Community Marketing and Management at Your Best and Worst Times

[Music] welcome to this presentation entire community marketing and management at your best and worst of times a title that just rolls off the tongue and definitely fits on a presentation slider my name is Molly Costigan I am a product marketing manager at Paradox Interactive and I've been with paradox now for five years which makes that my second longest relationship ever and the longest one I married yeah somebody told me don't try to make jokes in the business lane it doesn't work but I'm thinking this is mostly community managers and marketing people and we have fun right good okay cool so I have about 30 slides to go through and I've never managed to do it on time so we're gonna kick off I'm gonna tell you what our product marketing manager is because it's kind of a weird title what it means is that I

am responsible for coming up with creating and executing the marketing campaigns for a selected amount of titles at Paradox Interactive and to make sure that we meet our sales goals and that we make the best possible foundation for the game to get to market so I work for with games from before they're even signed until they're released and a couple of years post release but I started as a community manager and Paradox Interactive oh the clicker works if you don't know about us we are a Swedish based publisher currently we are 300 employees with an internal development studio most called paradox development studio that are mostly famous for our grand strategy titles Chris ad Kings to Europa Universalis 4 and stellaris are some of the more notable ones together with hearts of ayran but we're also a publisher and we publish third-party

games together with different Studios so we just launched surviving Mars yesterday no sorry first week just lag Stockholm is several hours away together with her me month games and I am currently working on battle tech together with Harebrained Schemes we've also launched pillars of eternity together with obsidian and one of the games I'm gonna cover a lot in this talk which is City skylines together with colossal order and they said that paradox is a company of 300 people that wasn't the case when I started 5 years ago back then we were around 80 people I think I am employee 73 and the company has changed a lot and it has changed how we do marketing because we started our marketing based in our community and then we kind of grew into a company that had actual marketing budgets that we could do bigger things with all right I'm getting ahead of myself what are these two games I'm going to be covering a little bit these are the two games I'm

going to be talking about a lot today European reversal is for is a grand strategy game where you play a nation in the world and you attempt world dominance it's developed by our internal development studio paradox development studio and then city skylines which is a city builder game currently available for PC Xbox and Playstation it released four years ago now and it is a city builder game it's kind of straightforward but what is community marketing and community management that just sounds like somebody is trying to make fetch happen it's kind of a weird hybrid of buzzwords but this is where I should have talked about you about the history of paradox our community is actually older than our company which is kind of weird but we went through a couple of iterations currently our community is around 3 million people just on our own channels when we started a couple of like when I started five

years ago it was way smaller we were looking at half a million to a million and we work with something where we take the knowledge that we have from community management the community marketing and bring that into our marketing campaigns so we use what we learn from community management and make that translate into marketing and we do that in three different ways it's either when we try to market a game to a new audience so a game where we already own the community but we have a new audience that we would like to reach with it which is the case for uber never saw this for or a new game where we don't have the audience but there is a clear look-alike product like City skylines and Sim City or a title if you have a completely new game that fills a hole in the market so I'm going to talk about how you can reach a community or new audience for these three types of games how to utilize what you can learn about that community to make your

marketing competitive and why should you do it this was supposed to be to take away for the entire talk and I put it here so you can technically leave after this slide I wouldn't advise it but you could marketing with a community in mind can make your campaigns competitive even if your wallet is not if you have a strong community presence if you know what kind of asset works with your community either the community that you own or the intended community that you want or your intended audience you can make yourself compatible even if you can't pay your way to success because most of us here aren't the big five and we probably can't just pay for the space that we need in order to like get the game to be successful we need to actually like work with other tools I can talk about marketing as like basically how to create an audience so

for him but I'm going to focus on one specific thing and that's language when we talk about community management and marketing at the best of worst of times an important thing to keep in mind is that the best of times don't just happen it's something that you need to work for and you need to build a platform for so we're going to take a look at how you build that platforms for the three different categories that I mentioned earlier language is one of the most important parts of building your platform and a language in this context isn't just your spoken language or written language it's everything you use in order to communicate something to an audience so it's everything from images to music to gifts or actual words or single words it could just be the tags that you use for your game that is part of your game language and the language of a community

