Community Driven Discoverability for Indies

[Music] my name is Patrick and I'm here today to talk about discoverability as you might have guessed from the somewhat cryptic title of the talk I run a small studio from an even smaller town based in New Zealand and so you might be wondering what I'm doing here our most recent title with dry cactus is a semi casual bridge building kind of simulator titled poly bridge as we were developing poly bridge we very quickly realized that there was a fair amount of competition in the indie scene this is a steam title they released in early access a few years ago so we try to kind of implement a number of techniques that we like to call community driven discoverability meaning a number of kind of game design decisions that try to kind of cater to empower kind of the community to help us promote our title in a very organic and kind of socially driven way without trying to fall under the kind of

marketing umbrella I should have clicked on this I'm very professional as you can tell there we go - so yeah poly bridge again this kind of sits quite small title you might have seen it a few years ago because it kind of went viral we might say on Reddit and Twitter and so on and talking about discoverability is pretty vague of course it's not a new topic by any means it's you know it's we've kind of been dealing with discoverability ever since games existed probably used to be very old-school in retail and so on obviously now everything is moved digital and I guess the main issues we're facing as independent developers these days is that we've identified a number of trends that have been very quickly solidifying in recent years and so discoverability as a whole has taken really center stage you might have noticed in fact that throughout this GDC in particular like in the indie summit but also you know in the general talks ajussi there's been significant talk around discoverability there was even discoverability day

whatever that is and just kind of you know we all were all kind of on edge thinking oh my god like how am I going to make my game Scoville marketing doesn't really work anymore there's so much saturation and so on so some of these trains that we don't really love but the you know have to be acknowledged and we have to kind of start working with our office you know the more obvious one being platform saturation we've been seeing that for a long time occurring but of course with the semi recent changes particularly on steam with green light going away and steam direct and new stores coming up but they are kind of allowing a fair amount of self-publishing kind of in lack of curation in general so that's you know one thing we're batting against constantly the other thing which I'm not a big fan of but it's just the way we're going is kind of algorithmic curation so we're moving away quite aggressively and quite quickly from being able to reach out to establish dev relations and to kind of hope kind of try and maneuver

some degree of hand created featuring when we go to release a new title or a major update or whatever it is and we've moved quite a lot into this kind of algorithmic curation of recommendation and so on and so again we need to kind of think a lot about these things while we think about discoverability and how these things affect the games that we're making also not a big fan of the lack of cross promotion in particular I guess this applies to the recent launch of the epic story which is very interesting if you notice you go to the epic store and possibly also discord but not too sure actually off the top of my head but they do know attempts to do any degree of cross promotion within their store so if you go to the page of game a it doesn't attempt to recommend any similar games that you might be interested in so literally if a customer reaches game a page there is no chance of game B kind of getting promoted even though there might be lots of overlap we very used to seeing these things in steam on the

Apple Store and Google Play it's all about cross promotion but it seems like some models seem to be moving away from that as well so basically I guess what's happening and what we really need to be mindful about is that we need to be driving as much traffic as possible to the stores ourselves rather than kind of being able to rely on internal factors within a platform that can help us kind of surface in that kind of discoverability queue and so on that's sorry quick I guess discoverability as a whole is a pretty vague term often is falls under the kind of marketing branch we could say and hopefully by now most of us have realized that trying to tag on marketing towards the end of the development lifecycle is a way to hurt ourselves quite actively again hopefully we all realize that marketing whatever that means is the thing we do from day one the marketing the marketability of the

game is lots to do with the game design game mechanics and how they appeal to certain established audiences and so discoverability is really no different in that sense but because of all the things we just mentioned it seems to be really the discoverability has kind of branched off from marketing and become its own thing trying to identify what makes good discoverability is almost impossible I would say I tried very hard in recent years but it often fall flat on my face although we can identify some broad areas that are obviously very valid and applied to pretty much every game I'm not going to talk about them because they deserve and have their own talks so specifically in this year's GDC you might have noticed there is talks about how to manage effective email lists talks about how to start and manage a discord community talks about how to do outreach to youtubers and streamers and so on and so forth so these are things that we all need to be doing very well

