I'm super excited about today's episode because we will be diving deep into the topic of community in game building I won't attempt to list out all the ways uh leveraging Community can help one build better games because there are really so many but moreover we have two guests who can talk about all things Community way better than I can summarize Colin Foo and Richard Warren Colin is the CEO uh and Richard is the head of community at windwalk which is a company focused on building digital communities and the Technologies necessary to accelerate them so so

welcome to the Pod guys thanks for having us awesome so uh let's kick things off with some uh context for our listeners who might not be you know very familiar with both of you and windwalk we'll start with Colin um if you could quickly go over your background uh maybe even touching on windw walk's founding story and what windwalk does today for sure yeah uh I'm Colin as you mentioned I'm I'm CEO here um my background is originally from the game design side so I was a game designer at Riot working on league for a couple years then I went to go do some kind of VR work um at a studio called bobab and then founded windwalk shortly after that um and you know now we're kind of a big Community agency Community SAS product you know kind of company but we actually started out originally as a game studio so the reason we kind of are so obsessed with Community is we were founded as a game Studio that's Foundation was to be

Community First you know a phrase kind of everyone uses to describe their game studios these days right um but for us it was yeah yeah ex like who isn't Community First right um but you know for us it was pretty a pretty specific strategy based on what we saw in the market which was essentially the discoverability was harder than ever you know we saw you know the cost for influencer going up we saw programmatic ads kind of collapsing um are getting expensive and you know we saw small games medium-sized games big games that were winning grow on the back of these huge organic communities you know usually built before launch so um yeah we we launched you know our first game Enemy on board and we kind of to to TDR our company story we we discovered a really unique kind of community go to market built around gamifying our Discord gating access to our game you know our alpha build essentially for weekend play tests and tournaments um and essentially having people like share

invite their friends upload all our content posts um in exchange for a shot to get into those weekend tournaments and it a very you know for us very caveman way of running this kind of community-led go to market but um you know we've built on those strategies and we've grown you know a pretty thriving business out of that and and have some exciting Tech that kind of doubles down on those Concepts coming out soon so awesome which uh which what is the name of the game just out of Interest yeah yeah the game was uh uh the game is called enemy on board um you know we've kind of given it back to the community I think we realized we nailed the community growth part but we couldn't get the LTV to work super well um but you know it improved out our strategy um and if you were on Reddit in 2019 in any of the gaming sub reddits you probably saw all of our posts you know and ours of fans going and uploading all our stuff so I definitely remember reading about the game I think in Simon Carlos's newsletter um and I think it was uh that

was probably also where I heard windwalk for the first time so um but yeah uh very interesting um yeah maybe handing it over to Richard if you could also quickly go over your background um you know what you do at windwalk today maybe who has windwalk worked with in the past and what uh the process generally is also cool so I I joined winwalk as the first employee here um in 2019 uh sitting alongside Colin Chris and Sam who are the kind of OG co-founders of windwalk um and prior to that I had been just kind of like giving advice from the sidelines and like trying to help out as much as I could whether that be like you know helping them think through go to market or fundraising questions or anything like that I was effectively just trying to trying to help out a group of people that I thought you know we're going to do big things um and you know I got connected to Colin and Chris through Sam

who is one of my really great friends and and a college roommate um and so yeah basically joined the company as the first employee prior to starting at windwalk um I spent five years working in in Tech m&a so actually doing sside uh m&a deals for different tech companies a lot of SAS companies some gaming companies as well that was a total slog like definitely a grind um being an investment banker is really really tough but one of the things that is super important about it is like you take your job really really seriously um right so you know somebody is trusting you to sell their business for them potentially kind of like a life-altering outcome uh on on the scale of hundreds of millions of dollars not just for them but for you know multiple generations of their family afterwards um and you as an investment banker have to be there you know to Steward them through the through the process of of you know actually selling their business and so yeah you

know basically learned a ton of things doing banking um was very very serious person was getting a little sick of was getting a little sick of just kind of you know the the mobility hurdles at at Banks to be honest like I you know started as an analyst moved up to associate you know would have had to work for multiple more years in order to become a VP and then you know director and MD and all this stuff stuff I really liked about it was ultimately connecting with with with different companies that we were selling um and learning their businesses inside and out um and I I I kind of felt like as you progress in that field all you really start to do is focus on sales right you're starting to bring in more companies and you you don't really still get the opportunity to dig in as much as you as you'd like like that just gets reserved for analysts and Associates to make models and make decks and stuff like that so the the aspect that I really loved about banking was starting to slowly go away um and I you know throughout that time I

had very much set my sights on gaming you know I'm a lifelong gamer played a ton of games growing up you know one of my favorites is actually uh Wind Waker like from from Zelda um one of my favorite favorite games um so it's funny that you know ended up working at a place called wind walk um but uh so so yeah you know I I I started started working on enemy on board as head of community and really running growth and we had very little marketing budget for the game we had we had just gone through y combinator um had raised like a tiny bit of money but ultimately had a pretty small budget dedicated to enemy on board's marketing and what we saw was all of these other indie game companies right using platforms like Reddit or Twitter you know using creators you know to to spread the message of their game and we kind of naively jumped in head first to kind of figure out what are the right

strategies for us to take and it became very obvious that building an awesome Community around our title was going to be the winning strategy for us we wanted you know 10 20 40,000 people you know all collected inside of a Discord you know with connected emails you know connected Twitter handles things like that that we could easily notify about all the announcements all the content that we're pushing out so that effectively those people would become evangelists for us um and help us break through different algorithmic Discovery hurdles that you know are are are prevalent on pretty much every social platform so yeah had a lot of fun doing that we had a lot of success building enemy on board's Community from zero to you know 40,000 people in in uh 2019 2020 prior to our Early Access launch and uh the work that we did for enemy on board was very much foundational to us building the technology that Colin kind of alluded to um in terms of gamifying different things and providing people rewards for taking um you know growth

positive social actions um funneling that into like a core incentive structure like I want to play testing key so I'm going to retweet everything that you guys push out or I'm going to up upload all your Reddit content so that that was you know foundational for us to build our technology but also foundational for us to kind of build our goto Market approach um where you know that's effectively uh my position now where we work with different partner companies is everybody from big game studios um big music labels um and small Indie Studios as well that really really are focused on on building community and and starting to effectively you know build evangelism around the product a lot of the work that we do uh sits in Discord as a you know kind of centralized I would say hub for Community but our view around Community is very much that it's you know multiplatform people have different social dependencies people

