Closing Down Game Communities: How to Plan a Dignified Breakup

[Music] i'm going to go ahead and get started thank you everybody for showing up i'm not sure if troy and sarah lynn are here i know don is not here those are the folks that organize the community summit so i really want to thank them it's really cool that we have this as a resource every year to come together and talk about what's going on in community i know i look forward to it so i want to really thank them my my presentation is called closing down game community communities how to plan a dignified breakup i thought this was a really important subject to talk about because i found i work for lionbridge game services and we work with a lot of different games and so of course this comes up more often just by virtue of the fact that we're working on several games that a game does have to close down and there really isn't that much written as far as best practices about how to do this and we've learned a lot

over the years doing this and so i thought it would be a good way to share some of that knowledge now that being said i realize there are folks in this room who also work in community and who have also been involved in closing down game communities in fact i would love to see a show of hands if anyone has ever been involved in that process actually shutting down the game community excellent and then how about anybody who has played a game that has shut down and you've been a part of that community yeah so i mean it it happens it's a game is a life and it ends it is a it is a relationship and it ends so it's something that you have to be prepared for so i was really it was really important to me to talk about this and and have a discussion so i'm going to try to leave about five to ten minutes at the end so if anybody has anything they want to contribute even from your own personal experience doing this or any questions i'd love to have a discussion at that time

so i have this quote up which is better to have loved and lost than never to have loved it all because that's what you want your community to feel at the end of this process you want them to feel like it was important that they were part of this it's better that it happened and is over than that they were never a part of it in the first place and and i'm going to touch on this several times throughout the presentation but really what you're trying to do is move people from this feeling of just rage and sadness to nostalgia that's where you want them to be in the end of this process and i have this first part because i hold it true whatever fall i feel it when i sorrow most that's not always there when you see this quote but it's important because you want people to feel this way even when they're at their saddest even when they're feeling their worse you you want them to steal to still feel this way i have an example here up from starcraft this i think really gives a good example

of how you want your fans to feel at the end you want them to feel like they were a part of something important they're glad that they were there even that they were kind of special that they were and others weren't and that it's something that they wish that they could explain to other people that your legacy is going to live on in a positive way of course ashran's call is a game that shut down recently landmarks another one i have this up because i feel like this shows really there there is a personal uh relationship between people who play your game and the game itself people feel like especially if it's been going on for a really long time like they grew up there or like they went through a significant part of their life with that with that relationship with your game and so all the more you really need to be respectful and thoughtful and about how you you break up and then i just have this up because i have a really good friend in seattle who

um is just die hard seattle sonics fan and literally to this day he still puts up a happy birthday to any person who was ever on the team ever it's been 10 plus years since this game left seattle and still it's something that is in his heart in which he there's still a legacy for the memory so relationship resp respect it's really important to think about the fact that your long-term relationship reputation is at stake you may have other games you you may have a brand that's associated with other games you may even as somebody who works in community as a community professional carry this reputation to other jobs that you take for other games so you need to think about that now of course you want to do a good job and be thoughtful because that's the right thing to do but also it will affect your reputation they've been feeling it for a while too there have probably been lots of rumors about the game a fact the

game is going to close down and you are going to have to deal with this fact that some people are going to be feel they've been made a fool of a little bit that's something you're going to have to address and get it together before you speak i can't i cannot stress that enough that's really what is going to make the difference if you're thoughtful in the way that you conduct this process it's going to change it's going to make the outcome much more positive people are going to feel that you cared you cared enough to have things be coordinated in this end phase so at the beginning of any when when a closure is planned you need to put together a closure timeline so some things to really think about when you're putting that together are that the communication is synced across channels so that's social media forums official unofficial english language non-english all channels need to have this this

closure announcement made in a way that is synced you also need to make sure that your pr customer service marketing are all on board because as you know as far as your your players your customers are concerned it doesn't matter who's speaking it's it's your game internally sometimes we start to think oh that's pr that's marketing but they don't care if somebody in marketing is saying one thing or customer service saying another it's confusing and they're and they just they it gives a an impression that you're not being thoughtful about how you get this information out the other thing is really that everyone knows when and what to say internally at your company even people who aren't really typically client-facing all the time everybody because of social media or just really because the way that people interact and communicate they are going to be talking with people about what's going on and you need to have a time when they are given a direct message and really they know what the company line is as far as what's going on and

