Define Your Audience Now, Not Later

[Music] so welcome everybody thank you so much for joining me today for defining your audience now not later my name is Cassie hogland I'm currently working for Blizzard Entertainment and I'm excited to bring this information to you today I have learned a lot at conferences and conventions over the last too many years we'll say um and it's always a pleasure and a privilege to get the opportunity to give back and offer some information of my own uh we'll take a moment for introductions again my name is Cassie I play make and Market games and I have for about 6 years now Major's mask is number one in my heart and in reality this is a hill that I will die on uh if you disagree I'm just going to say it's okay to be wrong um please put

cheese on everything it's just the way to live and if you didn't like whatever you were eating with cheese it was the wrong cheese it's not that fault it's not its fault um and finally this is kind of My Philosophy for games it's why I work in games it's why I will continue to work in games and it's helping you find your next favorite game I'm sure everyone here has played enough games to really have that magical feeling of I found something this is for me I feel like this is so special and we deep dive and we become obsessive and we really get into something um the reason that I work in games is to help people find that feeling as often as possible um now that you know a little bit about me let's talk about what I would like you to take out of this talk the first is the ability to analyze your competitive audiences so be able to look at a game that you say I want to make something like that or this kind of reminds me of my concept and and figure

out did they successfully find Their audience uh next I'd like you to understand how to define your own audience and and what that means it's kind of in the title of the talk and hopefully you'll be able to speak to that at the end and finally I'd like you to leave with some actionable steps to Define your audience um I have been to many cons and conferences and something that always frustrated me about the talks that I went to is that a lot of them were very beginner focused very surface level and although it was exciting to be in those talks and feel inspired I would immediately feel lost as soon as I left the room and I wasn't ever really sure how to take what I had just heard and put it into action so in the content that I make I try really hard to make sure that you do have actionable steps and it feels like you have a clear path forward for how to enact what you learned today we're going to start with

definitions which feels kind of silly for something called defining your audience so we are defining what defining your audience means and it falls on these four pillars who is going to be most interested in your game who are your super fans who are the potential people who will Deep dive into your lore speedrun your game moderate your communities who are those people and where are they we want to talk about the platforms that you are going to publish on the Wars may be over in name but there are still differences in the audiences for each of them so where you publish matters we're going to be concerned with competition is there any uh and is the space viable as well as feature sets different types of players expect different types of things in their games and if you want to be Innovative that's great but if you completely throw people out in the left field they may not like like what they

paid for next I want to talk about what I call the Trap which I see a lot in the Indie space as much as I do love the Indie space getting lucky is not a strategy we cannot rely on if we build it they will come there are many amazing games that nobody has seen in the world because we are not focused on making sure that the right people find our products and to put this into perspective Ive as you can see 11,000 games were published on Steam just last year and that's just steam what about consoles what about other PC platforms what about mobile what about any free game anywhere on in on the internet so we have a lot of competition and that number is only going up every single year we do not have the luxury as people who want people to find us to just make something and then set it a drift

without a Direction so we need to understand that although marketing can be intimidating that maybe it's not really our Jam we want to focus on our art it's all understandable but that it's just not advisable anymore but some people here might be thinking my game is amazing though if I just make it I know people will find it and I want to challenge that mindset because I'm sure your game is amazing and the people who do find it might enjoy it but let's just talk about this slide for a second are you a game developer you're here you're in this room which means that you have an all access pass to GDC I would hedge my bets and say that you are either a game developer already or you are aspiring to be one and in either case defining your audience helps you discover the purpose of your IP is it art is it a commercial

project product is it a personal project whatever the purpose is uh knowing that is important so we're going to say yes you are a game developer um next do you want players for your game much like filmmakers want people to watch their movies and authors want people to read their books we as game developers want players for our game that's how they consume our art and our creativity so we want to prioritize our game features to match expectations and give a little bit of razzled Dazzle sometimes uh but most of the time we want to make sure we're meeting players where they are so yes we do want players and finally money question mark uh this can just be any compensation it doesn't have to be dollars uh it doesn't have to be currency in that way it could also be