can be very different and very individual based on the community and if you can replicate a community language you're kind of already you get a couple of extra steps sorry sweetie I'm gonna take a breath and just keep going with us it it helps you to gain an advantage on the market sorry I'm really nervous I've actually never done one of these talks before so study the language of your intended audience what this means is if you are looking at your own community make sure if you are a marketing person talk to your community manager what is your community actually saying and doing what are their in jokes this is an in-joke that we have from our grand strategy community they usually say that because they spend so much time playing our games they are always gonna be alone or like their wife got really mad at them or their partner got really mad at them because they were playing up

all night playing ck2 so we made these very specifically catered Valentine's card that was based on their inside joke which worked because we knew their language and they understood it because it was really easy for this to be interpreted as sort of dismissive if you don't know the community it's coming from marketing towards an existing community was something that we did when we launched you for so we already had our ground strategy community and they were big and they were really excited about a new product but we were seeing some disco discourse around their ground strategy titles that are basically I'm too dumb to play grain strategy games I can't play them I'm not smart enough and that's a big problem for us because we want more people to get into our games we don't want to feel that they're too dumb and this was something that we kept seeing on different places those are forums on Reddit and other places so what we did

was we created this marketing asset it was originally titled are you too dumb to play group and rizal is four but we changed it later too so you think you can't play empire building games it's basically that fear that they are too dumb to play it addressed in a floor chart that also actually talks about the features of our game in a really creative way and we made sure that this was up everywhere where there are fans were and where these discussions were happening so not just on our own forum but also on Reddit and other sub forum so we actually could share this broadly with our audience another thing that we noticed that a community really liked to do the main thing they talked to talked about together was user stories they were talking about their alternate history stories their conquests and this was a direct thing that we used when we made our trailers so we basically made our trailers based of the stories we saw

on our forums of an alternate history Sweden where we never conceded Denmark and suddenly we are an empire a good thing to keep in mind with the stone is to do it with finesse these are two different kind of assets where the flow chart is very internal if you're not part of this community it's going to be really hard to understand why we're doing this but we kept the announcement trailer or the release trailer really accessible so you can watch that you've never seen anything from eu4 before you can understand what's going on in it and make sure you differentiate these types of assets because otherwise you will accidentally make stuff that are too niche for a broader market so that's how we worked with a community that we already owned and that's easy right you already have the insights you have your community managers you have your forums you know what they like but what about the people that are new to you what if you have a game that doesn't

have a look-alike product in the market and where you don't own the community what do you do something that we like to do is to talk about what your game gives to players this is using City skylines as an example see the skylines wasn't a gap in the market type of game it had a very easy competitor to look at but we're not just talking about your game that's the important thing like don't just benchmark or look at the community surrounding your competitor's game or different games look at what your game actually does for a player city skylines is you can build and manage a city that's our core player loop and that's what people really like so we have some clear competitors there with SimCity but you can also be creative and you can build whatever you want and you can mod it and you can do all of these sort of pricey things so there we're competing with minecraft but we're also technically competing with knitting

because that's also a creative pastime and if you have a slow-moving city builder game that is kind of a relaxing experience so we will also relax our players and in that case we're competing against taking a long bath or playing stardew valley or you just want to do something over a weekend I'm free I'm just gonna get really into this and city skylines can do that too it can be a game where you can just play it for hours on end and it has no real ending so technically you are now competing with a 50 year old TV show that has absolutely no ending so it's just a way of thinking about your game and it's not just a game but also as an experience and taking that when you look for new audiences and new communities like maybe minecraft isn't a competitor in any way to city skylines but maybe we can provide the same sort of experience

as it could do like we're never going to put marketing money on advertising on Minecraft videos but we might just want to put something in there about you know want to relax a little bit wanna chill take a bath in cities cities of course had a very clear competitor we had very clear competitors in other city building games so something we did when we started working with cities again this was five years ago and paradox was a vastly different company we had a hard time reaching outside of our grand strategy audience we weren't always publishing grand strategy games but we still had a problem getting those players to actually be invested in our product so what we started doing was to we actually when we signed city skylines we started going through other city builder communities the example here is from SimCity 4 but we did a lot more than just looking at their steam hub and we started looking at what their games

did what kind of jobs did he do what kind of language was their community speaking what kind of words did they use to describe their product what kind of images were they putting up and can we do the same thing without lying do we do the same thing as them and we started taking boxes we do this we do this we don't do that and it turns out we can be pretty similar we can use their image language in our community and announcement assets so this was actually learnings from the community that we used in the announcement for City skylines just to make sure that we kind of got that thing but something that also happened especially around of seeing how the state of SimCity was at that point and the state of their online feelings towards SimCity was that when we did this it was very clear what we were doing we were very clearly