one thing really i need to stress which it can be overly overlooked unfortunately is that the registration is disabled by the team so as soon as you make the announcement that the closure is going to happen you have to make sure that no more people can join and play your game that looks really bad if you forget that step messaging so tailored to the channel and that all of the roads are going to lead to your closure faq and i'm going to talk a little bit more about the closure faq later but you need to make sure that your messaging is in line with with your community so as part of your closure plan you're also just going to put together something that if you don't already have it catalogs who's in charge of and what all your channels are again official and unofficial because fan sites on facebook can be just as powerful or even more powerful than your own official sites and when you tailor the messaging the more personal you make it the more

it's going to have an impact for example if you have a group of russian folks that meet up at a bar and they always meet up at a certain time drink a certain beer whatever you you reference that beer when you are making this closure announcement just every little thing that you can do to really show people that it's personal and it is a big corporate branded messaging it's it's going to make the impact that much better so some key points to hit in the in the closure faq are why when what about all my stuff what now and can we still talk so why you're going to have to address it people are going to ask why is this happening now you can't always be exactly direct about what's going on you can't give them financials but it's something you're going to have to address they want to know why it's happening when it's going to happen and you want to put time zone you want to put exact time again you want people all around the world to know that you aren't just thinking about west coast u.s when you put this time up

you are thinking that people need to know what it is in their own time zone what's going to happen to my stuff now that's a big one there's in-game currency there people have invested time and money you have to have a plan laid out as far as what is going to happen and in what time what now this is this is one you have to be a little bit careful with if you have other games you can push people to the other games but you want to not come across as too salesy or marketingy especially the time people are feeling bad so uh something to be careful about and then can we still talk you know how long can people keep talking with you through the channels that they currently are when does it switch over to customer service do you even have that option these are things that you need to outline outline i this is not a complete version of faq but just uh minimize so that you can see get the gist of it so some other things to think about are reasonable questions you know you all play this game too so what are some things that you would want to know

the tone i used to work for lego on the lego universe game so of course in that game when we were closing down that game we spoke to people it you know from the point of view that they were children most mostly children playing this game you have to keep that tone that you had otherwise in your community and and carry it over into the closure faq again pushing people to other games and then um disable comments is really important you're going to have plenty of spaces online again social media forums other forum topics etc where people can discuss what's going on so this is not about stifling conversation but you want to have one place where it is pristine where you have exactly the message that is coming from your company which you can change if you need to later on but where there's no distracting comments coming in about people who are you know saying what is up there is wrong or arguing about it or whatever that can go on in other spaces but in your closure faq you want that to

be completely controlled by you so we've got some examples of what i think are faqs that are done right and also this is still live the glitch shut down i thought they did a really good job of again keeping the tone of how their game had how they'd spoken with their community otherwise and addressing all of the major issues in a in a thoughtful way in a way that showed they cared and then i've got lego universe up here again i thought we did a good job on that i like number two i think it's a really good example of the tone or thinking about your audience because you know why i love lego universe for a kid you know the world revolves around them so they're like i like this game why how could it be shutting down if i like it so you really just need to make sure that you're speaking directly to your community as you would otherwise adapting editorial calendar so you you're going to want to like tailor your campaigns in such a way that um

you're not just going to throw everything out once you make the announcement that the closure's happening you don't just stop at every fun thing you've ever done in your community but you're going to tailor it so again moving people from this feeling of rage to nostalgia so i just have an example i got a very simplified uh active community for a little game about zoo animals where when you have an active community you all know what you're doing is you're you're trying to get people excited about what's going to happen in the future you want suggestions for new things you want to them to be showing what's going on right now in the game and inviting people and and having live uh live game play with the moderators and all that kind of thing map ideas for new worlds that's something when things are active but uh when people when it is uh when you when you've announced the closure you're going to want to change that so but it doesn't mean it just is no fun anymore but but what you want to do is you want to take people uh take their interest and move them

towards celebrating what they have done so you can do tribute campaigns you can have perhaps if you had live play with the moderators maybe now the moderators put together a topic in the forums where they talk about their favorite people who they played with and what they did and all that again just moving it to this this place of nostalgia so once the once the closure announcement has been made that's when you need to start ramping up your moderator hours so again this is to the extent that you can do this sometimes that's not possible but it's really important at this time if you can to do that because this is going to be the time when all of these negative comments are just flooding in and you have a lot of people who are not really contributing positively to the conversation so this is a time when moderators are really really important to go through

