Game Discoverability Day: Building a Community for Your Game from Scratch

My name is Mike Rose. I am from publishing label No More Robots. Um Thank you very much for coming. I appreciate the uh the the Google keynote is on right now. So, um I'm I'm very happy. I was like, "No one's going to turn up to this." But, you have. That's really nice of you. Thank you very much. Um So, uh so yeah, today uh as part of the sort of game discovery a discoverability day, I'm going to be talking uh about how I do community stuff cuz a lot of the stuff that I do on No More Robots is very community-based now. And uh I'm going to be talking a whole bunch about Discord as well, and you're going to think that uh I'm some kind of Discord shill, and I basically kind of am at this point. But, um it's uh it's very useful all the same. So, uh at one time, there was always this big thing that helps sell video games, right? So, years ago, uh it used to be

people were saying, "You got to get press. You got to get all the press to talk about your games." And uh then people were saying, "No, no, get the YouTubers. The YouTubers get PewDiePie to play your game, and and you'll make a bunch of money." And then it was Twitch streamers. Um And uh at this point, all of these things are still pretty useful. You know, you still want to be getting press and YouTubers and Twitch streamers playing your game. But, uh really at the moment, the thing uh at least from my perspective and it seems like from a lot of other people are realizing this as well is that community building uh is the is the thing that's really driving players to buy your game right now. Community building always has been, you know, over the years, there's always been forums and uh and I guess IRC before then. There's always been uh a lot of games that have had massive buzz around them. A lot of the time, they have had a nice community presence. Right now, uh I believe that community building has

sort of become the number one thing that you want to be pushing forward with your game when you're trying to sell it. Uh so, I'm going to talk a bunch about that. Um yeah, I'm so I'm Mike Rose. I uh I was originally a writer. I used to write about video games. Uh and then I sort of jumped the fence and I worked for a publisher called tinyBuild for a while. We did a bunch of games and then because I'm an egotistical maniac, I was like, I can do this myself. So, a couple of years ago I started No More Robots. Uh it's um it's it's it's going all right. We've had some uh pretty nice releases. We had a uh mountain biking game called Descenders, which did quite well for us. Last year, I put out a Brexit management game called Not Tonight. That went down really well on the internet. Uh no, and weirdly that one did really well. Um and uh then last uh last week, we just put out Hypnospace Outlaw, which is

a '90s internet simulator, and uh that's done quite well as well. Uh we've got We've got a game called Family Man coming up. We've got a few other games in the pipeline as well. Uh but um yeah, uh that has been the stress of my life for the last couple of years and will continue to be so. Uh so, the the thing I should say is that uh there's loads of talks about like uh community building and stuff like that, right? You can find a load of them uh even just on the GDC Vault. I specifically today want to talk about how you actually start it in the first place, cuz I think a lot of people struggle with that bit. There's loads of stuff online where it's like, here's what you do with your community. You've got this community, but no one seems to ever talk about I've got zero people interested right now. How do I make that number be bigger than zero? And uh and it's it's actually from my perspective, when you know what you're doing, it actually is kind of simple. There's uh there's some some steps that I follow to make this happen.

So, what I'm going to do is, instead of just being vague and dancing around the subject, I'm just going to straight tell you the step-by-step thing that I do with every game. I'm announcing a new game in about 3 weeks, and this uh this checklist, this step-by-step guide, is literally what I am going to follow um you know, just before we announce this game. So, if you follow this, then you can essentially uh just do the stuff I do, and you don't need a publisher anymore. Hey. Um I won't be talking uh about stuff like uh moderating uh communities, etc., because again, there's all I think there's already a a a ton of talks on this kind of thing, you know, toxicity, etc. Um but yeah, there's there's already plenty of people who have talked about this, who quite frankly can probably talk about it better than me as well. Uh so, yeah, like I say, this is going to be just a straightforward, here's what I do, and you can do it, too. Uh these are the things that I use uh when I am building communities. So,