reputation it could be exposure the infamous exposure that doesn't pay our bills but maybe gets us some name recognition what are your business objectives if it's not money that's fine but you still want players right you're still making something right and you want people to see it so we need to understand what our business objectives are in order to really make sure that the uh the product is making its way to who it needs to now that I have kind of rambled on about that for a minute let's do an exercise we love hypotheticals here so I want you to imagine all of the gamers in all of the world uh we can quibble about what a gamer is but whatever that means to you just imagine all of them now we're going to limit that just to the people who play RPGs

it's kind of a big subcategory almost not a subcategory uh but it's still there now let's talk about narrative driven RPGs it's a little bit more narrow what if it's a Rog like and it has stylized Graphics that bit right there where the VIN diagram overlaps is what I like to refer to as the market sweet spot this is where the super fans live this is where the speedr runners the Community moderators all of the people who want to know you and are living inside your game live don't say anything out loud this does represent a game and I want you to think about what game this might be I'll give you a second surprise it's Hades uh disclaimer I have never worked on Hades this is a market poll example where I want to show you that even though I've never worked on Hades we can

still talk about their success in regards to audience definition so let's look at the steam tags these are player driven for the most part and the players have identified Hades as an RPG a Rog like with a rich story it's handdrawn and it's isometric you might notice some similarities between these words and the V diagram that I just showed you the developer keywords in other words ways that the uh Dev team refers to Hades in official Communications things like the storefront press releases trailers use words like this roguelike Rich atmosphere character-driven storytelling again you might notice some similarities the developer of Hades refers to Hades in the same terms that the players do this is an agreement on what kind of game Hades is it means that

the developers of Hades were making this game and went who is this for well it's for these players the ones that found it they did a good job good for them and we know they did did a good job right I heard some chuckling some people guess the right game and we know that hades's had some good news last year so let's try again again all gamers in all the world but now we're going to look at Shooters another big category fantasy shooters now we get a little interesting what if it's magic instead of guns I want to be able to shoot fireballs and boulders instead of guns and we get those stylized Graphics again once again this is our Market Sweet Spot think any ideas don't say anything uh on what game this might be it's spell break uh spoiler I did work on spell break for quite some some time so this one is a little near and

dear to my heart uh I did work on the marketing for this game it was a ton of fun but let's do the same thing the steam tags shooter third person shooter magic RPG stylized the developer keywords and official Communications Battle Royale fantasy battle mage RPG stunning Graphics we can see once again an alignment an agreement on what spell break is between the Developers and the people that the def that the dev team was trying to reach the people who ultimately play spellbreak well Cassie that's all well and good but how does audience definition help create success there has to be an end goal there has to be a positive result well some of you might have seen Hades made a big announcement at the end of last year there's going to be a sequel a huge achievement for any game now it's officially a franchise that's very very exciting and uh this

particular screenshot was taken uh quite a bit ago at this point but you can see it's got tons of Engagement and I would wager this is going to be one of the most anticipated in the early accesses of this year very exciting and this is Commercial Success next we're going to look a little more uh close to home uh this is a gift um and it's kind of a fun gift uh spell break was very focused on community and connecting with players this is something that was made in house by the team and if you've never played spellbreak don't worry I can introduce you this is Thaddius he is a general NPC who leads a charge of rebels against a fascist State he is buff he is strong he is charismatic and colloquially referred to by spellbreak players as thaddy

Daddy we love him and he is thty Daddy forever um if you were to go on to gify and use the keyword peaking Fus comes up and he's been on there for quite a while now uh this gift has over 8 million views and when it was first published on giy for months was outperforming similar peaking gifts oh no go back uh similar peaking gifts with the likes of George Clooney Jim Cary Kim Kardashian and to this day if you were to go on gify and look up peeking Thaddius is there within the top 10 to 20 gifts um so it's a lot of longevity it's feeding into the culture of the players and giving them something fun that they enjoy and uh getting a lot of

notice and a lot of traction out of a simple but fun gift so we've done a lot of talking about hypotheticals defining things uh but I did promise you actionable steps at the beginning of this talk so let's go through them step one game design document these are a matter of debate within the Game Dev Community I understand that I fall firmly in the camp of you may not think you need it but I would highly recommend it especially if you are early on in your Development Career these are just four categories that a game design document uh allows you to explore and kind of flesh out plot gameplay publishing and marketing and your visual style you may remember in our examples these types of features come up a lot in player tags

