Care and Feeding of Wild Fansites

[Music] morning everybody welcome to this panel which has very few of the original members on it I was asked to walk in and help out listen I have been having a terrific time so we're going to talk about the care and feeding of wild fansites here at GDC I hope you're all prepared for this all right so introductions my name is Linda Carlson I'll be moderating this panel and currently I'm the director of community relations at Trion Worlds before that I worked for many years at Sony Online Entertainment and before that I was a fan site operator and you guys can introduce yourselves and tell us a little bit about how you have been involved in fan sites all right I'm Kristin Overton I am currently a senior lecturer at DigiPen I also work outside the game industry right now but my history is I got into games doing fan sites far too long ago then became a producer in the industry so now I spent a lot of time figuring out how to balance the the value of building as well as communicating with

community so it's been a fun journey to be on both sides of that and my name is star long I've been making games for about 25 years my first game was a game called Ultima Online and which spun up some of the very first community fan sites like statics and other sites like that so been sort of involved with this from the ground up of working with fan sites trying to get them what they need being very open with them etc and now I'm with a company called portal area and working on a product called shroud of the avatar hi I'm Jennifer page I'm the what is your strategy for Microsoft Studios Xbox I got started in community and gaming writing first radix for Ultima Online uh-huh everything always goes back to you oh I have a theory yeah me too oh hey good Union maybe that happened up

more petals than I could tell you yes so not only did I write and then I also did snow Sonoma question is which was my own fansite for a while and I kept having opinions and running fansite as you do yes I'm a very subtle woman and after a while a company finally hired me because I think they wanted me to shut up I don't know that it worked but so really grew up to them from the very basement of the beginning of online gaming and fan sites themselves right so now we're going to talk about fan sites and what defines them of course most of us when we first started working on this most fan sites were websites blogs that sort of thing and they still exist there's lots of them but there are so many different types of fan sites now YouTube twitch Twitter I Twitter seems like an odd one but I have a couple of fan sites who operate only in Twitter they're very visually oriented they do a lot of memes and screenshots that sort of thing Facebook has groups and fan

sites wiki's are a highly overlooked type of fan site because they're run by players reddit discord guild portals and god only knows what we're gonna be doing next year it'll be the next cool thing so the question for the panel here is how has the gaming industry's approach to fan sites changed over the years I can remember times when it was somewhat adversarial who would like to start with that has it changed so it's interesting because I think initially I'm going back to you oh again initially there were these fan sites that kind of tried to find leaks and tried to get inside scoops and but also reported on everything that was happening within the game itself mainly quest in live fiction stuff as well as patch notes and all that but that created community and it was a little let's see what we can leak let's see what we can get but it changed pretty quickly to being things like Stratos where you could read and find out what was happening in the game while you were sitting at work and then it was more of it let us be your and you know

microphone for the content that the game is actually creating from there it's evolved into everything from QA testers from fan sites because they give great insight on games themselves to being a core part of the team even in early development which was not the case when it first started so when I was at also at Stratos by the way and I started the first neverwinter nights sightfirst radix and it was probably one of the first true partnerships with Bioware when they came out with that game and we actually built tools because there were not a lot of data sources for information about what was going on in the game so we were actually when I had one of the first tools on one of the fan sites and we didn't really think of ourselves as a fans like that that was days we didn't think of ourselves the community site we were information about the game site kind of we didn't really have a the nice nicely framed community site or community fan sites we have known and it was it was really cool

because we started off on our own and then all of a sudden Bioware found out what we were doing and they're like you guys are doing some great stuff how can we help and it was one of the first partnerships and I absolutely loved working with them and you know years later to actually work alongside them on some projects and meet them in person so it was very cool it is when it all comes full circle II pivoted quickly I think to being a very very cooperative relationship I mean I yeah there are certainly sites that are more about the cheats and exploits but I mean they literally advertise themselves as that's what we do like where we're about hacks and cheats and exploits but for the most part it really is a cooperative exercise between the two but like you said you know it has evolved now where for us I mean most of our effort now is directed at wiki's and twitch channels those are the two I would say the two biggest areas of focus for us and to the point

where you know it another interesting evolution I've seen is that you know a lot of the sites have been scraping data sort of on their own right a long term but one of the things that you know I see a lot of us doing now is intentionally exposing data and giving tools to the sites and the fan especially the wikis and saying oh well I see you're scraping all this data to get like all the crafting recipes or get all the stats for the weapons and most of that's right but but because of the way you're doing that some of that's coming on incorrect and whatever you know a lot of a lot of us are now actually exposing that data directly to them and giving them tools so that they can expose that and present that on a site and often you know it's it's the community is better served in that way because a lot of times especially for like for us like we're a small project we have a small team we don't have the bandwidth to write a website up that shows literally every single weapon and

every single stat and every single combination of like when I craft with this material etc but the players when we give them the tools to expose that data and make it a symbol wiki that shows every single crafting combination of which there are millions it's so it's really interesting to see that evolution of them manually scraping that after the pageant of giving them tools to do absolutely I think it took a lot of acceptance and a letting go of the fear of what fan sites are going to do with this information and realizing that they're really doing free work that benefits everybody in the community and the company Jen how does your what is your company's approach to emerging media like how do you assess the new style of fan site like have you gone all did you go all-in on Instagram or snapchat or anything like that when they came out we didn't I we just act like the world doesn't change now um experiment right so you want to stay real solid in the areas that you know that will produce for you the audience this will produce for you whether that's