have different social incentives that they need um in order to engage so Community is not just having a Discord um Discord for us very much is a Launchpad for a lot of other different socials um so it's a great place to kind of aggregate the audience and so we we help companies effectively set up build their discords um help help them set up evangelist programs whether those be Creator programs Community member incentive programs um and an engage Loops um and really just help them kind of go to market uh based on based on you know the growth of their community and and pushing that forward so shortly after we launched enemy on board you know we were in Early Access for six months I think we had half a million downloads on the title so definitely something meaningful for us especially with a you know very minimal marketing budget um we just started getting a lot of inbound for people asking us to do the service work for them you know not enough trained and talented Community people in the in the world not enough

growth oriented Community people in the world um so people started coming to us and asking us for help whether that be you know using our deep knowledge on Discord or just our ability to understand what's happening on broader social platforms as well so we launched that business about two years ago and uh yeah I work with all of our clients now helping them think through all this and actually execute on their Community you know go to market plans yeah I think like a really cool thing to realize there is like like the moment we we launched and we on board like we essentially showed that like that that go to market to to some people and it it was not a huge game but yet again we were like punching way above our weight class you know we were four Dudes in a living room with a $10,000 marketing budget who launched a free-to-play game on PC with 500,000 right like that got kind of kind of like raised some noise for us I guess um but you know the really exciting thing that

happened was that there was kind of some of these companies out there some of these startups in particular who saw what we were doing and they were like hey Community isn't just for product feedback anymore Community you know isn't just for you know customer service let's say but they view it as a way to grow a way to kind of go to market right um and since we've started doing that work yet again we kind of had people knock our door down saying like hey what you did for enemy on board can you do it for us we've only like kind of felt that volume increase right people are changing the way they build their games now to involve Community earlier and the impetus for them being for doing that is them realizing it's a growth thing right like we've all known communities can help with product feedback we've known they can help with customer service but when people like change the way they build their game from like having one build every three months to a build every month so we can start running play tests so we can grow a community you know when they start like comfortable sharing more about their product earlier you know that's because their ultim Ely excited about a bunch of users breaking

through discoverability all these like existential problems that game studios right with these right and so it's kind of a story of like I don't know in some ways I always say we're the worst entrepreneurs in the world because we were doing this work and we had like a bunch of people knocking on our door they're like hey can you do this for us and finally we're like yeah and they paid us for it like like we walked into a business right but um yeah I mean we we've seen one company in 100 last year 20 company companies in 100 now it's like 60 companies in 100 and they're starting to get senior level growth-minded Community leadership in these places so it's it's very much a Title Wave I think which is exciting so nice any uh any specific clients or games that you guys could mention where you know uh we could we could kind of see the impact of your work uh with the community growth yeah I mean so our you know our engagements are very like especially at the execution level are are very different for for the for the most part like across clients people

come to us wanting different things so I think one kind of like at the Indie gaming level which is indicative of you know one of the types of works that uh one of the type of work that we do um is around a project called fuzzybot um which is you know the ex dice people making an awesome you know Co-op action Rog like online co-op action Rogue like this is funded Studio I believe right I think so um they came to us you know asking to effectively start helping them think through their play testing Loop and build a community of people that you know we could they could start getting feedback from in like an early kind of NDA close pre-alpha right um and so what we did is you know we we went out to Reddit you know our Rogue likes our Rogue lights we found a bunch of co-op games right that people were playing Deep Rock itic sea of Thieves right

trying to understand this Co-op gamer Behavior like how people actually play these games um we started engaging on on Reddit and injure for the most part building up content around the Rog likee genre and ultimately funneled a lot of those people directly into the fuzzybot community Discord where you know they signed an NDA were able to you know play test the game and really we took their Community from what I would call zero to one which is something that a lot of people ask us for right I have no idea where to start building my community I don't know how to get my first 100 members let alone 5,000 10,000 members right people that are actually going to you know be excited about my product and so we basically helped fuzzybot build a I think it was like six 7,000 person Discord over the course of like two months um help them run through play testing the feedback loop incentive structure around rewarding you know referral for users because we wanted to make this be like a you know Co-op experience so people could invite their

friends um and that was a really interesting and fun engagement for us because it was very similar to the work that we had done with with enemy on board like you know building engagement and building engagement on other social platforms funneling those people into Discord gamifying the play testing access process you know to focus on sharing um so that's like definitely one type of Engagement where it's like really zero to one um the other types of engagements that we tend to handle will be things like you know communities are you know totally inactive or dead right so people come to us and are like yo I don't know what I need to be doing in order to revive this community right or in order to actually utilize this community um and we have a whole host of case studies around this you know I think one of the one of the ones that we've been working on and still working on continuously is is a web three game called Mojo melee um from the planet Mojo team and you know they they came to us with you know 100,000 person Discord or something like

that um you know 500 people online at any given time so extremely boted as you as you'd expect in web 3 and people not really like engaging right um and so you know we've we've really helped them drive up drive up engagement substantially inside their Community um basically by pruning Bots inside the server and then really digging down into the actual incentive structure that's going to get the people in there to care about being members of the community right so one of the big things that web 3 games do really well is they you know they release stuff early they go to market with their Community right maybe many years before they're even releasing a game but they understand that avatars profile pictures are congruent to digital identity right so you know if you can build a digital identity inside your community early that's really really important so that

was one of the first steps that we wanted to take with Planet Mojo was hey let's let's take these Mojo seeds that you guys have have basically sold to the market let's get some sort of digital identity going inside the community so people can have mojos as their pfps have their favorite Mojo they can talk about these things on Twitter they can talk about these things on Discord um and we've had a great amount of success effectively changing up the way they've been doing Community Management focused very deeply on the players that actually play the game right not just speculate on the web 3 assets um and that's been a been a huge success for us so that's you know I think right secondary item that people come to us for which is like this community remediation I don't know there's some Community like Revival I think people that that come to us for um and then I think the third third one where people you know tend to to employ our community services is really you know we've already gone zero to one maybe we have a small community already how do we activate that Community to

share like crazy right how do we get that Community to on board new members in there um and so that's effectively like a 1 to 100 you know style engagement um and a good example of that for us would be somebody like limit break where um you know they came to us with a launched project Digi daku uh ravenous um ravenous group of people that wanted a Discord community and we effectively implemented a a really great you know incentive Loop through you know our our Discord bot and our web tools and stuff like that for users to share get rewarded and grow and you know ultimately grow so you know that's been cool I think we joined that project when they had you know 25,000 members following their you know their social handle you know that's close to 300,000 now and then on on gab's Main account over a million and a lot of that's obviously driven by huge marketing announcements like Super Bowl and tons of crazy stuff like that but from from our perspective what