and make sure that what's coming in is productive support your team this is something is really important to me as somebody who manages people who work in community because if you work in community you do really have to have a very thick skin there's people saying really mean awful things to you all the time and to each other and so of course to some extent you have to kind of be built for that if you're working in community however working through this kind of experience can be really more than that and it really can take its toll on people who are day in day out dealing with talking with people who are just completely enraged so as a manager you really want to make sure that you are reaching out to people one-on-one who are on your team if you can if you work in an office together get people together if you work in a virtual community virtual team which is often the case especially these international communities

have more video chats send pictures of kittens with hats on i mean just really try to engage with people and recognize that this is a tough thing to have to work through the other thing is reaching out directly to positive users now that's something that in community that we're doing all the time we're always reaching out to people who we see as positive influencers but in this case it's a it's another time to really refocus on that because you're going to find people will emerge and sometimes they're surprisingly people who otherwise haven't been as active but they're people that really they for whatever reason this is where they shine they shine in helping people through this kind of experience and you want to focus on those people contact them directly but also publicly really give them a lot of attention so that they'll inspire others to do the same and then updating the faq and messaging as needed this is really important too because you need to be flexible in your messaging of course like i said before

the closure faq that's that is controlled by you but if nobody is understanding what's going on on sensor on a certain subject that means that you've written it in a way that's not clear and so you need to go back there and update that and even possibly put out push out additional messaging if it really was unclear in a way that is just gumming up the community so in the final two weeks again this is part of the closure plan you want to have this all really timed out perfectly and make sure that everybody in your company knows exactly when all this messaging is going on you you push out additional messaging via all those channels two weeks prior to the closure the same in-game messaging and also email basically any any way that you have any means that you have to contact your community you're going to do that two weeks ahead of time one week ahead

of time and one day ahead of time and then of course at the time of the closure itself and your community is going to notice that this is being done in a methodical way again going back to this whole thing about showing that you are thoughtful in the way that you are carrying out this process is going to pay off and then uh this is the end i realize i'm going a little bit too fast here so we'll have lots of time questions at the end but what you want to do in the end is button up financial so make sure that all of these the in-game currency anything that you've outlined as far as how this should take place has taken place and things are refunded any kind of disputes that are going on have been resolved and uh then you're going to close down all of your channels and make sure that although that can't there is some dispute there depending on well depends on how much ability you

have to keep your channels open but usually you're going to want to shut down all of your social media channels all of your forum except for the faq if you have the ability to keep it live for a little while that's just going to help some people who have who are confused and then look forward you can take pride in what went right and forgive yourself for what went wrong there are going to be bumps along the way that's just how it is and even of course if you do it perfectly there's always going to be people that are upset that's how it is in community but as a person who works in community you have to be able to take take what you learned from this and and move on and just be proud of yourself that you've done the best job that you can and shown respect to this community of people and that's just a little plug because we're having a party line bridge game services is having a party um on thursday 6 tonight at the press

club i really wanted to make sure that everybody at the community summit knows about this because it's free food and free booze so i know how community people are um so come on by and um it's just a couple blocks from gdc and actually i have uh little tickets up here if anyone wants that as a reminder but that's really all that i had i kind of um i wanted to give some time for discussion again knowing that people in in the room i'm sure have experience with this kind of thing so if anybody has uh any questions oh i'm also supposed to remind people that uh there is a survey that's going to be sent out to you after this is over so if you could feel please fill it out yeah and if anybody has any questions or comments or has something that you've had as a personal experience i would love to hear it hi hello um i actually work for total rock studios um as a community manager at the time when we uh our contract

ended with evolve stage two okay um i can say before i ask my question one thing that went over really well was uh we did a video beforehand i interviewed all the devs talking about their experience and kind of in that nostalgic way and how they felt and also reassured the community that good things were to come and it seemed to go over really well we also took a picture of everyone that was close to the community because we had about 60 devs that were constantly communicating with them on the forums and discord and we held up a sign that thanked them that's awesome it went over really well yeah but my question to you would be um when you've moved on and you're working on a whole different other project um and you still every time you post on social media you get those kind of like upset comments uh what's the best way to handle that so it doesn't seem like you're pushing your other content but you're you also care about how they're feeling but you want them to know and understand like empathetically we're still you know

moving on we're trying to survive in the studio and do things um that we can to keep you know doing what we love it's not that we don't care about the old project so um oh um i'm gonna repeat the question i i think what you're saying is when you have another game that you have that is active and people continue to go back and uh complain about the fact the previous game is already over what can you do well i mean to some extent there there is just the i you know i feel for you kind of reaction that you can can give i mean if they're if they're saying if some of their comment is about the new game you know you can of course speak to that and then say sorry and if you have questions here and or in some cases you know if another kind of fan site has sprung up that's not official that you are cool with you can push people to that even for games that have closed you know they still live on in these other ways but