but they're not the topic of today's talk because obviously they take up their own segment and so they deserve their own time so ideally if you have acts at the GDC vault or you attended these talks you learned a lot from these what I was doing today and what I'm hoping to be able to kind of communicate is them what what choices can we make and what things that we need to think about when we're talking about discoverability in a community sense and particularly we're thinking about how do social aspects of our games can impact discoverability and help us surface above the noise basically and Before we jump into a few examples that I've identified I just wanted to touch on a couple of topics which I feel are kind of the foundational pillars when we think about discoverability at least they are for us in our small studio whenever we make game design decisions with discoverability in mind we always try to think about how do these decisions impact a couple of these pillars the first one which is

relatively recently become you know a huge thing is driving external traffic basically what I mean is you know as I was touching on before even just a year ago we might have been able to release a game on Steam for example and maybe by having a developer relation or anyways by kind of choosing a smart launch window we would be able to get a certain amount of visibility because there is in platform promotion this is kind of going away over time replaced by algorithmic recommendations and so a very important metric which is not kind of very often said but it's become kind of a huge key factor in in recent months and just is external traffic and that doesn't mean that you're trying to drive external traffic to your website it means that you're trying to drive external traffic to the platform specifically so again in the example of steam you're trying to bring people to steam ideally these are people who don't even have a steam account and so a very significant metric

in by the algorithm gods as we call them is external traffic that then translates into a new account on the platform if you are somehow obviously it's easier said than done but if you're somehow able to drive significant traffic to steam through your game you can be sure that somebody will notice and your title will magically surface up on the top of the recommendations and algorithmic curation so I guess if you're a distracted person like myself and you forget most things that you hear one thing you could take away from this talk is it's the main thing you're trying to do is drive external traffic to the store page with that said the other goal kind of the I always think about when thinking about discoverability is how does how do my efforts in kind of game design and discoverability translate the community and how does my community interaction feedback into discoverability it's a bit of a loop so of course trying to get

that momentum going initially isn't necessarily very straightforward but it just helps I guess to always think about how does how can I do things in my game that will help the community make my game more discoverable and how can my discoverability feed back into the community in a positive sense ultimately I guess what we're trying to do with games in general I guess particularly well in our studio we we identify as probably the main value that we try and promote is healthy community this doesn't necessarily mean just having you know a discord server where people don't insult each other but in general it means a long-term community is kind of the foundation of what your fan base can be for your studio so any further titles already have a fair critical mass that is in a positive sense and wants to support your work obviously having a healthy community also brings along many other advantages such as you know they can be your advocates that you can do a bunch of customer support and forums for

you so you don't have to do all yourself if you're doing an early access period they might be contributing really meaningful ideas into game design and so on so yeah the community is number one we want a healthy happy community did I go far too much now here we go and so now I wanted to quickly look at three practical examples so of course as I was saying earlier trying to identify a number of things you can do to affect discoverability is generally very inefficient apart from the obvious let's do a healthy discord let's do email list let's try and drive lots of traffic to are coming soon page and so on those are out because they're those obvious I guess the less obvious ones to try and kind of communicate the importance of of a community kind of helping discoverability of your game I try to focus on three practical examples given some data points around these the first example is fairly obvious so to speak but it has been around for a very long time so it's by

any means nothing new but I think it's still extremely valid these days and there are lots of examples of games that work very well in this kind of area in fact the talk just before this one also touched briefly on similar topics in the same state you make small games for your community you don't try and do something massive so catering to a niche or a niche depending where you're from to me means kind of thinking about game design in a relatively narrow sense and identifying your audience beforehand this can have huge benefits of course because the main one is that you tap into an existing community this obviously has more or less value depending on game genre there are certain genres they can obviously cater very well to this if we think of as an example which we're going to look at just now if we look at simulators particularly if we think about maybe a car engine simulator you could tap into