matters is having those big marketing beats and a community that's willing to go talk to them talk about them online right you can do tons of crazy things like have a big Super Bowl commercial but if no one's going to talk about it you know on socials or in your Discord why are you even doing it so you know we've been very happy with that engagement in our ability to take all the incredible marketing work that their team is doing bring that back some into the community and have people effectively spread and evangelize that you know for for for limit break and that happened with dig diaku that happened with gab's account now that's happening with their new royalty solution ERC 721c where all you can see on Twitter if people are talking about royalties is a bunch of people from The Limit Break Digi diaku communities chilling ERC 721c and talking about why this is a better protocol for people to to employ so um right yeah those are those are really kind of like the three main engagement

types that that that we that we handle for people you know separately there's like advisory work where we just help them kind of strategize around Community um and that's something that you know we've been doing for a little while now and has been quite fun for us uh definitely puts my like investment banker hat on like that involves like presentations and stuff so I have to like make power points again um but but uh yeah you know people come to us for that as well so those are those are really the things that we do on the community uh all right Community side of things cool so yeah so I guess yeah to summarize there's the zero to one style projects there's the existing Community driving engagement projects and then there's the growth projects and then there's like an ancillary advisory on the side so great I think that's uh that's that's a good U you know good rundown of windwalk so uh listeners should be like pretty uh up to date now about what you guys do who you've worked

with and also yeah potentially see you know some of the impact of the work that you've done in the communities uh in the game communities that you mentioned but um yeah I think let's dive into then today's topic of discussion uh so that is building hits with the power of community and you know there are really so many interesting angles to this topic uh and we'll try to cover a lot of ground uh on this episode but the reason we're talking about community community today is pretty simple uh it has always been important and I'd say it has never been more important and especially when thinking about you know where the industry uh is moving from a discoverability distribution product Road mapping ugc or even web 3 perspective uh but everyone also thinks about Community differently so let's start with a more fundamental question and maybe Colin uh this one is for you what is community can you Define it for us and also what is it not yeah I think

I think tons of people you know yeah everyone has their own little little definition but I think for me you know it it's fundamentally people engaging with your product outside of just using your product right so we think of like fandoms right if I love a game character enough I'm going to go create fan hard and then I'm going to go share it somewhere right or I want to talk strategy in a game or I want to meet other people to play with right you know these are kind of functions we see communities fill right but usually you know it's those people who want to organize with others outside of your product and this is why Community exists not only in games but in music and with influencers right now we actually do also work with you know increasingly with like music labels um and we're starting to work with some really large influencers because it's it's the same problem right you know people who love I don't know let's say pokem man right are going to go into her Discord and they're going to want to spend time with with other people who are fans they're want to take part in actions there you know

if you're launching a game what people are going to be doing in your community and your definition of community will change over the course of the life cycle of your product right um but fundamentally if you have a bunch of crazy lunatics who love what you're doing who are you know self-organizing or joining your formal official Community um it's a powerful force find a way to harness that find a way to 10x 100x the amount of those people that exist and get them to go do things that let the thing that they love grow your product right so to be very much more specific to um this tends to be on Discord and Twitter for a lot of games maybe like telegram for web 3 stuff but those communities tend to be somewhat short-lived they kind of have like a twitch chat problem it's just hard to be an Engaged member for a while um but yeah I mean right now the dour tools are Discord and Twitter Twitter kind of your push notifications in async Discord your synchronous communication so how about Reddit reddit's great

um Reddit kind of like Discord doesn't really have a discoverability arm to it right like it's just not very reasonable anymore for something from your subreddit to get onto the front page just like on Discord you're going to be driving people into your Discord word of mouth is right and so Reddit is great you can have a community fracturing problem early right so what we we tend to see is that games post launch that have scaled will have very active redit communities we find that less common pre-launch because there's kind of a concept of wanting to focus all your laser beam right you know if you split your attention you'll have some people in this community and some people in this community and you know the ultimate value a community like provides for people is the ability to meet other fellow fans so you can have like a concurrency problem um and so we don't tend to do a lot of subreddit work early um you know owned Community work but that being said other subreddits out there especially general interest ones will go find appropriate ways to spread the good word about a community we're working on in those places so yeah um

it's also a demographic thing and we could dig into that later but each one of these platforms is going to have kind of a prime demographic where you're going to have users who are most familiar with the tools like we've all had those friends who have tried to use Discord and it's insane right they're like I don't even know where to go but for certain Generations especially younger Generations they're like natives right and so they're going to want to go join a where they're most comfortable on the tools that they're most comfortable yeah I guess yeah that that kind of lays like a good foundation and we can start to dive a little bit deeper now so when when I was kind of thinking about you know how to structure this uh conversation I kept coming back to how multiple aspects of community live on different spectrums um and so let's start with you know first discussing like the first Spectrum or uh we can just call it like the xaxis of this which is community launch time and and so Richard you know there are there are of course two sides uh to the Spectrum

there's games launching communities pretty early and the others launching it pretty late and both work in you know different contexts and scenarios uh but in your opinion um when when you think is kind of a good time to launch a community what are the criteria to consider when thinking about you know Community launch time and maybe you could even hit on like more tactically how does one kind of execute on this more early versus late approach yeah it's it's a good question um and actually something that we get fairly often is like when should I launch my community um so yeah I think what we tend to tell projects uh that are looking to launch you know their communities is is you know what are the reasons why somebody is going to actively care about being a member right um if you don't have reasons for people to be there right why are you for for example wasting your time setting up a Discord

because all you want in Discord is realtime chat you want people chatting and engaging and connecting with one another all the time and if they have nothing to talk about you know then why launch a Discord right just launch an email newsletter um and so I think it it the the question is really you should launch your community when you're ready to service the different platforms that you want to be building on um I think that Indie Studios and smaller games teams that don't have Big Marketing budgets and for example aren't getting their trailers on the game awards or covered by huge creators right off the bat um maybe they don't have spend for that um it's it's vitally important that you know you build your you start building your community probably like yesterday um one of the big challenges that we see um one of the big challenges that we see you know Studios Studios have is actually like what are the the things that what are the things that are going

to Captivate interest for my users and I think you can get really really creative from a Content angle to keep people entertained and engaged um and so you know a lot of different communities that you know we're working with particularly on the Indie side right we'll hold off on on launching for example a Discord early for them but we will launch a pre- signup right users will you know connect their Discord ID their Twitter hand maybe the Reddit handle we can kind of create like unified CRM you know with you know their emails associated with it as well kind of like a unified CRM of all the people that are maybe interested in your in your title or your brand right you can you can start thinking about each of the different pages that you have the different you know parts of your company as assets think about how you can build audience behind those assets um a really great example of somebody that's like building that started building um started building uh kind of like a brand identity before

they launched a community like a real community on Discord um I think was it is it Mike morheim Studio Callin um yeah that's doing the the Starcraft you know next version of Starcraft oh yeah there's a couple Studios doing that right um so yeah I mean there'd be Mike moram I think is bonfire but uh I know the folks over at Frost giant have done a really good job of also buing your brand ear I think it's Frost giant that's one um position themselves as experts in the RTS space right before they've Ann before they announced their now they've announced it but yeah right and tactically before they had like anything to show right they posted an they posted you know a bunch of press and got people you know into a newsletter and you know onto a Reddit page people are speculating about what's going to happen and they started feeding monthly content to those people like little Dev blog notes and stuff like that and it can be as simple as that right so you know I I think the question ultimately is kind of like push back to the to the developers which is or the