streaming or you know wiki's and all that and then in addition to that we do put our toe in every water to see how is this doing a lot of research engaging with the fans on those sites by showing up and saying hey I like the work you're doing and seeing kind of what they're doing giving them a little information building relationships with those people gone is the day where as community managers people didn't know your real name and they couldn't find you there used to be like Batman right now they can find you they can email you they can ping you on Twitter so you might as well have a cooperative engagement with your fan sites and your fans who are on the leading edge of all that stuff because I will never be as good as my games fans and I will never be as knowledgeable because they live it and they do work it which is totally didn't perspective it is really interesting when they can actually embarrass you by your lack of knowledge in the product that they know so well but you're working but it helps to go out there saying I know you guys know more than me yes out the doors all

right so we want to talk a little bit about why do we seek them without what are the benefits to it clearly they are community leaders they can be influencers they can also be allies in talking to your players and they provide free media and content which benefits the players and the company so the question for the panel is how have fan sites affected your company and community and even more importantly these days of careful budgeting can ROI be effectively tracked for fan site impact oh that's a tough one I know let's get started that's one of the things you know like okay what's the return on the investment right because a lot of times working with community there's a lot of a lot of demands for what we could do but you got to figure out what you should do you know every time they make a request for an interview with one of your team especially if it's during the day that's taking away working on and building that game that they're waiting for or that next new update you know every time

you're working on some new art for some fan site you know contest or event same thing you're taking it away from your games you have to pay attention to those trade-offs as much as you want to sometimes you have to say no because you know the return on the investment is not going to be the best thing for your game and it's it's one of those mixed blessings I think because you think about at least for me having been on the other side of that line right making those requests I was the one who was you know writing to Bioware saying hey can we get some cool art for this next site because we're trying to build our community and that was one of the draws we used to use back then was art signed by the artist because you didn't have as many of the early access things you do now and so at on the other side of it when I'm working on the game I'm sitting there going god I really want to help you because I remember being in your position but now I have a different role so balancing that is hard anyone else have any ideas of how ROI can be tracked

can you use analytics to see what kind of hits the site get so when deciding who you want to work with I think you have to that's part of the game right I mean part of it is you don't ignore the smaller up-and-coming passionate intelligent fan sites you want to feed those that garden but you also have to identify who do you invest in who has messaging that's you know in line with where you're trying to go and who has a really solid following looking at stuff like impressions if you're talking about social how many impressions do these people get to suspense I get looking at the kind of traffic they're getting to their site and the kind of engagement and that's huge for me and this is where I have yet to find a tool that does it really well it's better just go through and read what is the sentiment of the site right what kind of feedback are they getting for us that one of the biggest things we get is the conversation in there they will tell us by the way we're hearing a lot of this on the fan you know our site there's a lot of concern around this and they'll let us know that and since we're not in there every day it's extremely helpful if it's actionable feedback and

training your community fan sites how to do that is a big part of it I think the other part is also do they fill a unique niche right when you look across your whole bandwidth of fan sites and community sites are they doing something nobody else is doing are they covering a part of your game in a way that nobody else is so look for those ones that kind of fill in the holes in their puzzle because that's where the value is and the full coverage of your star do you have any any feedback on the way that some fan sites maybe even specific ones have affected your company and your gaming community yeah I mean I would riff on the look at the opportunities specifically for you know things that either you're not able to deliver on your own you know like if it's exposing bits of data that you can't you know you don't have the bandwidth the show if it's highlighting things that the community or is doing so if you have a product where the community does lots of things in the game whether it's streaming matches or whether they set up

events inside the game if the players are highlighting that if you know look for the things that you're not you just don't have the bandwidth to cover and if they're doing a good job of that you know highlighting them recognizing them that's where you spend your bandwidth to support them so I think it's less about tracking the actual monetary value and more about where they are fulfilling a need for the community and a gap that you may not be able to fill yourself and then also you know there are but there are metrics like you were saying you know I mean like twitch twitch is a super easy one you know like look how many followers they have like look you know go watch one of their streams and go see how many views they're getting during the stream you know like if it's somebody that had you know is on Twitter look how many followers they have you know that all those things are easy metrics for you to gauge about how much bandwidth you should spend and then to you to your point about going and looking at the

conversations that are happening you know there's a it's really important to look at the tone you know so the tone of a community site is critically important for your product you know and and that's not to say you know you you only want to embrace the fan sites that are quote drinking the kool-aid right that are the white knights right because then you're gonna get the reputation well you only support the guys that are 100% on your side so it's okay to support sites that are giving you a critical feedback but you you you also don't want to go support a site that is all just truly negative you know because that contributes nothing to your community right and so that's where you want to be careful about like you know or that they're doing you know even worse like there's they're doing like racists or misogynist things you know like or whatever you know like so you have to be that's also where you have to be super careful you know about what sites are

supporting you have to look at what kind of community are they attracting you know because especially now in this climate that's something to be super careful of because if they are attracting the wrong kind of community that can be that can have sort of wide-reaching damaging effects to your larger community right we're now going to move on to reaching out of course the gold standard what we all started with is the easiest the passive fansite kit and there is no excuse for any comp not to have one of these make it easy to find have it on your website and that'll contain things the simple things logos artwork screenshots video audio clips a lot of fan sites like to use bits of audio in in their in their their own lineups and especially if they're making videos and that sort of thing but there's still so much more that you can do beyond fan sites so panel is it important to create an outreach program for your fan sites tell us about your your own ideal approach to fan site