and developer keywords so knowing what these are is going to help you speak to and Define your game for players uh and it's it's just a a sacred text for your whole team filled with key information about your development process the why for your game where you're going with it and what the key pillars are it's something you can keep in back to when you're 5 years into development you're starting to really wonder how much you want this step two market research I know this sounds kind of scary to people who aren't working in marketing and you really want to focus on building I get it but we're simplifying it for you today with four major questions anybody can ask these questions and I have total faith that everybody in this room can answer them with a little bit of work about about their own games question one

is there an existing Market you're making a platformer do platforms exist yes they do in what form do they exist these are the types of things that you should ask yourself when you're thinking how does my game and my idea fit into the market if you can answer this one question in a comprehensive way congratulations your investor pitches just leveled up they're going to want to know the answer to this question Grant people are going to want to know the answer to this question and you need to have it for them it's going to make your pitches that much better second question what are the common features we're going to go back to the platformer what kind of features do Platformers have in general um are you going to incorporate those and to what extent knowing what the common features are allows you to anticipate your player needs and uh you've probably heard this phrase

already so far this week but you can't break the rules unless you know the rules so figure out what the rules of your genre are even if you play a lot of games whatever you're making study the competition because we all have our own tastes we all have our own biases try the ones that you haven't played and really figure out what's common and what players are going to expect when they boot up your game for the first time third who stands out there are probably going to be big fish in the space that have a lot of the market share for your genre who are they what are they doing is it a Game feature thing that makes them successful is it a marketing thing that makes them successful did they just get in at the right time if you can figure those things out and for the most part I think that they're pretty clear uh you're going to understand your competition which allows you to better pitch yourself or your game against them and I don't mean to make that sound

combative or competitive but when we're talking about market share and the amount of time that players have to put into games sometimes it is and finally where are the communities I cannot tell you how many Indie devs I have met or I have worked with who do not know where to put themselves online they are overwhelmed by the number of social platforms and they're like I got to be on all of them and how how am I supposed to do that it's so much time to make all these assets and comment on everything and come up with copy the secret I think is that you don't have to do that if you can identify where your target audience is where they congregate outside of games then you know where to be do they go to Reddit and that's where they talk to each other you should be on Reddit do they go go to Discord and congregate

there you should go to Discord or do they just like to be on Twitter and engage with brands that way focus on that then it's it's not that difficult um it just sounds scary and it sounds intimidating but I promise just a little bit of research is going to make this a lot easier for you in step three tone and voice so you know who you want to talk to you figured out these demographics what the average age might be what their player type might be if they have genre preferences existing habits like they binge play on the weekends or they play on the bus on the way to work you know where they live so you're looking into localization and if you might need that you know what kind of news outlets they'd be interested in Reading from so maybe you could reach out and do some PR and you've decide what your release plan platforms are going to be well why are you going to

talk to them is it just informative are you looking to build uh a a community uh are you going to roast them and be a Wendy's in the gaming space uh that's a legitimate question by the way um I've seen gaming companies do that um but if you know the answers to these questions which hopefully with step one and step two you've at least answered most of these questions you can figure out how to talk to them are you going to use the word Yeet when you are talking to a retirement uh target audience and you're trying to get them to play a mobile game probably not um and knowing how they want to be talked to is going to help you talk to them in a way that resonates because if you speak to them in a way that they don't understand and they don't get it not only are they not going to give your game a chance but they're probably going to report your post these three steps give us access to

multiple Returns the first of which is your active marketing if you find yourself with a budget hooray you have a budget um how are you going to spend it active marketing is your paid time your ads your influencers Etc so this is what that gives you uh now you know who to Target with your ads you can figure out which influencer communities you're interested in uh being exposed to your product retargeting if you have a newsletter if you have pre-registrations uh this is all going to go better potentially a higher conversion rate because you're now speaking to uh a community of people that you have put in the time and the work to identify as interested in what you have to offer you can leverage lookalike communities hey my game seems a lot like that game or at least the players of that game I think would be really interested in my game and if

that's the case maybe I can leverage my ads and my content to people who kind of represent or or mimic that community and you're going to reach those relevant uh recipients so people who want to see more of your content people who are more likely to click your ad and see what you're about um and you're not going to get people going what is this I don't want to see this and taking a negative action after seeing your content and the last thing that we're going to take out of all of these steps and efforts is your learnings over time you have taken the time you've put in the effort to say why am I doing this at all why am I making this and what do I want out of it this is going to inherently inform your decisions throughout development and because you've documented it it's going to help you explain the decision ISS later on when you look back it's not going to be