Discord, I'll talk about that in a second. Uh it's all there. I mean, you can see here, there's nothing where it's like, that's crazy, he's using that. Uh Google Forms, Mailchimp, Steamworks, it's all stuff that I imagine if you've uh at least even worked in a game in games a little bit, you've probably used these things. Um there's there's no there's no like crazy magic program that I'm using. I use all of the obvious things. Um So, so Discord, um the reason that I do all my community building through Discord is because uh what what has happened with Discord is it kind of came out of nowhere, right? It it just started building a building. I think in I think between like 2017 and 2018, they had something crazy like 120 million extra people sign up to it. Um, and I think they say right now that they have like 10 million like active people who are using Discord on a daily basis.

The reason why that is amazing compared to uh, you know, all the possible platforms that you might think of using is that if somebody has signed up to Discord, there is a high chance that they like video games. You know, it's a video game platform. Uh, so you already know that anybody who is on Discord is probably a potential person who might want to buy and play your games. Uh, the other thing with Discord as well is that if somebody signs up for your server in the first place, so you know, for anybody who's not aware of how it works, there's you can you can get a link essentially and someone clicks this link and they join your server. Uh, if somebody has clicked the link for your server, then already they've shown that they are interested in following your game just by joining your server in the first place. So, it's like you've got you'll you'll have this server that you're filling up with people and they're all people who have already, specifically by clicking that link, told you, "I am interested in your game." So,

they all become like potential customers, you know, and if you get thousands and thousands of people to join your server, then obviously that's pretty nice. Um, the other thing with Discord as well is that there's just loads of cool stuff you can do with it that I think a lot of people aren't aware of. Uh, there's all of these sort of like you can just run bots and scripts in there. You don't even need to know uh, any any coding whatsoever, quite frankly. There's there's thousands of people who have already made bots that you just install in your server that will just do cool stuff for you and will automate whole systems for you. Um, I'll be talk uh, later I'll be talking about what I use some of the bots for later, Uh, but the but the the overall is that Discord is just a really, really good place to be collecting people who are interested in your game right now. Um So, yeah, let's just do this step-by-step. Uh Discord, one thing to do if you're looking at this and you're thinking, "I

don't even understand what Discord is." Uh I mean, it's I guess if you're sort of under 35, it's Skype except it works. If you're over 35, it's just a glorified IRC. Uh it's it's literally just chat rooms where people can hang out. You can create a server. So, you can see this this here is uh the the server for Descenders, and you can see all down the left is just all the different channels people can join. In the middle is just where they can chat to each other. On the right is all the users. It's it's very simple. If you if you don't, you know, if you're still a bit like, "I don't really completely understand Discord." Go and read about it. Honestly, it's an incredibly simple platform, and you'll get it in no time. Um so so here is how I set up servers. So, first off, make a server, give it a name. Once you've done that, you go get it verified by Discord. Discord will verify uh any um any server from a

developer or publisher who's making a game. So, you go to this link, you enter all the details of the server, explain to them what the game is. Uh getting the server verified uh is incredibly useful, not just because it makes it look more legit to players and makes it so that they're they're, you know, possibly more likely to join. Um But you also get a bunch of other benefits as well. You can get a custom URL for it. So, you know, discord.gg/descenders, discord.gg/hypnospace. It's a lot easier to link that than, you know, discord.gg/invite/abunchofletters. Uh it's it's just easier for people to remember it and they're just far more likely to click it. Um, and uh, and they just actually added this new feature which is uh, rather nice where they now have uh, just a public catalog of all of the verified servers on Discord. So, people users can now actually just look through all the verified servers. I think there's only like a few hundred of them right now