outreach how do you contact them so for us they often contact us before we have a chance to even contact them right because again we're accessible you can find us you can reach out and actually right now we're working with fan site called Phantom dusted because we're bringing back phantom dust in terms of compatibility and all that look it up it's an awesome game but we knew this was one of those niche games that had a hardcore following that was just rabid that this game is not new it's been out for a long time and yet this community exists and it's just passionate and we knew we would never do this game justice like they do I mean they have the wikis they have the deck builders they it's there's no way we could touch it so while they've been in contact with us just as soon as they heard the announcement they started with jam out to us we actually now have weekly calls with them about how can we support you how can we get your content in front of our audience so we do weekly calls with

that particular fan site other fan sites it might be a forum newsletters things like that but it's a relationship and it's a trusting relationship on both sides and that's important to honor if you want it to be effective do you assign do any of you assign a person to work specifically with fan sites within your company to be the liaison for it for us it's the community manager whoever is the community manager on that product okay yeah we it's usually the community manager but sometimes like for us again we're a small team and so it's a community manager but often but it's sometimes it's also myself right so especially if it's a it's a large site or in our case like in another example would be for us the syndicate so they're this you know they're the longest-running largest guild ever so they started in Ultima Han Monde and they move to world of warcraft and they've been basically in every MMO sense and they're like 800

members been continuously running and so like I go to their annual convention you know I have regular emails and phone calls with their guild leader you know so the same kind of thing and and build a relationship with them because and again building that relationship and maintaining that relationship with a group like that is important because I basically threw their guild leader got a big chunk of that Gil to just migrate from one product over to us and and through working with them and maintaining that human contact and for us that's a really important thing is like go to their conventions or go to conventions where you know they're going to be present and make that human contact and we've even because so I work with Richard Garriott and he very very much believes in extending the virtual to physical right and so we've we've even formalized community recognition and so we have rewards we give out and

so one is that we stole from England so we have the so they're in England you get the OBE which is the order of the Britannia Empire so in our game the land is called Newport Aniyah so we have the onb II which is it's a virtual medal and a title that you get in the game for your character but there's literally a physical metal you get as well that we have like a ceremony where we pin it on you so like if we see you at a convention or you come to our offices we actually give you the medal that you can wear when you go places and that's for individuals who do outstanding contributions to the community either through running a website or a fan site or doing things running events in the game and then we have what's called a royal warrant again we stole it from England and in England the Royal Warrant is where like the Queen will say you know you have a royal warrant to make cars or like you know handbags and so it's like you and when you get that royal warrant you're recognized as the

best person to make handbags in the land and so we give royal warrants for groups it's basically the equivalent of the nbe but for a guild or a group and so like the first one we gave out to was the this group the bards of the poet circle who crowdsource all the music for our game and the reason we gave it to them was they are mute we had crowdsource we had basically downloaded a bunch of free music from the internet and it was terrible they'd pay for a man and they approached us and said Oh your musics terrible can we please fix it please please make can we make it better because we're aware we're a guild of musicians and we're all sort of professional musicians that we'd like to make music for the game and and so we worked out this agreement we we we paid on licensing fees for everything and that but they run this whole thing where they peer review it and and and so we

set up this whole thing of like if you want a crowd do crowd sourced music for the game go through this guild and so that's so we gave them a royal warrant and again it's like this plaque that you can hang on your house in the game everyone that's in the guild gets that title and there but there's also a physical wooden engraved plaque that the guild leader gets that they can hang on their house in the game so so again we formalized this community recognition in a digital and a physical fashion so we sort of taken it to this kind of next level that has proven to be incredibly powerful and sort of tied them even closer to us than we've ever seen I want to talk a little bit about talking to fan sites themselves we've already established that communication is extremely important and I'm just gonna list some of the ways that we communicate you already talked about going to conventions and meetups email is an obvious one it's very easy to track I am programs at Tryon we have Skype channels for groups of fan sites we have people who we call the dimension ears and they're heavily involved in building stuff in the games

so Skype slack aim I know people who are still using IRC forums and PMS on forums sometimes we'll hand out the office phone to the community manager and we try not to do it to the producers because they're just too busy I hand out my personal cell phone to every fan site that I come in contact with because it's so much easier for me to answer a text from them than to go through the whole email process studio visits are also a big one especially if your studio can afford to bring your best fan sites in what types of communications work best for you with when working with fan sites and describe a few of the challenges that you've had in communications so look at a couple depending on the product so for a while I was working outside of gaming for a very short while it's a weird then you got sucked right back yeah I just realized you can't you have to be far more appropriate when you don't work in games is that's not acceptable for me but I worked on a community support site but it was run by

the community and had 35 million unique visitors every month and it was run by volunteers that kind of constant change and high-level stuff is we would have a slack call enough slack on Skype call every week with a PowerPoint deck can you tell I work at Microsoft and we don't rewrite like here's the updates coming to the site this week here's some whatever and then we'd have this whole dialogue with the leaders of the volunteers and we do that every week if I tried to do that to my team for some of my other products they would kill me because changes don't happen that quickly and I overwork them so it depends on the product itself mm-hmm but I have found that day in day out quick one offs emails texts I need to be available or rather my team needs to be available yeah yeah make sure you freeze I'm careful let's don't actually do anything but when it comes down to it all of that is great but you still have to have in my opinion that person-to-person contact and I have some