there's not so much you can do i mean that that does of course continue to happen especially when you are a company that has several games that's just going to continue to happen but i think the main thing is like what you're saying is the empathy you know just just tell people that you're feeling for them thank them for their that they that they loved the game you know um and uh eventually that will end and but i do think at that point i mean i guess it depends on the the length of time it's been i think there is a certain point where it is okay to start getting a little bit more pushy about marketing to the new game i guess um or just hey have you seen this wow check it out um in a more overt way but um yeah i don't know it's that that helpful at all okay it's not so much that we're trying to market it but we just want them to know that it's like look in our in our shoes you know we just doing what we love it's not that we didn't care about it or anything

right well i guess with that i wouldn't get to even though they will get personal i wouldn't get to personal um in a way that um is like you know could be perceived at all as defensive right i guess yeah yeah i would just say you're sorry for i would put it on them more and that you're sorry for their experience versus you know we're sorry that it happened because it had to happen for all the reasons you've outlined yeah it seems they've been adapting it yeah thank you cool yeah thanks hi hi i'm uh sam ellsberg student uh so really great presentation uh throughout all that you showed us what community demanded community managers should do my question to you is what are some of the mistakes that you see happen often that community managers do when they

close down their game well i think the biggest mistake uh can be eliminated by that closure plan which is that things are not coordinated so one thing that i forgot to mention when i was talking about that is you know some of the departments marketing customer service they might have automatic emails that go out if you for example don't have that coordinated and they have some sort of auto messaging goes out that is as if the game is still going on that is still in the movement of you know acquiring new people um that can that looks really bad so that's not necessarily community manager mistake but that's you know as far as the entire process that's a mistake can be made um and then yeah i mean taking it personally and maybe getting overwhelmed by the situation and um getting into this kind of can happen in any kind of situation when you have a group of people i mean at a restaurant happens when you know if your boss thinks

everybody sucks then all the waiters think everybody sucks too you know like you kind of like get in that kind of feeling where it's like they're all against us so i think um a mistake that can happen is people can get they're just getting pounded on by these horrible really unreasonable comments all the time they start to get into the space where they don't their their skin isn't thick enough and they lash out so i think those two things really again the having things very clearly defined who's in charge of what in a timeline and having that predefined um that will eliminate most of the mistakes thank you yeah you're welcome hello hi so you mentioned that people you know the company creates a world and people come in and they develop a lot of sort of emotional investment and even economic assets and then the world gets closed down and so it just made me think suppose i was the governor of hawaii and a bunch of people came there and

they built buildings and got to know everyone i just decided that it wasn't working for me so i kick everyone out of hawaii and i blow it up and send it under the ocean my thought is why do the game companies close these places down instead of just releasing them into the wild why don't you let people sustain their right i think in some cases actually with um with glitch they did i think they actually did um release it into the wild somewhat um so some companies do do that it's um mostly i think it has to do with brand uh ownership of your own brand so you know if you release it into the wild and then it turns into some alt-right something you know i mean like then and it's associated with your brand it's a big big risk so that that is um you know again speaking to the thing i was talking about as far as people thinking you it's you no matter

who you are it doesn't matter if you would say to somebody oh that's actually not my game they're going to see that mark on there and that character and they're going to think it's you that's really that's the main reason good question yeah while not entirely shutting down a game what would you say you with the steps like uh we're ceasing development but the game's still going to be live support it's bug fixing how do you message that without everyone going oh it's done bye well i guess it depends on what your intention really is with the game you know i mean if if the intention is to keep it going um i would be transparent about that um if your intention is not to keep it going i would uh this gets into the question of your overall business plan because you know there's only so many resources that you can put on any project so if

you have other games going on and this one isn't really going to make any more money for you or it's not going to be a focus and you're probably going to want to have fewer campaigns less moderation whatever anything that costs money and put it to your other games but you know if you're planning on really are planning on keeping it going long term i would just uh you know based on what kind of needs you need for moderators community managers for it currently i would i would base that plan on that going forward but if you really are planning on closing it down i would start to uh again it depends on how much you're able to tell people but i would start to ramp it down and save your resources for games that really are going to be making money for you sure when you close down something or you see