a community of enthusiasts about car engines these are not people who generally play many video games for example so you're not competing in the space of video games you're actually bringing something new to an established community that has a very specific hobby and is generally quite hungry for quality content and if you come along and you give them a video game of this topic chances are that they'll be very enthusiastic about it and kind of back you right from the start and also help you shape the game design and game mechanics in a way that is meaningful to this kind of community the other big thing I feel about working with the niche titles is kind of them I guess if you've been doing game design for a while you might be familiar with the fact that when you're doing games you try and give players a relatively constrained set of rules to work within if a player has too much freedom they often find themselves confused which leads to frustration which leads to anger which leads to one star in a

refund so to speak and this same concept applies extremely well to game development of course if as a game developer I'm just trying to do some entirely new that doesn't have an established design language doesn't have an established audience the chances of you know obviously having a huge hit are tiny although of course there are people who work in that area and that's great for them but for the rest of us mortals helping it's really helpful I gets to work within an established set of constraints and the language is familiar to your players so that you can kind of tap into that and it's more about I guess iteration and improving rather than trying to come up with something entirely new and a third fairly obvious one is we're trying to avoid that market saturation as we were talking about before and we don't like market saturation it's real thing but if you can cater to a niche in a small community and you can add that value you know you're kind of avoiding at least that is significant pitiful a couple of

things worth mentioning is of course you need to know your subject matter well there are lots of examples of independent developers trying to cater to niches but they don't actually know the Neef it's in a sense if you know nothing about airplanes for example and you try and make an airplane simulator chances are that you're not gonna do a great job and of course you must provide value and quality above and beyond what already exists so I guess the risk here is if you're trying to compete in a small space but there's really a golden standard so to speak you really have to either improve or offer something is different enough to have its own merit a practical example of that okay there we go I can see the images all garbled but they look right over there that's great and so automation you might have heard of automation maybe a bit more recently on Steam actually an automation is a relatively small game made by a small

team from Australia that moved to New Zealand a number of years ago and they're a great great example of doing this kind of niche thing super well as I was saying the car engine simulator example works really well so basically they did where you design engines and nothing else eventually they also implemented a way to design your your whole vehicle so modifying every parameter of the body modifying every parameter of shark's wheels you name everything is fully simulated and very accurate but they started off with engines which was kind of where their main audience was the marketing they did was entirely non game like they did nothing to try and push the game in in a video game kind of marketing sense they reached out to a number of car magazines that were very eager to cover the topic and you know car enthusiasts on YouTube and so on and that worked really well for them they've been in development for about six years now and they're still going strong initially they were did released on their own platform eventually moved on

to steam about four years ago which did really well it's just I guess they're a very very good example of catering to a niche tapping into an existing community isn't about video games and finding lots of success and another exotic work thing they did recently you might know or you might not know a game called beam ng or beamed Ong beamng is again a car simulator but it doesn't focus on the engine or building parked the car it just focuses on the driving aspect so you drive it at a car in your racetrack and you can select from a number of vehicles that were made by the developers if you think about this you know automation did build your car beamng did drive your car both of them did very realistic simulations and specialize in different fields but as you can imagine there's loads of overlap so what they did about eight nine or nine months ago they decided to kind of team up so to speak automation implemented an exporter so

the vehicles you make in automation can be exported beamng implemented an importer for the automation vehicles so what happens is you can design your vehicle in automation and export it and drive it in beamng you can probably guess by looking at that sales graph from Steve which are now allowed to share thank you valve of clarifying the terms of conditions flatlining as you can see on the left that's actually not a bad flat line that was daily average of 20-30 cells a day a $30 price point so not bad but not definitely not enough to support a team of seven or eight people as they are currently the little bumps you start seeing there are the announcement both beamng and automation did announcements of on this day we're going to be releasing this awesome thing and obviously on the day you can tell what happened there was a massive spike a four hundred fifty percent increase over the similar period of the previous year the tail kind of increased by five or