folks that are my Canaries that will call me and say have you checked Twitter you know those people who twelve o'clock in the middle of the night I get a call and say no trust me you want to log in mm-hmm that kind of stuff I need to have that kind of communication with my trusted community members because you know they're all over the world so it doesn't matter what time of day I've got people out there watching letting me know when to freak out that is actually a very good point I used to when I when I first started working in community professionally I was kind of loath to give out my personal contact information because I didn't want these people bugging me like bugging me for stuff in in retrospect that was really stupid because when I finally started doing it they were not bugging me they were helping me at every single turn by alerting me to problems that were going on in the community or letting me know when somebody's running a really awesome contest and that sort of thing so I had to let go of the fear of allowing that communication to operate on a very personal level but could you see it also

getting out of control where it's taking over the working day in the life of your community managers or whoever you've got assigned to it well you can't always be in reaction mode and that's part of the problem so having those extra eyes out there really helps you to focus on when you do need to get involved the the volume of negative is you want to drop it you know drop what you're doing change your priorities focus on the right thing for the community in the game but if things are going well maybe all you kind of do is like monitor it and make sure that it's heading in the right direction so a couple of things that we've done in the past to kind of help with communication I come out of a couple of small projects and usually is one of the first producers on the project I'm the de facto community manager so those first touches are often fall to me until we say hey we have enough volume to hire somebody to do it full-time so I have to kind of squeeze it in between all the other things like chipping a game and so we have done a couple things like even setting up very specific aliases within our company that they know of they can

send to so if they see something happening there are certain people in the company that are automatically part of that alias so we automatically get it so one of us can respond and we kind of haven't had a mini on call but for for community because we didn't have a dedicated person whose job was to do that so when you're in a smaller studio on a smaller project you have to be a little more creative for for monitoring that volume and you know you don't want to be that person who wakes up at seven o'clock to you know a thousand email messages what the hell happened over night because you bothered to go to sleep so anything you can do to kind of raise your awareness without trying to build out a team that to what we said like can keep track of it you know round-the-clock worldwide you just can't do it yeah there is no sleep in the game industry now start what what are your favorite communication channels beyond going to the conventions and meeting people face-to-face you know so we we have our own we have forums and you know we make sure that we set up notifications so if someone tags us in the forums or sends us a PM that will

get a notification that that happened and and we make sure that people know that if they tagged us or send us a PM that will respond within a certain amount of time you know like Richard on Twitter he literally will respond to every single totally gonna test that rate right now no it's more respond so so if you tweet Richard Garriott on Twitter no no we respond like he responds to every single tweet just like and on our forms I respond to every tag and every PM and so we use we sometimes give out email but most of the time we try to chain all that communication of the forum's but we also are always on you know so we're also on steam so we're on those steam forums we also do Google Hangouts with our community yeah yeah and we'll do we do a monthly livestream

with our community and then quarterly like 12-hour Hangouts with the community wait wait wait 12 hour hangout how does that work are you a lot of drinking involved yeah we've did some amazed you know they focus on different disciplines we'll get all the artists together and do an AMA for anything on the art side just lots of creative things to kind of engage them in different ways yeah those hangouts are are are basically AMA so we collect a bunch of questions ahead of time and then we answer those questions on air but we're also we use discord right discourse Eric and we're also collecting questions live while we're hanging out and answering those too so so one thing I did on the livestream were what we're when we're working on gigantic was the community was like they were live-streaming from a show and I wasn't at the show so I was home and so what I did was I took all the questions

that I knew they didn't have time to answer so I would hop in if they were asking some information or if somebody said something incorrectly I was like I know what's going on with a game so I just said I will I will just lurk and make sure that the data that's being portrayed either by the community if they're getting it wrong I'll fix it if it's correct I'll reinforce it so that as you go back and look through that that the text chat afterwards you actually getting new information about what's going on with the game and it was one of those things that I did kind of accidentally one time and then after that community team was like when you're not at the show can you make sure you do this worse because there was just so much less that they had to worry about right but they also knew you know since I was working on the game all the time I probably had the most relevant information relative information and most accurate for that where we were in the productions like let's talk now about setting expectations as you know that's that's fairly important a fan site they're building they've you know they've contacted you or you found them they're very excited that you're paying

attention to them I do think that it's important to set expectations as early as possible now especially if you're dealing with some major huge fan sites regardless of what platform they're on and a couple of really small ones that are not really doing that well sometimes those ones will expect just as much attention as the huge ones and how we deal with that is important how do we show support for our fan sites in general we promote their stuff we retweet them we share on Facebook we comment in response to their posts and and what they're doing very often companies will offer free access to games or items and content that are in the games so that the fan sites have unlimited access to everything that they want to comment and talk about a star had already put in here and I should have put it in here too data fees are extremely important to some fan sites direct access to the community manager for questions access to devs for information even if it's indirect and must be requested through the community manager we often provide support for

and events that the fan sites are running when we were developing Atlas reactor people kept asking about tournaments we say well we're not really sure if it's a tournament style game here we are in alpha and the players are organizing tournaments through fan sites and that was that was a great eye opener you've got to support that sort of thing we offer people giveaways maybe the fan sites are doing giveaways to their own fans and also people are increasingly davila at developing affiliate and profit sharing programs with fan sites so panelists do you have a formal outline for fan support that you give them like here's what we'll do for you and here's our expectations and what do you do if they request things a lot more than you're able to provide them on it what if they start getting really demanding so this goes back to what you were saying about can I get can it go negative having too much contact with your fan sites right or having them have contact with us or how do you motivate your fan sites to be a power for good