buried in a slack Channel or in a DM or be something that you just decided off of the cuff and you're not going to have any recollection of why something was done your datadriven pivots we've talked a lot about researching gathering information that's that's data and it'll help you to make the pivots that you need to be more successful which means as you can see you can decipher the patterns have you cut things from one section too much are you prioritizing something too much is your scope too large scope creep is a problem and it's difficult to see sometimes unless you have that history offering top- down transparency both to your team and to players is something that marketing teams fight for every day just please legal can I have a little more transparency and having that offering that as a

developer a studio founder a director not only gives you insight into accountability for decisions but offering credit to people who make contributions to your game that leads to job satisfaction and trust and really just makes a better studio and a better team for everyone with all these recorded experiences congratulations you are smarter and more prepared to go on to your next project regardless of how your current project goes whether it was a resounding success or it didn't quite work out you've you've done all this you know this it's familiar and you can take it on with you to the next project and have it be quicker easier and more effective now we're going to zoom out we started with defining your audience and what that means well you got three steps your game design document your market

research and your tone and voice which gives you all of these great benefits these aren't the only benefits but they are the only ones I could fit inside this shape uh all of these benefits lead to the ultimate goal I guess not to be redundant of learnings and goals uh hopefully Meeting those goals I'd like to offer you some resources um these are ones that I have found personally helpful disclaimer these are not endorsed endorsed by blizzard these are ones that I personally as a Game Dev I'm offering to you the craft and science of game design by phow Connor is probably in the bookstore here this week it's a book that I own and it's what I used to make my own game design document for my own project um understandably the books are expensive if that's not an option for you gamedev beg.com has a great template that you could use from market research uh Chris Z kowsky and Victoria Tran if you are somehow unfamiliar with both of

these names I highly recommend getting familiar inciting up for the newsletters that they offer you can find information from Pure beginner uh to advance from both of them and you're going to have kind of a a finger to the pulse of what's going on on the market especially with steam uh with Chris's newsletter and for tone and voice uh I know Udi is kind of a hit or miss really when it comes to classes but this business business branding with personality class by Steve harangan is one that I took um and I found it incredibly helpful in uh providing language in particular for sharing that language with my team on who are we as a brand and who are we talking to I think it really helps to simplify and visualize uh in a classical sense uh who who the brand is uh and how you differentiate that from the team TM um and it's really

helpful so back to the takeaways uh I hope at uh now that we're here that you uh feel comfortable in the process of auditing a game for successful audience definition I also hope at this point that you understand what defining an audience means uh and that you understand why it's important not just in general but for you and finally that you can start on at least one of these three steps soon today now uh and that you feel comfortable and you feel enabled to do that well thank you and uh you know if you want to talk or engage or whatever later um I'm awesome hen on Twitter and most places online if you like reading I am obsessed

uh you can find me on Tik Tok under cassa's bookshelf and if you want to know my two cents on games uh you can look up my website Indie hord um but thank you all for coming uh and I hope that you've gotten some good things out of the talk seems like maybe we have some time if anybody has any questions we've got like four minutes it's on oh is it on yeah there we go okay great we got it uh Dennis over at hit sense marketing manager so we have um a fastpaced FPS Rog Lake coming out this year okay and we have the uh gamedev who has a pre-established community of you know really access players and they have very much you know

their own culture and their own you know uh way of communicating like you've discussed however in order for us to you know justify a commercial success that needs to broaden hence the audience will broaden and so how would you go about um Bridging the Gap between say the pre-established Early Access Community right and sort of the mainstream um community that needs to be sort of integrated as we continue to Market and bring in more attention for the game okay so the question is uh how do you bridge the gap between an established community and reaching uh new audiences uh I think that's a great question uh especially if you have a really passionate uh base already they want to be the ones that you talk to um I would say uh look at a different platform than what you're currently reaching that core audience on whatever

that is um look to expand in a place that they are not um that way it's it's something totally different and you can Target your content in a different way so that they aren't sitting on every single post wondering why are you saying this to me I already know that um and Tik Tok might actually be a good place to do that this side hello Daniel Marcus game designer from offro Industries let's say hypothetically of course that you've already fallen into what you call the Trap what would one do differently uh in order to assess the audience that you already have and uh maybe continue to expand it yeah so the question is if we're already in the spot of if we build it they will come how do you move past that even with an established Community um I mean the the reason that this talk is titled Define your audience now not