Publishers even um which is when do I have enough stuff to share and what is my plan to actually share this with the community because what you don't want is a passive community that is maybe it's actively growing and bringing in organic traffic but those people are seeing something that's not engaging you know they'd much rather spend their time inside of a community where they can chat and connect with people uh um you know live maybe on Discord than for example a dead Discord or something like that so I think it's really all about having enough to keep people excited and understanding what are the different kind of like steps in getting to a big Community launch so you know when we're thinking about when we're going to launch somebody's Discord for example we definitely don't want to do that when you don't have content to share we probably want to do that the earliest time we want to do that it's probably when you're gearing up to play test right you can have like a really

exclusive Discord that's just for selected play testers maybe they've gone through pre-edge and you can service them really well all they're going to be talking about is the game sharing clips of the game in there giving you bug feedbacks and they get you know they get to connect with one another because they're all playing this game and feel like they're an active part of the development of it the the question I think can kind of the question is is a tough one but it's really like when you have enough stuff to share and when you have a good plan for the different pieces of content that are going to live on each of the platforms that you want to build community on and so the general feedback that we give is Indie Studios do it now bigger Publishers right where you have more arrows in your quiver right you can do it later but you should get started now anyway yeah so I think like and that that's like the answer really like manual your question was really specific which was when did you start building your own Community but like when we think broadly about community and how it can actually help a studio or a publisher like what Richard's saying is absolutely correct

like once you have creating your own Community is kind of like having a child in some ways right now you have all these responsibilities you have to take care of it right and it can bring you great power right you could scale it up it could you know maybe that very public success and engagement could help you do BD work you know maybe you get all those people to start retweeting and boosting all of your marketing beats right and you're this huge Larger than Life product but if we take Community as a discipline there's other things that other than just owned community so like what are the big existential questions that a game Studio or a publisher have to deal with you know am I going to green light red light building this game am I going to get my financing or my publishing deal lined up and then I'm going to launch my title right Community can help with all these things so a quick example we we have a second title we we have a games armor we have a second title in production right now that we've placed with a publisher we s used Community to solve those three problem problems on that path we're going to be launching it next year right um so we don't have tons of

you know we don't we don't have exact data on that yet but green light red light you know we wanted to build a Rog likee title pretty crowded red ocean genre right yeah um what we actually did is you know we essentially said look if we're just going to build a rogue like just like any other Studio doing it it's pretty hard for us to put our money into that our time our effort our Focus we don't know anything that other people don't we don't know what those a what that audience wants we're kind of just gambling on own creative Outlet um so what we did is we built a community on Discord a general interest Community not affiliated with LW walk for Co-Op and Rog like Gamers and we essentially said hey come in here we're going to do like best incl you know large public Discord stuff we're giving away games every week we're helping people with lfg to meet other people to play you know we're running contests for other people's games in there through that we built an audience of like 10,000 Co-op and roik Gamers we interviewed them a bunch um and then we kind of came up with a game pitch right and we showed it to like I think 200 300 of them um and you know we

felt confident in in an actual pitch that was unique that addressed their unique problems we felt like we were advantaged building in that space so then we built an alpha for you know we greenl internally we built an alpha build for it that was really janky you know we always say a build only a mother could love and we showed it to that community and then we grew a community for that alpha build right um that ended up getting into you know the five figure in size on Discord then we took all that momentum and we went and showed it to a bunch of Publishers and did our publishing process and we had a bunch of horses in the race and we had a really really awesome pitch right most people are like here's a cool game I want to build it I'm credential we said 10,000 people already love this to death right um then now that we actually have kind of the money lined up and a really Kick-Ass partner now we're going to do owned Community right we're going to build a community that we're going to grow and we're going to use those fans get them really pumped and we're thinking really consciously about when we want to launch that to exactly Richard's point right like when are we ready to maintain momentum in that

Community because the goal of that community in that stage will be to amplify our launch so this is where I'm saying kind of like Community solves a lot of problems for you it's kind of a stupid buzzword in some ways right um but if you view it essentially as like why are we building games and not knowing our customers super well or talking with them or involving them in development they're ultimately the ones we going to have to buy it it's pretty powerful right yep yep yeah yeah and I mean I thought like um you know when I said launching a community early I was uh even I was just like referring to more like you know an alpha you maybe there's like an alpha Bild or something even a little bit earlier than that and that kind of content is then getting spread across the community but the example you gave right now is like really early where you know you didn't even have like the concept but then you build the community around okay this is the game we want to build let's like get an interest group set up and then make the pitch and then you know uh kind of

uh evolve them into the game Community or the kind of you know founding members of that game Community itself so that that's pretty tactically ta tactically like getting started with something like that it's like very easy right like you just need to be willing to share something and like try to understand an audience and like what they care about so we started that like for Co-Op Gamers right we built a big binder like on Google Docs or whatever um that just listed a bunch of different co-op games right and we went into those different subreddits and we started just posting like literally a the the it was the same post on every single subreddit it said why like why is Deep Rock Galactic the best online co-op game why is gunfire Reborn the best online co-op game why is sea of Thieves the best online co-op game why is you know like literally in all of these communities and what we saw is tons of people commenting on this stuff right we then dm' them on Reddit

said hey we're building this game concept we thought your opinion was really awesome right thank you for sharing can you come join this Discord community and be active participant right meet other people that share similar thoughts to you right we didn't have to make any content to do that all we did was post you know a really simple Reddit headline that said why do you think this game is amazing once we start once we built this like smaller audience of people that we knew were you know into co-op games right we started expanding that into Rog like so we created a Rog like fake Rog likee influencer on imer called spritle um and all spritle would do would take different Co different Rog likee games um that were trending on Steam uh find their trailers on YouTube download their trailers and repost them on Tik Tok uh sorry on injur and tell people hey I'm giving away X copies of this game this week right we had like a $50 budget or something like every week

um and those posts just went insanely viral like that Creator had I think close to three million views over four months um when we were basically just building this audience of Rogue like evangelist and we didn't have to make any unique content to do it so we just had an opinion on you know where we wanted to go with our game we had a an Ever clarifying opinion on who our target audience was going to be and funneled all those people into for us a Discord but you know we very easily could have done like an email newsletter or something what we really wanted was you know people that we could share our game with uh people that could actively give us great feedback and tell us why what we've built is wrong um and why you know what are the different Co-op things in particular that they that they were looking for what are the specific Rog likee things that are that are there in particular we learned a ton through that process like the people we interviewed had like 15 Rogue like games in their steam Library right they told us overwhelmingly every great Rog life