not evil it all goes back to how much you value are you giving those fan sites right are you just expecting them to blow a horn and celebrate you or are you providing them with quality content or access and all that if you set that up in the very beginning as part of that conversation of here's what we're gonna provide you based on the fact that you have been identified as a top fan site and I'm real clear with people about what we can and cannot do this will also evolve because just when you're like and this is what we're gonna give you oh wait another streaming okay now we're gonna give you this - oh wait now there's whatever is next it will constantly evolve and change but I'm very clear at the beginning to say here's how we're gonna make you successful they're doing us a favor we want to make sure we honor that and provide value at the same time there's real clear expectations help it go of listen if you know we were talking about just the this just the other night if you retired and suddenly have a life and don't want to run your site anymore we totally get that you know that's not a freezer slide you're skipping ahead but

you know that's totally fine they understand that it's a partnership based on mutual accomplishment and then at the point at some point we have to back off a little just because you're not as act they know that in the very beginning so it's not personal and as long as you're honest and just open and transparent people they get it right I mean people aren't occasionally you got people who want everything for nothing but that's gonna happen no matter what I just open communication and having it post it very clearly and I actually like to post them publicly our fansite kind of policies of this is how you become a fansite this is some of our expectations do you do that on your forums or on the on your website on the site on the site look at my sites right now cuz I'm not there right now because I'm but no I think it should be very transparent cuz I don't want people to ever wonder how come you chose this site on that that side or it's just you're right honestly most people get it right we're not new to the Internet but it's just always better to be as transparent as possible mmm-hmm the one problem though is

remember most of us get involved in fan sites because we have a passion around that game that title that studio and passion is personal and so as much as you try and draw that line as much as you try and keep that that kind of relationship where it needs to be on the business side eventually it's gonna cross and you got to be kind of really careful so I mean I'm blessed have gotten to be really good friends with a whole bunch of folks I used to be you know on the other side of but there are days when I have to remind them like I work for the studio this has to come first and so I need you to step back a little bit when we're in this kind of relationship so just be careful because you do have to control that line sometimes because they're just some amazing people out there that you want to get to know better but they also have to respect what you do for the company and that there are some lines that you're not supposed to cross for both the business and personally to kind of keep things you know in the right place yeah I mean it's it's like we were talking about earlier I mean you just have to it's kind of back to that ROI thing you know you just have to balance

what kind of exposure and what kind of benefit are are you deriving from that site so I mean if they're getting you a lot of exposure if they're providing a lot of value to the community then whatever they're getting in in response to that you know whether it's steam keys or store credit or you know things that they can give away like you know for us an example is like twitch streamers again because that's a that's a huge a focus for us and mostly most companies now is you know giving the you know and a big focus for most companies is giving twitch streamers things they can give away during their stream right and the amount you give those streamers is directly proportional to the number of viewers right so and and again just be super transparent about that it's like if you have a big audience I'm gonna give you more store credit to giveaway right and and just just say that and everyone gets that I

mean that like that's that's not a hard thing to communicate or sell or and everyone understand and that's perfectly fair like the nice thing about that is like it's it's a very fair metric and it's a very objective metric there's nothing subjective about you just but that's I and do you have do you have a formal policy or outline posted as well that would be super awesome you'll get right on it when you get back to the office just barge in at Tryon we have what we call the creator program and we actually formalized it because we had so many twitch streamers that we just couldn't handle and it's a it's a way that they can register so that you know we don't accidentally miss people but then we started finding out that fan sites should also be signing up for this because they deserve the same stuff so we have wiki operators reddit operators fan sites the the Twitter guys all of these people are now registered through the the creator program so we try to keep it short and concise and one of the things we threw in there because of our friends at YouTube is yes you have

permission to use our stuff freely and make money off it if you want to and can so it's a I think it's very useful to have something formal up and you mentioned the affiliate right Papa cherry stuff which is it which is a really new ground that started happening very new and we've we've actually got one example we have a what we call a trusted trainer program because we have a we we actively allow a secondary market so we let players trade virtual goods for real dollars income own and and we and so we have a one person who's a trusted trainer who we let buy materials from our store and then sell them in a secondary market he does it with Eve as well Wow does he even also has a similar program and but again its profit sharing so and he you know he can buy things from us at a discount and then resell them because we

have a trusted relationship with him he gets his exposure you know he promotes the game on YouTube and twitch but it's a new thing that not a lot of companies are doing it yeah but it's but it's a really interesting new model that's I don't know how many of you saw the announcement from twitch on Monday that they're doing an affiliate program now where we're actually at Trion Worlds we're lucky enough to be a partner in that let me tell you this is so new that we're not really sure how we're approaching it yet our platform guys are working with our sales guys working with the brand guys working with the devs and everybody's trying to get this stuff cohesively together because affiliate programs can be a real bear to manage so if we can get twitch to do that for us we're really happy we're already partnered with straiten with steam and of course steam takes a cut of the profit as well but the same sort of thing you're reaching people that you wouldn't ever reach otherwise I think affiliate programs are a really smart way to support fan sites because they pour their life's blood into these I into these endeavors and it's nice that they can get even a little bit back so