six times currently so overall I guess again a really good example of showing a niche a different niche overlapping some platform support because steam did do a loyal to coupon so the owners of automation that didn't have beamng got a 30% off and vice versa so basically that did really well as you can tell from that massive spike there the metric on the left is units so we're spiking at about 4,000 units on that day if you can do numbers you can figure out so very good the other example I wanted to quickly look at is user-generated content user-generated content is a very vague term I think we're only low on time so I'm just gonna slam through this user-generated content can mean lots of things when I think about user-generated content I primarily think about content that is made in video games where the player has a lot of creative ownership over so not necessarily UGC is often talked about like a mods or a level for

a game I'm referring to you you see as kind of creative ownership of content so minecraft or the obvious Mario maker all the same games where you get to build your city or your ant colony or whatever like they all fall into this category well roblox of course is a huge one and this like has lots of value I think to kind of tie communities together enable very meaningful social interactions between players that like these games and we're riding on the wave of the maker movements which was quite big you know number of years ago but it's still going strong so things like the Arduino which is an open-source electronics prototyping platform and the Raspberry Pi which is a tiny confusion all these things kind of strongly indicate to desire from for like from game developers and game audiences to kind of find a common language and be able to interact and share content in a very meaningful way I'm by no means a psychology expert but I do often find a very strong

relationship between kind of human emotion and these kind of desire to share and to some degree even kind of brag I guess with your friends or wider social media circles about what you did if we think of paintings for example your tool would be a paintbrush and your canvas and your colors but that's not what you're showing people you're showing people what you made with these tools the tools become completely transparent and almost invisible so that's what I'm talking about here is in an ideal world if we can cater to this kind of human desire to be creative and own the creativity and then showcase it to your friends in social media circles the game really just becomes takes backstage but is inherently promoted all the time and this has been huge so we're gonna look at an example with poly bridge which is the game we made you can hopefully see the animated gif playing a very crappy framerate but it gives you an idea so very simple in poly bridge we just implemented just before releasing

an early access we implemented this simple frame recorder records at 15 frames a second then it keeps it in a buffer whenever you fail or succeed in a level you get a prompt to share your replay you share your you play you can upload it without leaving the game to a bunch of social media platforms that you can also indicate in game I had a bunch of stuff that are going to talk about tech but I do think around a bit long time anyways you can find some open source and corridors made by Zach and so just to give you an idea of the impact this had this is from July 2015 which is when we released in early access try and take a guess yes what happened so you can see to the left we had a relatively minor launch which was still great I was just working on this myself so I was like yeah I can finish this game I don't have to go back and get a real job I'm really happy and then you can start seeing some kind of ups and downs the first little spike happening around the 10th of July is

Twitter picking up on it we had lots of Twitter activity the second major spike the the graph on the left or whatever you call it the column on the left is US dollars so I left dolls because again we're now allowed to share a monetary value from our Steam backends and so we can see you know for a very small semi-casual independent bridge-building game which is like who the hell's gonna even care because we had this mechanism where and we identified that players were really quite strongly kind of sentimental about the bridges they built and so if we just said let's just empower these players and given the ability to share the content that they made onto their social media platforms and that was much bigger than we thought and obviously you can see the spike you can see how much significant the tail picks up after that there are a number of other spikes after this but I just wanted to focus on the first big one that for that big one in the middle is a

the front page I'm ready I think once ready started also sharing stuff and then we win you know Polly which gives were a thing for many months on reddit where then people started saying you know again more polish please but it did work pretty well and the last thing I'd like to touch on before we have to bail is twitch streamers or hopefully we all know by now that twitch is not going away and we all love twitch mm-hmm hopefully twitch is listening love twitch and there's lots of material out there and what you can do to approach twitch streamers so that's definitely not what I want to talk about there are the talks there are forum posts or blogs there's so much material out there and you know the general rule is you start small you don't try and reach too large or deny and leader are streamers there's also an article recently they were shown kind of the crystallization as of the twitch streamer seen as in as with any kind of capitalistic model the