games game that comes out I'm looking to I'm looking to play right 20 30 bucks I'm willing to buy that because it's going to give me a ton of value I know it's replayable right I can play this for a 100 hours and the co-op Gamers had you know Sim similar type of behavior where they have kind of a lineup of co-op games that they play with their friends maybe on a weekly or you know bi-weekly basis and you need to find a way to get your game inserted into their to their lives right um but they owned a ton of co-op games as well so they're always looking for new things to basically add right it's like the new bar that's opened across the street that you're going going to with your friends like hey I'm gonna go check this out it's like the new co-op game that everybody is excited about you know people are going to go buy it and share it with their friends so we learned a lot through that through that early process talking to people um it's super impactful for us to have a very very clear pitch to you know Publishers at at GDC back in 2021 I think uh when we did it so yeah

it was dope all right great yeah I think uh I think I think that's like a good good good breakdown good examples and I guess yeah timing what I'm hearing is you know essentially uh timing for a community launch comes down to first of all Readiness uh which can be in terms of resources you know content um the team uh Etc time uh but the second part is also just the goals you know uh if you want to like create a community to gather initial feedback or you want to create a community to share your initial bills or you know you want to create a community to kind of spread the word uh about the game that you have so probably Readiness and goals is kind of what I'm hearing but let's uh let's go ahead and you know add up like a y AIS uh to the entire Spectrum um so you know this one is uh a size versus quality uh Spectrum so you know one extreme is of course like the size of the community how big it is how small it is and the Other Extreme is you know the quality of the community itself so you don't have like

all the people but you have like you know you're kind of optimizing for engagement uh and such um but yeah Colin what what do you think is kind of the right balance to achieve on this axis what are kind of the you know again criteria to consider when thinking about size versus quality and again more tactically you know how does one control for both size and quality without making too many enemies in the community too soon yeah yeah yeah no I think that's the enemies thing is hilarious we have uh yeah yeah I mean you can especially if you're trying to grow aggressively you can rub some people the wrong way because usually the way you grow is you go into other people's communities and you kind of you know usually talk to the owners of it and kind of you know borrow Their audience for a bit but um but yeah let's talk kind of size quality so the important part about Community work especially because it's so hype driven right now and kind of buzzwordy is to like always push back to like why are you building your community what company problem are you solving with your community and usually that will answer your size versus quality right you know what stage are you at are you trying to gain confidence in a game you know maybe

the right 10,000 people who are like total tast makers in the space if they love what you're building or you understand what makes them tick that's enough you've succeeded in your goals right um you have access to that audience so that would be that stage one stage two you're going to talk to Publishers right like think backwards right if I have a bunch of people who are excited for this game you know what is going to help me tell a good story of of this being a product that needs to be made right of this being drisk because there's an audience who already loves it right and then you know maybe this is a much more exciting and meaningful question though when we cut to that third stage which is I'm launching my title right in the next six to nine months I want to build and gr Community to help me win um and the answer there is like what makes a Community member good right um I think you know having a huge community of low- engaged people the problem is when you're in that growth stage you're going to be counting on that Community to come in and make every social media asset that you post right every trailer that you post success and so if you have 500,000 people but they're not showing up they're not engaging they're not what we call

activating who cares right and and I think that actually has burned a lot of VCS because they go like oh there's 250,000 people in this community it must be great and we're like why like why not do um and so then you know let's go to the other side right I mean if you have 5,000 people who are ride or die and they're massively engaged and they're talking with each other you know that might not be enough right you might not be getting what you need whether it's play testing feedback you know or amplification right or word of mouth I mean fundamentally the amount of Word of Mouth that can come out of 5,000 people you know you're going to have less of a cap than if you have 50,000 or 500,000 so yeah you know I would say really we're talking about kind of inducing Word of Mouth we're talking about driving your K Factor up if you're going to be in that third stage launching with your community you know think about a metric that is a function of quality and size what are they doing for me right good way to put it awesome that that makes a lot of sense I guess we can then finally add up like a a zed or a z axis

uh that more represents maybe the platforms and uh and or business models and try to kind of connect it back also to the other axes so Richard how does community launch time thinking kind of change for you know a PC console game versus a mobile freet toplay one versus web 3 or you know uh the other axis for size versus quality so how does you know the size versus quality balance change across you know the same platforms um yeah maybe maybe we can start there yeah uh so out of the ones that you just outlined like I think PC console um generally are you know I I would say generally are more social people um on platforms like Discord um or Reddit even uh so that that group of people is is incredibly social so if you can build a big Community uh of you know PC console Gamers uh let's say PC maybe it's as as

a start um that I think is a is a huge success for you um you know so I would optimize more for having a big community of people that I know are in my target audience um in terms of like when to get that started I think uh I I think generally again if you're an indie Studio you should start that now if you're a big studio with huge marketing plans right um that you know are going to drive the actual you know an actual target audience to your game you have a just a little bit more leeway I think in terms of when you want to launch your community that being said you you still can build a community around an unannounced title right say who you are as a as a studio build a community around that and those people can come and amplify you know the bigger launches in the future um so I I think it's kind of a yeah kind of like a open-ended answer but but that's what I would say for for PC console like actually just more so for PC I

think console is like a lot less social on on platforms like Discord that you know Discord for example has an integration with PlayStation now but you know we just don't see that many people in our communities that that we manage that are exclusively console Gamers a lot of PC Gamers a lot of mobile Gamers as well uh for mobile Studios I think um I think it's a little bit I think it's a little tricky um I Think It's tricky to launch communities um they have like a their own kind of like go to market plans in terms of doing soft launches and really testing ad spend um and I think that is very valuable for them uh mainly because they want to see what you know the LTB to CAC looks like the payback period looks like um and that's not necessarily something that you know your community is going to be able to give you clean data on like it's better to go run an ad test I think for PC those me those metrics especially if it's a premium title uh for web 3 games

um as a whole I mentioned this a little bit earlier but web 3 games you know are have done a really really good job of finding ways to build community early uh and you know the biggest one is through pfp projects I would say uh where community members have a shared identity maybe those assets that they you know buy or get for free um maybe those assets end up being used in the game and I think that's a really really great strategy to retain people for longer right they feel like they have buy into the you know final product I have a ship in this game or a character in this game that's you know unreleased I don't know too much about it but I'm still excited about it because I have some sort some sort of upside some sort of you know cool cool item that's going to be used in there maybe it's rare or legendary um so what three games I think have um have done a really good job of of ultimately giving assets early building identity