before we move on real quick one of the things that we ended up doing work on gigantic was we partnered with some of those fan sites and got a fit they set up official tags for us so that when we posted they knew that we were officially part of the game and part of the company and they did all this really fun stuff but it meant that when we had the time to go in and comment on a thread or get involved in that conversation which we couldn't commit to doing all the time they still knew we were there that's that's great and it just you know they were like oh wow we didn't even know you guys were here is like we're here right we may not be able to post all the time because we do have day jobs but you know when we do post they know that we're engaged in the community we're paying attention and that's a form of currency to fan sites as well that's that's time investment from the company and that is a form of payment and a thanks for a job well done most reddit mods will also tag your team members if they verify their identity so that they know that you're not just pretending to

be somebody from the company but that you're you're an actual person and then you get horribly downvoted to the bottom you know page 10 but at least you're tagged and people know that you're your legit let's talk about one of the more challenging things because this does happen biting the hand that feeds you okay sometimes a good thing goes bad the the passive one is as we mentioned earlier when people burn out and they move on or maybe they get a job like for instance I ran a fan site for several years the brass calm but when I started working in the game industry I no longer had time to do comics and write-ups and that sort of thing so the site might be abandoned or or just left up on good terms that sort of thing however sometimes when people get frustrated with you it can result in a lot of burning bridges on on their part and sometimes on the company's part and I'm sad to say I the the second danger is that if you give fan sites a lot a sense of entitlement conform just because

they've got the special access sometimes some people can develop a sense of self-importance sometimes they will have an increased level of demand that they feel entitled to and if they're unhappy with you they're going to vent to a very avid audience that schadenfreude runs very strong among the people who read fan sites so panel have you encountered any of these issues and how did you resolve them and how do you terminate an unhealthy fan site relationship well like when you guys went when you partnered with 4chan you know how did that turn out I'll leave the the the getting out of it to one of my fellow panelists but I will tell the news mystery story from when I was actually on the other side and part of the community I was running the Neverwinter strata credible relationship with fire where it felt like a real partnership and I had to step away I was actually starting at mythic strata so we're excited about that game so I want to step out but I was also building a bunch of stuff for the back end for

statics and I just didn't have the bandwidth to do both and so what I ended up doing as I handed it off to somebody I felt was a really good lieutenant to hand it off to you well little did I know he felt super entitled he had not done any of the work to build the relationship with Bioware and the team but he felt like he should just be able to step into my shoes and just have all that trust and within three months Bioware contacted me directly and said if you do not take back this site we're going to sever our relationship with you because he was that bad and the relationship that we had was too important so I made him go away because he was actually damaging our community and the relationship with the company and so I ended up stepping back in and I stayed for another year until somebody else actually stepped up but you know from the other side it could have really destroyed our site because we had that tool that they were giving us data for and you know it was a relationship that that stuff came out of the trust and as

soon as somebody started to damage that trust we needed to fix it immediately so I haven't had that happen on the other side so I'll leave that one to you go yes hmm so you can't fire a fan site correct you can't they're just gonna they're gonna be there so again the key is to being at providing so much value that they want to play nice because you're in and you have a trusting relationship with them and you all have the same goals and if they start to go sideways pulling that stuff back should be felt in other words if the fan site to your point is getting value from the relationship with the company they're gonna want to reinforce that just it's the same way that we do that the most you can do is actually pull back those resources and actually say acknowledge when people ask unfortunately we've severed a relationship with this fan site and part of that is protecting your brand right when somebody goes toxic and negative on the internet which is so rare never happens

making sure that people understand we don't condone this even if obviously when it's blatant hate stuff but even when it's just non constructive and right you separate from it and saying that publicly I think is important you don't have to slander but being able to say we no longer at this site that's all you can do and not get pulled into the mud chef's secrets that's all you're gonna say Wow 25 years in the industry and you don't have a story I mean that's it I mean it's really that simple yes you just have to make a public statement and say we're no longer work I mean that you can't do anything else I mean you can try and you can try and get them back on track like you said bye-bye either pressure or demands or or you know a lot of throttle throttle yeah throttling back on on on supply but at the end of it if it becomes if that doesn't solve it I mean

all you can do is make a public statement I mean there's no there literally is nothing else you do okay I am amazed that we're actually on time with us you guys are really good speakers I'm gonna have to sign you up again the best advice this is this is the last formal slide and there are two parts if there is one thing you could tell a community manager seeking to start a fansite program it would be and the second is if there's one thing you'd like to tell execs reviewing your budget about the importance of supporting fan sites because that can be somewhat challenging as well now as I put at the bottom I said okay you can offer more than one piece of advice if we were super concise and on track previously chances are low I know you people so you sure you surprised me so what what are your what's your best advice to both somebody who wants to start a fansite program and something that you'd like to tell executives or offer to the Community Managers that they can take to

their executives on your face when you say that they're out there whether you want them to be or not they're out there and they're talking about our products and they're they're giving out information and they may be scraping data that's not accurate and then it may be coming from a good place but they're out there one way or the other why would we not take advantage of that reach and that passive passion and that it megaphone for the messaging we're trying to get across oh and by the way you don't have to pay them so if you really want to get tricky about it what you say is I can hire two people to go out and make sure we're hitting all these different community sites and getting this messaging out or I can hire one person and start a fan program it's cheaper it's more effective yada yada and the feedback loop is huge for us that is HUGE we want to hear from the fans and not just the fans from reddit not just from twitch and not just we cannot possibly