number of small streamers they are succeeding so to speak and able to do it full-time is decreasing and the number of large streamers is becoming smaller but they're getting most of the audience or most of the money so to speak so this is a bit of a warring phenomenon but nonetheless we focus on starting with small streamers we want to get them enthusiastic we want to have a good relationship with them and we also very strongly hopefully understand now the attempting to involve influencers which is a word I highly dislike at the late stage marketing is complete nonsense again we're trying to what we're talking about how do we make meaningful gameplay decisions and integrate these into gameplay mechanics to allow this to happen quite organically this obviously doesn't apply to every genre if you're doing a single-player narrative the linear story your appeal to twitch streamers is already extremely low so it is no it's not much point in thinking about it but you know different games work differently and again with twitch

we definitely noticed a very strong kind of human connection or desire for human connection and so we try to enable that as much as possible so again a use case for this specific thing in poly bridge we integrated a kind of a way for streamers streamers playing poly bridge and is building little bridge and the viewers are screaming at them in chat saying no you're stupid you're doing it wrong move this here do that there and then there's a stream of text and it's impossible and everything gets lost so there was like okay there's an issue here so we implemented just before release a WebGL version which means an in browser version of poly bridge super minified no textures nothing everything was ripped out but what that means there as a viewer you can load up this kind of in browser version of poly bridge you get a mirror version of the bridge that the streamers building you can modify the bridge you just can't simulate that you can only modify it and you can submit it back to the streamers a suggestion who then gets a pop-up saying

this person just submitted the suggestion so basically we created a very easy way for streamers and audience to collaborate together and play together in an asynchronous way while the streamer stays in control which is obviously very important if you're in traces are bitten to take about this just email me and we can talk about it later because we're running out of time I believe use case again with a nice little graph because if we all like graphs if anyone knows who that on the left is they get ten points I didn't know until recently that is a twitch streamer or streamer in general his name is faker and he's a he's from South Korea those two big things you see behind them are the kind of his world champion things of leagues of Legends League of Legends rather I should know what I'm talking about League of Legends is a relatively large game as you might have heard so what faker did he and this was completely you know I didn't do anything we didn't this is two years

after release the twitch thing was going on so basically this twitch integration we did made it so that poly bridge became a quite a common staple within the twitch community so small streamers would often play poly bridge because it would allow them to interact with their audiences in a more meaningful social way and allow the streamer to cultivate their own community because that's what a twitch streamer obviously wants to do they want to have a healthy community to just as much as we do so poly bridge allows them all bridge becomes a tool for them to cultivate this kind of healthy community more so than other games because other games are very passive when the audience is just kind of watching and so because we integrated this twitch kind of became a common staple and two years after release faker started playing before doing his League of Legends streams that are quite huge he started playing poly bridge for half an hour to an hour and he's actually still going because he's determined to finish the game and so if we look at the graph this is the graph for the steam sales in the Asia regions

so primarily China South Korea Japan and a bunch of smaller ones you can see to the left we're kind of flat line in there we're I think 5 to 10 units a day pretty negligible and you see that first little bump that's fakers first short stream you see the second bigger but all of all the spikes you see in this graph are because faker is playing poly bridge these are no longer dollar values these esteem units the steam back and doesn't give dollar value when you're doing regional for some reason so I'm very impactful okay it's obviously from the spikes but you can see the long term tail tends to creep up and without giving it a dollar value if I could buy something for faker it would be probably a gold statue of himself because he did do a lot to help us financially without even every thinking about it we've never been in touch but the fact that a large streamer just decided to play poly bridge because of this twitch integration because of the

social value we added has been huge for us as a game studio in our ability to continue making games and I think that's us if anyone has any questions I think we have one minute otherwise I will hang out for more time later [Music] man I'm still in the one question sure have you heard of twitch extensions I have heard of twitch extensions is I would love to see a twitch extension for volley bridge I probably yes I think so the question being twitch extensions and so on I think twitch extensions are a great tool in a clear indicator that twitch is picked up under this kind of social value I haven't worked with them too much to be honest because for this thing the twitch extensions did not cater at all so we had to implement our whole server back in with a REST API and so on so but I'm actually meeting with twitch tomorrow we're going to be talking about how we can do this in in

and so on and I think that's us beautiful okay [Applause]