around their projects um so they they tend to do it much much earlier than than traditional gaming companies right makes sense and I guess on the mobile side also you know I guess not all mobile games have a community but there are also like some clear examples of both games and companies that have you know prioritized Community one more I mean I I guess we can call it slightly recent maybe over the last five five six years um calibri games with idle minor Tycoon you know they these were also like you know four I think four or five college students uh who essentially build out the product uh through Community feedback and you know it like really really helped them and then on the other end of spectrum you know with the bigger uh $100 million budgets you have Mi hoyo and the hoo and you know how they kind of sustain their communities uh but yeah I I think overall uh it's definitely the importance of you know Community feels like yeah feels like uh more of a focus

on the web 3 uh and PC console sides versus mobile but yeah also you there are opportunities in Mobile I guess um definitely definitely opportunities in Mobile I just think it's um it just feels like uh mobile games have like a very I would say a much simil um maybe simplistically like a much more rigid go to market approach versus like PC console games um and because they have that you know they have that approach that's you know been proven out over over a long run um they're much more willing to stick with it so I think the opportunity is clearly there for Studios on the mobile side that want to build community right yeah we've worked with a couple of mobile um apps mostly for a focus on like testing on Apple test flight things like that and that's been very successful so it's not it's not like mobile doesn't have the the tools to build community it's more you know mobile games in

particular you know they want to test scaled ad costs understand ltvs and customer acquisition costs and payback periods and there's a kind of a framework to do that that's separate from Community yeah yeah yeah yeah I guess yeah it kind of comes back to the gos part of it but but yeah that that makes that makes a lot of sense um unfortunately you know there are no more uh reasonable uh axes left uh but the question of resources uh to fund Community Building uh engagement growth and you know management efforts always exists um Colin maybe you could quickly go over you know what does successful community building on a Sho string budget look like and then on the other end um you know what does it look like for the more like top five kind of gaming companies of the world or in the world yeah I mean yet again it has to come back to goals right so you're an IND Studio what stage are you at right have you decided what game you're going to build yet are you going to hunt down a publisher right like I think the big

question I always ask of like Indies and especially some of these like very venture-backed startups is like you can see a lack of clarity in their goals because they might be sitting there and putting 99% of their budget into development right and none of their budget in community and I'm not saying you need to put all your money in the community but like what is the actual outcome here is it connecting with users and showing that there's an audience who loves this so you can go do a bunch of sweet BD deals to go you know boost your launch is it to launch in a massive way and so you know if I could reframe your question I think it's less like what is community look like in a Sho stream budget but the first question is like what is a good split and how you spend your money to get your studio to your next set of goals and that is something that Indie Studios and even if Venture back Studios have raised a lot of money they need to act like Indie Studios right because they're they're existentially they you don't have a product in the market you're an indie Studio essentially right um but yeah you know I would say on a shoestring budget you're you're going to be you know like it's it's who you hire

who you bring on right you could bring on someone like us and we can come in and do really targeted work help you get clarity of strategy uh and work but we're probably not going to be Sho Sho string shooring so maybe what this is is actually going and finding someone who is a really upstanding member of the community and the audience you want to go tackle and bringing them on part-time to go build interests and to like manage a small community around your game that can be great for Indie folks right um yet again that person is going to be like native from the audience that you need to win with to win financially ultimately right or you need to win with to go get you know a publishing deal done and those people also the hardest problem with Community is you're going to have people who are good at managing the community and people who are good at growing the community and when you talk sho string Sho string you're trying to find that unicorn who can do both right if you can go pull someone from a community who already has a little black book or already has all the relationships connections that can be a really Frugal economical way to go in there and get started right big

companies um yeah big companies like massively massively underinvested in community yet again there's three existential questions that you have to answer as a game Studio am I building the right game right do I have the traction I need to get this game like fully funded or you know all the resources it needs to launch and then am I launching strong I think we overwhelmingly see a lot of big studios these days building the wrong games right you know it's the creative director's baby it's the game that the the comp that the team wants and then there's no matching audience for it like no amount of marketing no amount of product time or budget uplift will solve that problem right and I think you know in the in the industry we always joke about this with our friends with reer we're like who you know three years ago maybe this made sense but who is this for so for those Studios like they need to be getting closer to communities they need to be probably putting into their red light green light process um when it comes to getting funding there that's going to be usually for big studio is an internal red light green light you know I I think for them those those people who are building those early play tests

and prototypes need to be comfortable sharing them not because they want to share something horrible with the world or they want to hurt brand value but because yet again players tell us what is good we we the best game designer in the world can't call his shot they're not Babe Ruth right um and then I think stud big studios are massively underinvestigated too are getting less efficient so the programmatic ad spend like apple did at right like you're not getting as much juice out of that as as you were before if you're a big studio and if influencers know you have Deep Pockets they're going to either ask for all of your money or they're going to ask for carry in the game right and you're kind of caught with your hands up um you're fighting for less and less and less attention so I think it's existentially important that you figure out how to get more attention out of your captured fans right now what does that actually look look like Best in Class is going to be Mi hoo right um what they've essentially done is built a custom web Hub they have all these huge

scale socials like Discord like Reddit like imer um they've spent money growing those so they have these huge huge huge social platforms we know that because we actually were approached by them and did some Community Growth work for them through one of our Discord box um but you know now they have this like kind of central Hub and they're pushing all these users in there and in there they can put up quests and Rewards and induce kind of mass action from those fans they're also Gathering data right and so the ultimate the ho lab you're talking about yes o Labs exactly all right okay and so yeah to to keep it short right um what they're essentially doing is going in there and they have these big lovers they can pull quests they can put out there daily rewards and they can induce behavior from these huge scaled socials they have right you know everyone from the Discord in the game is all coming into o and then they're also capturing data right data that informs their their marketing and lets them do those normal big company marketing things more efficiently right know your user not

only helps you get them to drive more K Factor organic but it's going to help let you go you know spend influencer money better you know know the right mediumsized influencers to tackle know which people you want to partner with on Twitter so right yeah that that's kind of integrating Community fully into your go to market and that's what big companies need to do right makes sense yeah that that's super valuable insights over there and I think it also kind of dovetails quite well into the next question you know kind of moving away from the more theoretical and strategic topics but you know uh let's talk about you know who's the best person or partner for the job maybe Richard uh you could you could uh you know give us some insight into you know when is a good time to hire a community manager or a Community Management partner um and also you know what should one kind of be looking for and testing for and if you have any immediate red flags that that that would be good to know too yeah Colin could definitely add on here as well um especially especially around