be everywhere but the fans are everywhere so if we open up that communication loop and we make sure that we're getting that information in it's hugely valuable especially as for instance we announced a game and we do this big marketing splash with all these really pretty trailers and we think it hit great and the audience says wow that's awesome we love that you're doing giant pink elephants and like there's no giant pink bit like how did they get that message sometimes what you put out there is not received the way that you think it is having that relationship with all these different places means I can now go to my execs and go hey remember how we said that well now we have to shift our messaging because it's not landing otherwise you're gonna have pissed-off players when we sell this game that has proven to be extremely valuable for executives so they're working as a focus group as well that's another benefit a rather unfocused group yes but yeah I know it's a huge benefit in for like I said it's not expensive the returns on it if you have so if you are going to

set up I'll go to the first question if you are going to set up a program how do you ducks in a row understand your reporting and reporting has to be consistent and constant there is no value of the community managers the only one with the information in their brain it has to be put in a concise bullet point template that an exec over lunch or coffee can go got it right because then they're getting value out of it and if you're not doing that on a consistent basis and taking taking the passion out of the communication and making it actionable that's huge but you want to have all that in place so that by the time you go out within the first week of a program existing people are seeing about you yeah so the if you're a couple of things if you're gonna be setting up a program I'm gonna echo what you said that you having a very digestible report for executive to understand what's happening in the community so I'm gonna single out Barrack our Matthew Anderson our

community guy out there he you know so he does a weekly report it's called our community sentiment report it divides the community into different areas like here's our community on steam here's our community on our forums here's the community in other locations like ooh yay reddit and and then sort of rates there you know how they're doing and then talks about like what they're talking about and then but then also give suggested actions based on I think but it's all like one page right and so and and that comes out right before our weekly manager's meeting so we have as an agenda item we have that list of you know both sentiment and actionable items from what is going on in the community and the pan so having that data and in a very digestible and actionable format is critical for that for exec and leadership to see value and that has to so if you're setting up that program make sure that that's the end result of it right is this digestible actionable

data coming out of it or else there's no point yeah that's that's what you're pitching so if you're gonna pitch like I want to set up this program that that's your pitch is like this is the report you're gonna get because if you show if that's your pitch like you should win that report they're gonna be oh awesome but then the other part of your pitch is you know just a simple data point which is the cost of user acquisition so you know the average revenue per user right now is about a dollar right okay let everyone let that sink in for a second you're getting about a dollar per person right now the cost of user acquisition right now is about five dollars see that how that works so you're losing about four dollars a person okay so which means you need to scale and the only way you can scale you're not going to scale through traditional no longer can you scale through traditional marketing techniques right aspect unless unless sure like super cell and you have 26 billion dollars right so if you're

anybody else you need other techniques and the best way to do that is with community right and so they are your user you know they are an amazing user acquisition tool and so that's your other pitch right is his community is a user acquisition tool and life and fostering a community and helping a community that's that's that's the way we're gonna do it and then and one last thing is you know if you're if you're setting up a program you know always be transparent and honest that that's that's key to any program like be be open and honest with your community and be clear about what what works and what doesn't with your community and recognize the outstanding contributors so people who are considered but don't do that until they consistently display positive contribution like if someone's is is doing something really awesome for like a day don't immediately jump out there and go look at that person who did

one day of really awesome things because they like do months of really awesome thing but once they district once they consistently display something positive over a month's of time publicly recognized them show the community this is what we'd like this person right here or this group is the kind of community contribution this is the fan site we like and celebrate that to the rest of the community because then the rest of the community has an example to work from and they can see oh those are the guys who are doing really awesome work and they got lots of goodies because of it it is what it works okay all right just a couple minutes left I guess but so from the executive point it's you know I had to make this pitch because I was starting to lose my ability to actually run the project as a producer so I was part of helping make that pitch to say we need somebody to do this we've got so many people paying attention to us and I can't deliver the quality that we need to kind of keep that message on task but also to Ecostar we're both the

community managers both acquisition and retention right there kind of keep that there that's where the care and feeding of that passion the community side so they're gonna help us acquire but they're also gonna retain and they say don't play they don't pay right so we need to keep them around once we have them and the community manager is one of those glue elements to the future of our game and making service a there and as for the advice piece is don't forget that is building community outside the studio you're also building the community inside the studio because you are basing a lot of things you're doing on the people who build that game and being aware that those kinds of things impact that that group some of them won't want to do those streams but I had the blessing of working with amazing community managers through a really stressful time on our project and the fact that he supported me allowed and gave me the opportunity to support him even more and it was an amazing partnership between production

and community and my studio and I felt really blessed great and now do we still have time for questions yeah we have so okay so if anybody has any questions please line up at the microphone thank you so much panel for taking part in this you guys are really brilliant hi thanks guys I'm Nick hug it from kick side we've made a big push into mobile gaming one of the big things that we've seen is that our players like to communicate through messaging apps including line and one of the kind of roadblocks you run into is that I was a part of a bunch of different chats and a couple of them basically decided they didn't want the company overseeing or seen what they were talking about and basically yeah not because of anything I did they just didn't like the feeling of Big Brother looking over top so my question is if you're in a situation like that you want to be part of some of these talks that some of your players are having but not that they hate you they just don't want you looking over

their shoulder do you respect that and and just let them do it or do you infiltrate and try and you know pretend to be one of the play like there's a couple of different avenues what's your advice you're asking if we want to advocate spying on your community you guys do go ahead and date that what you yeah well I'm asking yeah the price you pay is greater than what you're yeah they will find out you're spying so don't yeah so instead just kind of approach them and say hey can you guys give us just kind of an overview report we don't need to see the details just give us tell us what you come up with what you're talking about the things that matter to you guys we don't have to be there to get that information well there's a reason why they're having the conversation yeah right there's a reason why they're having those conversations and it may be that they want to be able to vent without you hearing right and that's that's fine mm-hm that's not what you need any way you need actual feedback that's actionable and so the people that are running those chats to your point if they can give you some talking points that's great otherwise you may need to start your own or have another group