later is that I think you can do that at any time um and whatever your current audience is can feed into what you do in these steps so you can look at who is already playing the game how they interact with the game I'm sure there's some play testing and feedback loops that you've already done you can look at that and extrapolate from it I would say that despite the advice to not go into the Trap if you have been documenting what you've been doing with your players up until this point you have so much data to pull from already in order to look at where your current players are operating online what other games they play and if they trust you you have access to them to ask them these questions and get that information without starting from scratch thank you hello um it sounds like this is a talk that's very Indie focused which means we can't make any assumptions about the size of the team or the number of hats that people are

wearing um but just focusing on the documentation itself um I was wondering if uh one of the things that it seems like you had talked talked nearby several times but not directly at was personas client personas user personas and I was wondering um where within the framework that you usually work with would you see personas what complimentary tools nearby help you get the best value out of that like where where does that fit into your overall um documentation of product strategy okay so the question and correct me if I'm wrong is when it comes to dealing with personas and documentation where do the personas fit in with this and what kinds of tools might we use to incorporate personas into the documentation yes what what are the other things that you've seen to other tools that help you get the most value out of those tools out of personas so the personas are are in themselves a type of tool um it's it's

kind of like a marketing personality test almost and I think when it comes to incorporating those into your documentation it's it's not so much an add-on it's a foundational piece so you're going to want to look for something to manipulate the personas within your documentation rather than use the personas to manipulate whatever else you have in there if you're saying that you're talking to uh a hero or an Explorer um that is a foundational aspect of the audience you're trying to reach so when I am for instance uh setting up like who are we talking to here's a tone and voice pitch I'm going to extrapolate on say the Explorer archetype and say these are the types of things that they like these are the types of activities that they're interested in and their motivation for playing a game how can we tie that into our feature set and is that represented

in our feature set and you can leverage that to pitch to product or to any money on dev side and say look these this is who we really think is going to be plugged in and we need to speak to why they are plugged in so it's really a leveraging tool to help you make the argument for um kind of a marketing driven change to the game I I've seen personas talked about in context of a value proposition outside of games and I assume that when in the context of the design document you were talking about maybe they could tie directly to your pillars Your Design pillars that you're establishing yes okay so yeah I was just curious if that if there's a direct link what that might yeah I mean the direct link is you know it's however direct you want it to be it's really just a matter of how how close you want those things to be or if you want it to be kind of a a side nice

to have sort of thing thank you very much do we have any more is there time for one more yes one more okay hi I'm Justine um I'm a product manager and I work for a small Indie uh studio in N La I was happy to see Victoria Tran on your slide because I'm a huge fan I was in her talk earlier um just using her content and her lessons have actually grown our Tik Tok to over 180k followers in four months I'm really proud of that but I was wondering if you had any thoughts on the potential Tik Tok ban and you said to focus you don't have to focus on everything you can just focus on one platform but now there's all this worry and uh you know there's a lot of messaging out there saying we need to diversify what are your feelings on like full steam ahead on just Tik Tok or you know maybe shifting uh a little to YouTube based on current events yeah so the question is um we have an

established community on one platform how do we feel about diversification when you're being told to diversify versus just really doubling down on one platform it sounds like you've had a lot of success on Tik Tok that's very exciting um before you you know diversify quote unquote um you should consider who you're trying to reach because wherever you do diversify needs to match who you want to reach and if the people that you are saying this is our core audience if they primary social platform is Tik Tok like at at a certain point in development of course you want to be everywhere but when you're building that initial community and you want to say this is our Hub this is where we are um I I would hesitate to recommend that that be everywhere um so I would say look at the other platforms Maybe the closest in demographic would be Instagram to Tik

Tok uh especially if people are really enjoying your visual video footage and you can more easily repurpose Tik Tok content for something like reals or even YouTube shorts if you want to go that way but don't just blindly start investing in another platform without confirming that the audience you want to reach is there I know it's it's scary and there's a lot of information coming from different directions but to go back to the idea of you're you know you're everywhere and so you're nowhere um make sure that that you're going to still reach people that you want to reach before you do that thank you so much yeah okay we are out of time everybody thank you [Music] again