like red flags I think that' be kind of funny um to hear his opinion on it but in terms of like bringing a community manager on either like onto your team or a community team onto your team um I think it it's in line with you know when you're going to be launching your community or set of communities like maybe one or two months before so they can get actively integrated into the marketing plans um I think that's really really important so just depending on when you want to launch your community that's the time to go find you know you know Community manager uh a community hire a community team or you know engage with somebody like windwalk um usually about like a month before something you know is something major is launching um in terms of finding the right people Colin kind of mentioned this uh earlier but we see a lot of Legacy Community managers I guess is the way to put it uh whose main job has been really customer service um what they do is they help people you know you know

figure out loggin issues or you know maybe they didn't get credited the right you know XP or currencies on their accounts or whatever and they basically act as a funnel you know directly from the community to the Eng team to make things uh to to remediate whatever the issue is that's certainly like a piece of the work right and having like somebody that can actively talk to your community members in a kind Manner and respectful manner very very important um but what you really want is somebody that can push you know for the different Community initiatives that you're looking to you know looking to uh looking to deploy so across the life cycle you know can someone actively manage play testing for you right are they going to be able to do things like select users send them steam Keys um or you know send them access codes Etc and create excitement around that inside the community are they going to be able to Leverage gating right and scarcity to go find different Creator Partners or Community Partners to actually amplify

you know everything that you're doing um and so I think what we see is a lot of people that have worked in community in the past very much are focused on customer support and Feelgood Vibes inside of a Discord uh and they have generally lost sight or have not been managed appropriately to to act acely push Community as a strategic goal I I I think that's kind of the the long and short of it in terms of finding somebody great it's will that person be able to drive the Strategic initiatives that we need for our community whether that be activation play testing feedback General engagement Etc in terms of red flags I think something that um I think something that's very clear clearly a red flag for for hiring a community manager somebody that doesn't know your product doesn't love your game uh you need somebody that you know is actively able uh willing and able to dive deep

into the product so that they can have conversations with people that are spending 50 100 hours playing it right you if that person doesn't know the meta right how can they actively be a community manager for you right they need to be playing the game a ton um they need to understand what people's complaints are you know and and how to actively remediate them Etc so uh very clear when somebody just kind of like doesn't know the product um and doesn't care to know the product that's a huge red flag I think the second red red flag is somebody that's not willing to experiment and learn right community community is an amalgamation of people and people all have their own different incentives and are working in different you know basically communities almost almost never are are Marching In lock step so Community managers need to be able to experiment and do things um and test and learn a lot inside their communities this could be testing tons of different Live Events

to run um or doing things like let's say you're running a play test and your team has been having a conversation around hey you know once we release this game what do live Ops look like do we think players are going to attach more to characters or weapons okay let's run a play test where let's introduce a new character and see how many people show up to that and play with the new character versus a play test where we introduce a new weapon see how many people play with that and what the feedback is that that comes out of it how excited are people so I think it's it's somebody that is very much willing to learn and experiment understands the product really deeply um and can honestly have have real meaningful conversations with people um those are the things that that matter the most calling any red flags from you no I think like summary right there you Manu the framework you had was size and quality right to to summarize what Richard said the first red flag is they can't grow your community and that's where we see Legacy Community people like I've been a community expert for 15 years working at EA on a game that's

scaled up by a marketing department if you're a startup or you're like a like a you know a venture back company game studio and your community's five people that person can't fundamentally help you so don't hire them right now yet again to Richard's point the second red flag and maybe less egregious one is someone who can grow your community like crazy right um but they don't anything about your product and the quality of your community suffers because it kind of feels artificial you know everything a community shouldn't feel um and so like I would say they're both red flags you know a community person early on where you can't hold them to a growth goal is going to be 90% of the problems we run into 10% are going to be quality yet again that's why I'm saying that unicorn hire for someone who's on a budget is find that person who's a lunatic who knows all the influencers in your genre right um and bring them on because their initial chunk of growth is just going to be their little black book B and they're going to be indisputably experts right so that's all like very wise advice uh

so that's great um so we're we're kind of running up on time so you know let's start looking into the future a bit start looking forward a bit uh so you know Callin looking forward and this is going to be a slightly big question but it's it's a kind of we have to look into our crystal ball a bit so you know looking forward what is the future of Community Management and games you know can I'm just going to like a bunch of uh examples and Trends over here but you know can AI act as an exoskeleton of sorts for Community managers and how what does the rise of ugc mean for Community Management to content creative programs you know have a role to play in Community Management uh I'm probably missing out on a few angles over here but these were top of mine but yeah you know to kind of summarize it'll be great if you could kind of talk about what you find the most interesting and exciting as we kind of go into 2024 totally yeah so let's start with AI because AI is like everyone's every VC's favorite topic right they always bring it up at the end of meetings I don't the thing

like the biggest problem that communities run into I think is scale right communities are inherently like authentic places to hang out with people and I think that the scaling problems that communities have are very similar to scaling problems that twitch channels have you know we follow someone on you know you follow someone on Twitch there's 30 people in chat you're talking in chat the person is talking back to you right the streamer and that's a really cool product and then overnight they blow up and they have 3,000 people in chat and the product that you loved completely changed now chat is just flying by a million messages a second and you probably go and find someone new to watch communities have that same problem right like they're fundamentally different when they're small medium and large and I think AI can help with that now we have met some people who are doing a very very bad Approach at this there are some people who are like we've built artificial community members so things can feel you know small communities can feel big or they can feel authentic and we're like gross no right like it's it's pretty dystopian right um but I would say you know AI is going to help in in three ways one is just the volume of data coming out of

communities is hard to deal with and so there are AI solutions that can help you understand the sentiment of your community you know when it was a 100 people you just go in and ask them what's good or you see when they're pissed you know when it's 10,000 100,000 200,000 people you're going to need a little helping hand there um two managing members of your community at scale right not making fake community members to engage but like hey want to run a community program that was easy to run with 100 people how do we scale that out to a thousand 10,000 people right um chat Bots are a good example of that you answer all the question the FAQs your users have then you build an FAQ question then you build a chat bot right that's going to respond to those questions for people um so I think AI is very promising in that area right um and then there's a lot of cool AI projects that are built like natively into their Community something like a mid Journey right it's a Discord bot people are talking while they're creating stuff there's no air gap between community in their product so that's kind of its own interesting area um I would say what we're really excited about though is I

mean it's it's our product it's what we're building right but which is like how do you drive mass behavior at scale from communities right and you could view this in a negative way right some people are like oh it feels like botting but the answer really is that members of your community right now want to help the reason they're in the community is that they're excited about your product and they want it to grow when we were building our first game the sentiments in there was like we can't wait for this game to blow up we were here first right um like but with the way discoverability algorithms work these days how can you better get your community who is passionate to show up at the right time and place for that discoverability algorithm to recognize how passionate your fandom is right that's the way to think about it and so we're really bullish on essentially like large scale Community rewards platforms that like pull essentially your community members together from all the disperate platforms because you might have a lot of people on Twitter and a lot of people on Discord but as we mentioned big earlier this the definition of community that's all your community it might just be inefficient because they're in two different places right so um yeah I think that's like kind of like where we