that you can incentivize to you know start one on your behalf and incentivize this again very transparent write it say hey we would love to we'll even give you some tokens to give out during your chat but the goal is we want feedback we want amplification whatever your goal is just be really transparent but with things like that it also becomes really gamey which is you know I mean it becomes this weird well we said well we think it's like that's not no we're doing everything aboveboard if you're not comfortable you just want to rant go for it that's something that's useful for me and I think the the end goal here is your truck you're trying to make sure that once you build the trust with the community to keep it right so being transparent about not invading their space if they don't feel comfortable because if they truly feel that they can trust you and you can trust them you're gonna hear about that stuff faster than the the tide of it getting out on the Internet and that's what you want to build your relationship oh no is it trust you're gonna be transparent like Jen said be transparent say hey we want to join you guys

oh we respect you if you guys don't want us there also that's so weird but it's not there are a lot of sites out there where people where I honestly devs don't want to go but as no I'm serious I there there was some EQ to flames for instance was a fansite forum that was started as a place for people to go rant and rave and we did not have our developers posting there because remember that a developer's presence is also a reward do not underestimate the power of your developers if you start a weekly chat and invite everybody to it do not underestimate the power of developers to pull in people who are really interested in your game so just go start your own yeah next question hi my name is Liz I work at Pocket gems on a product called episode we actually have a ton of fan sites but one of the issues that we're running into is that the fan site operators actually no no so actually so

back in back in the day sorry I'm gonna repeat the question for the audio what do you do when your fan site operators hate each other so back in the day when I did have fan sites who hated mine we actually had to learn to build we mean the companies we're not gonna fix this for us we actually eventually arranged a an agreement of respect it's like if you're gonna go steal their content damn it give us credit right so it was kind of we had to work out because it was in the early days of this right and so you know you got this unique screenshots or data from the the game company or whatever the studio and all of a sudden it appeared somebody else's site yeah and they didn't credit you I was like I don't care if you cross-post have a good time just tell him where it came from so that we get acknowledged for that effort right so a lot of it was just building respect between us and I had nothing to do with the company itself right and

it's like come on be grownups but let me ask and turn are they coming to you to come solve their squabbles so we're talking frenemies here is that where we are okay so so it's like really hard they don't like deal with but are they coming to you interesting in some cases it's did you know that so-and-so is doing this you need to ban them that's great yeah yeah I believe me it's not just teen girls and when talking with people coming to us with those kind of complaints it's like well as long as we're within the guidelines I mean height you start sewing like a pamphlet or something but to some extent not

adding to the drama and not even getting your toe in the water is so important yeah cuz you just don't want to reinforce that behavior no matter who it is and that does get to the point where you just remind people there are in order to be acknowledged by us again make sure you have a carrot making sure you have some kind of value you have to be behaving within this code of conduct and the code of conduct is important we haven't touched on that but a code of conduct is important and outlining in the very beginning we will not tolerate hate we will not tolerate toxicity we want all that stuff as part of that and then just pointing to it saying as long as we're okay here okay thanks bye and just not getting to about you'll find that they will grow up over time or they'll go someplace else too and it and and when i say grow up some a lot of times it's adults who start these fan sites and they also have to adjust to that social environment it definitely not just teenage kids I think we have time for one more question okay hello I'm Rafael from blues letting America hello so usually we get

limited spots bring people to workshops in the office or conventions like Blizzcon so how do you guys value who has who should come like a bigger fan site or a small one that you want to help grow and a follow-up question how do you guys handle the jealousy between fan sites like why did he get it inviting I didn't star had a really good response to this earlier way or evaluating fan site you know so so again being transparent about it so communicating why you made the decision so if you make the decision that you want to bring a smaller fan site for the purpose of growing them and helping them just say that is why you did it right and so or if you made the decision that you only want to bring web fan sites that are of a certain scale because they have a certain exposure but just be clear that that was the criteria or if you did a mix also say that say we chose

to web - fan sites that were of this scale because they had this exposure of this many views per whatever that metric and then we intentionally reserved two slots for smaller up-and-coming sites and just be transparent about that and yes you're gonna get jealousy I mean that's gonna happen but if you are very transparent about why you chose them those you know and if you did it by say a lottery or something like that you say like they're like the two smaller ones you know we say you know the two we chose the two biggest and that's an objective metric and then for the two for your two smaller ones say we looked at they that we chose ten smaller ones that we picked two out of a we randomly picked two out of those ten smaller ones and then and then again if you're transparent about it they're gonna get jealous but and they're gonna have some foment about it for a little while but if you were transparent about it that that that that will what won't last them

by the way the combination is the best right yes we only feed our big giant fansites everybody else gives up and suddenly you are dependent on two sites right you always want to have the up-and-comer that is building has new perspective has fills a niche the baby that isn't already filled but it also helps with the entitlement when it's not just two juggernauts or one juggernaut fansite they become a little less cocky if they realize they're not the only show in town and the silver lining is you have several fan sites to be jealous of each other and that's it that's a good problem to have yeah well I think that's it for us thank you all so much [Applause]