presenting ourselves as another city building game is kind of like as an alternative and it went really well it did everything we wanted it to do but it also created some comments like this because we were currently saying that bargaining was available offline which was not like a great thing but it did work he got us Internet attention but it also meant that we were getting a lot of negativity for something that instead of marketing what we did well we were marketing what somebody else had perceived to fail at and that builds a toxic community and that's not what you want because we worked really hard with making cities a cute happy city builder it is a friendly community it is a cute city builder with massive cities and cute tilt-shift and a

bird that wears hats and this is the kind of tone that we wanted because we really wanted to make sure that we the game that had so much modding we needed to have a supportive and nice community that could help one another because if they were building stuff on negativity they would be a negative community and that would hurt us in the long term so we spent a lot of time actually just framing this and today it is for actually a really good community but I think it's really important to remember this thing in an online world your community becomes a part of your brand and building a good community should be part of your marketing strategy so if you are a marketing person talk to your community manager when you plan your marketing campaigns because who hasn't heard of great games with terrible communities where you kind of like really want to play it but you also don't want to be a part of the community and you don't we don't want that and that is something that we can't let toxic players control our games we

should do that also something that is really really important to mention I added this slide just today because I forgot to mention it is that if you're doing if you are replicating other communities if you're looking at other peoples languages and using that to create your marketing strategy make sure you do something differently whatever it might be it could be something small if you want to have examples I can give you that after the session but I'm running low on time already to get through all of this because if we don't do anything differently we end up making the same content for the same people over and over and over again and that's not where we want the industry to go so hopefully you have now you got the best of times right you've done your foundation work you have created some happy communities and now people are really interested in you and your game and you're speaking their language and you define the tone and you have that in your marketing

strategy so during the best of times what do you do this is the times where your community is the most happy the most creative and the most engaged and here is where you can kind of future-proof your community for the worst of times which will come if you have a big community I'm not saying if I'm saying when it's gonna happen just big communities it happens incentivizing good behavior is something that is really really important when your community is at its best incentivizing good behaviors could be everything from just upload lifting people that are being helpful and like thumbing up them or somebody that shares the kind of screenshots that you want them to share or somebody dis creating mods just make sure that your community knows what kind of behavior and actions and language you like and you think should be associated with your brands and this is done really easily it might sound like controlling but it's actually

just making sure that you don't just focus on the people that is complaining about your product because especially if you're a community manager it's really easy to spend your days replying to the people that have problems or concerns or are just angry in general so I think it's very important to just remember to talk to the people who like you as well in forming the community at paradox we work a lot with transparency with our community so it's very important to us and hopefully it should be to you too to be transparent with information to your community to the point where it makes sense this is really good and very good for reaching your target if your community reaches places that you don't then you can use this and the transparency and information to make sure that your message goes with them our DLC policy is a really good example of this we've had a DLC policy or an

expansion policies that we've had for almost ten years and currently with a new influx of players for seeing a lot of negativity around it because there is a lot of negativity about DLCs in general but we have been consistent in our messaging around these DLCs for almost 10 years we've said the same thing it helps us develop the games further it helps us move forward with production and by giving that message to our core fan base we see that they replied those things at places we can't reach we can't reach the comment section of a PC gamer article but our community can we can't reach competitor sites Facebook pages but our community can and if they are informed they can help you spread your message this is also really important to make sure that they know what you stand for so make sure they know your Community Guidelines and make sure they know your values because they can help spread those as well and it's really important to make sure again

stuff doesn't turn toxic great with the community this is just fun whatever they're currently doing that you like for cities for example we really like when they create mods so we try to incentivize mod making through newsletters or presentations or we just want them to give we give them upwards actually for for mods created or if it's art have them make art make art competitions just uplift artists on social media maybe have paid them to do something official just to make sure that your community knows what kind of content that you really enjoy and help them feel like they are being seen when they produce it because this is like I love community creation that's like one of the best things about being in games is seeing what other people are capable to do with those games yeah this is the same takeaway gauging with the community can make your marketing competitive even if your wallet is not I left it in intentionally