see a lot of the excitement I mean Community is a very Hands-On manual thing early on and like Ai and this tooling will let us still have that power even when we're at huge scale and we can't be hands- on right I think Colin covered it for the most part there are a couple of really good examples like um of people I think using AI interestingly inside their communities um one of them is actually a client of ours called AI Arena they're making like a web 3 platform fighting game uh where you train an AI and the AI fights with with another trained Ai and there's like big prizes and Stakes it's really cool um they have you know they have kind of a mascot character like Pon type type thing for for gensin but it's called Agnes and it's a little robot and you know we basically did this um you know Agnes now you know users can summon Agnes to answer frequently asked questions inside the community right and that's a really really simple you know way in which AI chat Bots can can help um I don't think simulating like user

actually AI simulating users is going to work like people ultimately want to connect with other real people so um yeah I don't I don't think that's necessarily like the the move I I think where what we're what we're kind of nudging up against um is there's a huge lack of tooling for Community Management in this world um whether it be managing like your Twitter or your Discord or your Reddit all these places have native management tooling um but they also have like apis that you can build cool stuff on top of um and users are choosing to spend their time in places that they feel are cool and unique and so I think there's a huge opportunity to build interconnection between social platforms um and a huge opportunity to build tools that allow cm to do their jobs uh much more easily you know Legacy Discord event would be a legacy Discord event

would be for example I want to create a mini game I need to go talk to my engineering team and build a bot right uh for for how somebody can for example you know do a little clicker mini game right we've built out modules in our own Tech that allow you to deploy a miname that's themed and configurable to your community in less than 30 seconds right where could users can basically have like a boss raid and you know kill a boss or whatever and get get cool rewards for doing it um and so there's a big opportunity there to take existing behavior that has been really really manual and difficult for Community managers to Resource internally um and build technologies that allow them to basically just give them superpowers so that's that's what I'm really really excited about um and obviously that's that's something that we're we're actively working on so um it's just came from a place of us working on so many different communities us working on our own communities that

me having to go to the engineering team to build something custom every single time and taking up their time or trying to take up our clients time to build a really cool integration just isn't good enough right A lot of times there's no resources for it so we need to build something better that we know can work off the shelf for anybody whether they be an indie Studio or triaa publisher um so yeah that's what I'm really excited about awesome great yep I think that that makes a lot of sense and and yeah definitely very exciting uh maybe I heard hints of a windw walk GPT in 2024 but I guess we'll see product yeah great so yeah I guess to kind of you know top it off um final question you know if there's one games Community launch engagement and growth strategy you'd recommend everyone to study uh which one would it be and why number one would be this game called spell break that launched a couple years ago um spell break was like a battle royale

with magic elements so kind of like fortnite but you float and shoot magic at people um they did a really great they had kind of a really great Community growth angle uh where they started posting for their play testing on imer and it's very I think a great I think it's a very good case study for people working on PC games in particular to look at how you can grow a natural and organic Community around your title spell break would be a really good one I think I'm seeing some early signs of spell break in a project called uh sorry in a project called um project Loki from theorycraft I think they're doing a very very good job of curating their Community right now um and actively testing things you know I uh I just saw a video from them the other day where their Community manager or or somebody on their Community team I actually don't remember who it was was basically going through like this next update we're adding this cool crazy thing don't set

your expectations too high but we really want feedback on it and it was very very clear you know they're willing to test crazy things inside their game with their community of fans that they feel confident aren't just going to leave the game because they added this like crazy new meta into it um and so I think they're doing a really good job if if somebody is launching like a PC game right now look at what theory craft is doing actively study that one and if you want to kind of get a good sense of what theory craft is doing and what paved the way for theorycraft to do this take a look at spell break and see what they did back in 2019 uh 2020 era I think um that's definitely on the PC side I think on the web 3 side uh definitely Digi daku and what limit break is doing is really really interesting um and we're really lucky to be a part of that it's been just a great honor to serve on that one um so you know basically creating memes and building a cult-like atmosphere um in there is is a big thing

um and I I'd say a couple of other projects that seemingly have done this very well on the web 3 side be things like puggy penguins um that just did like a big Walmart launch um and probably auki as well that you know built a huge you know really high really high quality brand identity around uh really high quality brand identity around um you know their art and Anime and really targeted a great group of people to join their their Community but right um yeah I think I think those are some some interesting examples to go look at yeah I think I think there's there's definitely a lot of noise in the market because of games like Among Us that feel like so Community oriented but in reality just kind of like blew up and then built a big Community after that those aren't really great case studies to see what like an active Community go to market looks like something like spell breaker craft is going to be way way better um yeah if you need more ask

windwalk I think I think I have caveat about the games like Among Us that's a pretty important caveat a lot of people kind of forget about that uh point but but awesome um I think I think that's also a great place to you know end our discussion for today so thanks again you know Colin and Richard for sharing your knowledge with us it's been definitely a real pleasure having you on and I still feel like we really only scratch the surface over here so maybe there should be a part two where we get deeper into different topics around Community but if listeners would like to connect with you um you know or work with you uh on their Community strategy or learn more about windw walk's big 2024 plans how can they do so uh yeah I would say just shoot me an email at Colin windwalk dcom where we're we're still Scrappy enough that we use our personal emails we probably probably should fix that but yeah I mean we we're always down to talk to anyone um we I think Richard KN probably spent half of our week talking with people you know not not like pro bono just kind of

trying to make sure that they have good Community goals set in place they're working on the right things um and you know we want everyone to you know use the power of community and succeed so yeah everyone should just reach out and let's chat all right and Richard how about you where can people find you yeah you can find me uh Richard winwalk dcom for an email you can find me at Babushka boy on Discord and uhy also on Twitter so I'm a big ASAP Rocky fan so I uh had to had to co-op the name but fits me fits me I've been running with it for a couple years so yeah you know we're we're basically perpetually online um important for us to to do so and also keep an eye on what projects not just our own projects but what other projects are doing um so yeah it's it's uh very open to conversation with people so just reach out sounds good awesome and to our listeners uh thank you for tuning in if

you enjoy the conversation do let me know uh as we'll catch you in the next episode in a couple of weeks for more insightful conversations until then all the best from the three of us uh with setting up your game Community efforts for Success if you enjoyed today's episode whether on YouTube or your favorite podcast app make sure to like Subs subscribe comment or give a five-star review and if you want to reach out or provide feedback shoot us a note at podcast nov. or find us on Twitter and Linkedin plus if you want to learn more about what navic has to offer make sure to check out our website www.nic.edu Co thanks for listening and we'll catch you in the next episode