emotions are really high and sometimes as you all know community members have invested so much emotionally in something when it goes away is there any advice you can give when they're kind of imploding and people are reaching out to you from the community talking about even something as serious as suicide based on it or that everything in their life is going wrong one more thing or i know you mentioned nostalgia i guess that would probably be the best way to take it but i wasn't sure well when it comes to people talking about suicide um you should as a community manager have guidelines in place already how to deal with any threat to one's own self or others so i would continue on that same plan that you have and as far as people imploding otherwise in a way that isn't dangerous same thing really is to reach out to people and talk about

the good old days basically i mean you should be doing that individually but also with the way that you put together your editorial calendar that you continue to push people you know if people are just like so sad i don't have the whatever x thing to do anymore we you know hey we just started a contest that is the best moments from that let's take a look at it when it comes to suicide and most of it was very unfeeling so it was it was almost cold so it was hard to wear it to the point where other community members were re-chanting please help this other community but don't tell them here's the hotline whatever you do i would i'm happy to talk with you directly about that that's actually really um very important to me that subject and it's something that um you have to have in your god in your guidelines exactly a phone tree you know what are local resources what people should do volunteer

community managers and moderators it should be very um exact plan about how to deal with that it shouldn't be left for the community to help each other out it's pretty dangerous so yeah hello hi my name is alex i'm working on a game that will close at the end of the year but for contract reasons it's actually not doing bad okay and the users will be very surprised because of that because they know it's doing all right it's doing they know they it's the same number of players we had one year ago or stuff like that and we are not quite allowed to tell them that it's happening for contract reasons do you have any advice in this case you mean it's like ip you're not allowed to renew the ip um uh that's a good question because yeah i mean it is one of the things you have to

you have to address that uh i guess i would say you know kind of a catch-all weird diverting resources to other games kind of thing i mean you can always kind of go that way you can't say that the game isn't doing well you you can say that you know even though it's popular it doesn't make sense for us financially which is true um it's tough though it is tough when you have a really active thriving community where there's no no guess that it's coming but yeah that is the truth it doesn't make sense financially if you aren't going to have the contract anymore for that ip so yeah you have to be kind of vague unfortunately because you can't talk about that directly thank you and i have another question being a free to play games we have the free-to-play players and the whales yes and do you think so i'm thinking maybe in the last month

that everybody should have access to what the whales previously had to the what we could buy on hard currency oh sure do you think this is a good idea or maybe it would make the whales even more angry i don't think so i mean no in fact that's i didn't include that in here but that is something that you can do at the end it's just pretty much make it like all right everybody can have whatevs i mean because it it is the enemy you know whale the whales they shouldn't be mad it's like the last month you know i think of course you will again there's always going to be some people who are that way but i think generally um more people are going to be happy if you do that so i would say go for it get that yeah and then i think this is prior oh the last question wrap it up yeah um as you probably know pr is a little on the abrupt side when it comes to covering your game while it's live and man they jump on it as soon as you make

the closing announcement sure how do you take steps to control the damage when you have uh media uh or gaming media cover closure especially when it's outside of your control mechanisms like within your own communities what steps have you seen that works you have to throw anybody under the rock paper shotgun you know but you know some of the more they make a business out of you know slandering some of the game companies and stuff like that when they go down so so the question is really like the um the folks in in the media what they do with the story that your pr department has has put out like them taking it in whether you put out a pr or not like if you know if they catch wind through game communities that a game goes down boom they put you on blast on the front page well i think um part of to prevent that even from happening in the first place is to take control of that message and send out a press release you know because if they're catching wind of it that would mean your closure plan has kind of

gone awry you know what i mean like if if they're catching wind of it from your community versus having received a direct announcement or you know seeing that there's actually a press release i didn't i didn't mention that here but there should be a press release live on your website um then you know then they are going to be kind of making up stories from rumors so that's the one thing but of course again there's always going to be people who want to sell more banner ads or whatever and kind of um make it more sensational than it is the only way there is is again to just direct people to the correct information uh if you have your pr folks depending on the size your company should have probably direct relationships with some of the people at those companies and reach out to them directly correct if they have information that's wrong but there's only so much you can do to control that other than just again have a coordinated messaging in the first place and then also having a place where people can refer to you

for the correct you know information from your company okay so i'm sorry the so you would basically so even if we make all the uh announcements and everything internally social networking would you suggest actually sending out a traditional pr to the media definitely okay and having it on your website live all right well thank you thanks everybody for attending [Applause]