because I think it's important I'm gonna say it twice so now we get to the worst of times our worst of times came in July last year when Europa Universalis 4 was being revue bombed based on pricing changes that we made on regions that weren't using the Euro the dollar or the pound it kind of started slow with just a few people upset about it and then it's snowballed into this spike that you see here on the steam charts and it kind of hit us in a bad time because if you've known a Swede do you know that we are not available in July it's summer and we're out of there so we had a lot of people that had to work a lot of long hours to kind of work with us so what do you do when something like this happens to you evaluate what's going on who is

doing it why how many are there how many is really crucial in community management because it is you don't know if it's 10,000 people or a hundred people on a thousand accounts deescalate the situation open up a line of communication a single thread usually on your forum or somewhere where you can actually direct people that have questions or concerns or are just angry to make sure that they know they're being heard but also so that you can actually see where all the feedback is happening and that will help with your evaluation and it's also very important at this stage to not promise anything because you don't have haven't done your evaluation yet and you're not necessarily sure about what's going on when you have done your evaluation what happens again simultaneously with the de-escalation it's time to react what's the correct course of action for this if the slide seems familiar it might be because you've seen the series mind hunter and I stole it from that for when

they're teaching people how to negotiate in hostage situations so what we did was that we actually admitted that we made a mistake we rolled back the price changes and we did offer some compensations to players who had actually bought something during this change and we also said that we will inform you about changes earlier and we do know we won't ever promise that we won't do pricing changes again but what did we learn from this experience internal communication if you are at the company we're not all of you are in the same room or in the same slack channel and you can easily like see each other in the I internal communication is really important when something like this happens because usually you will talk to the involved parties and the community team will and the community team and those will be the people who are working on the problem our community team did a hell of a good

job with this situation they work 24 hours basically with just talking to people on the forum and social media but we forgot that we have a lot of developers and other people within our company that are actually pretty prominent on the internet and who was getting like information and this kind of like negativity directed towards them as well and we didn't have an internal way of giving constant information and updates about this situation another important thing if you're not if you're a community manager you already know this but if you're not it's really important to set internal expectations on what happens if you make changes to something that has gone bad so let's say for example with the price rollback of course that didn't mean everybody was happy again it was a step in their correct direction for making them happy but if a house is on fire putting out the fire doesn't make the house whole again you need to actually

like put down some work and that's very important for people to know internally because if you're not on online or with it your player base a lot people have a tendency to be able to think that it's just a quick fix and everything will go back to normal so that's a good if you're a community manager make sure to actually tell your marketing people this that set the correct expectations internally another thing was transparency something that we saw from our own community was that when the Bendix or the dust settled people weren't that upset about the price change they were upset that it came from nowhere because we have been consistently informing our community about upcoming changes like this before but we didn't this time and they saw that as us changing as a company and saw it as kind of a betrayal towards them so we need to be more transparent and make sure that the thing we weren't being consistent in our language we weren't being consistent in our actions and that

upset our community and that upset sort of like their trust in us so that's also something if you're being if you are being transparent with your community remember to cause and it'll be transparent about it if anybody here works with PR this is also a good learning for PR if for example if you have for us if we're pricing for expansions it's sometime a sensitive subject so we will go out and tell people about pricing at the earliest possible convenience just to make sure that that discussion is happening early and not on launch day marketing towards and managing a community is angry this is where the hard work pays off I'm just going to quickly show you this slide this is the sentiment this was posted on a Battletech video that was released two days ago and the first one's serious he's like I can't wait for the useless DLC to come and they dreamer tells them that yes we confirm DLC and then we have moon howler coyote who comes in and says I can't wait for their useless DLC to

come I love expanding my games and playing it for years this is our message this is the thing that we've been telling them the DLC policy helps us expand your game so this is where it paid off right now we're seeing like we're slowly gaining back to trust of our community through action and through people like moon howler coyote who comes in and helps us spread our message where we can't I am rapidly running out of time so it's gonna be a really quick summary community is more than the product of your marketing it can be one of its core pillars and it can make you competitive I've seen that three times now so it must be true and this was supposed to be the last slide but then I thought ah let's add another one don't fake it if you honestly do not care about your community if you don't care about the how well its thriving or what it's doing

that's fine that's you to you but don't pretend to do it if your game doesn't fit those jobs or kind of fits within the community that you want it to fit within don't try to force it in there try to be honest with the people online and be honest towards the product that you are marketing because people online are unknowingly smart and they will catch you doing it thank you [Applause]