that are actually verified. Uh, so if you have a verified server right now, obviously you uh, you know, you you get a nice little bit of visibility from that from people who might actually be interested in your game. So, um, the first thing is just setting up the the bog standard channels that I think should be in every single Discord server. There's a I I I So, I see some people have like a welcome and a rules channel. I mix them into one. Uh, literally just a channel that it it kind of throws people into in the first place that where they can see all information about the game, they know how to behave. Uh, an announcements channel. This is where uh, only you are going to be talking in that one and that's the one where you're going to be notifying people. Um, this is going to be incredibly important later. There's a thing in Discord called @everyone where if the admin of the person who owns the server types @everyone, it pings every single person who is in the in your server. It

throws a notification onto their phone, straight onto their onto the home screen of their phone telling them you've been pinged. Uh, again, I'm imagine how useful that is if you've got 5,000, 10,000 people in your Discord server who are interested in your game and you can now directly just throw a notification onto their phone about a thing. Um, and then uh, the I usually have a channel so you see there's one called Descenders here. I usually that's the place where people just talk. It's just the just the the base place where everyone's talking, just named after your own game. You'll have like a a mod channel as well because when you when you first open the floodgates of your of your Discord server, then it'll get kind of crazy. But the first time with the Descenders Discord, the first time I did it, I did not completely understand Discord at this point. And I remember the day I opened it and thousands of people started flooding in and it it was chaos. And that will happen to you as well and you will be so scared because because e-

the first time you do it, you just no idea what it's going to be like. Uh there's just people people will find ways to abuse your server in ways that you couldn't think was possible using commands that you didn't know existed. Um there there was a on the day that I launched the Descenders Discord, I'd accidentally made it so that people could use a command to make uh just sort of like a Microsoft voice read everything in the server to everybody who was in the server. So all of a sudden there was just hundreds of people like just screaming cuz there was a voice on their computer talking to them. Uh that was horrible. But and it'll happen to you. It'll happen to ev- everybody who first uses Discord will be like, "I don't understand the permissions or anything." Uh I I think it's I think it's good to learn by failing a little bit on this. But but there's plenty of documentation you can read as well on Discord to make sure it doesn't happen. Uh but yeah, these f- from from my perspective, these are the kind of bug standard channels I will always put into every server that I run.

Uh what I will then have is what I call entry point channels and these uh these are interesting because what they do is I believe they force people who are joining your Discord server to engage a little bit more. They they add an extra level of I'm forcing you to do a thing to be able to use my Discord server. So So right now you can see all the channels there, but that's because I'm an admin, so I get to see all the channels. What will normally happen is when someone joins the Descenders server, all they will be able to see is the pick-a-side channel, and that's it. Well, the the welcome channel as well, but just below it, pick-a-side. They go into the pick-a-side channel, and it says it tells them that they need to enter a command to pick a team. We've got three teams in the game, Enemy, Arboreal, and Kinetic. And the idea is that we give them information in the welcome channel about these three teams and say to them, "You can't access the server

until you've picked a team." And once they enter a command, that pick-a-side channel disappears, and the rest of the server opens up, including special channels that are just for that team. It also, if you look on the screen, you can see that people have different colors. It colors their name with the team they picked. So, the whole point of this is that they already, the moment they join the server, feel like they're part of something. They have no idea what, you know, they've not We did this before the game had come out. They had no idea what it even meant to pick a team. But, the level of We essentially had people just like, you know, trash-talking each other and bigging up their teams and banding together, all because their their name was a different color. And it's this kind of thing, if you don't have something like this, I think it can cause people to just join a serve a Discord server, and then just sort of be like, "All right, well, I'm I don't see anything to do here, so I'm going to leave again." If it forces people to to actually do an

action, which then can lead them to do more actions. Now, this stuff is really simple. So, there's a bot called Dyno, and honestly, it's just the best Discord bot. It does a whole bunch of permissions stuff. This is the code as if this is code. This is the code I had to write just to make this work. You can see all that happens is they type in one of these teams, it gives them that role, uh and then it just in the specific channel for that team will kind of welcome them so that then it pings them in that channel to show them look what you have now. And it also then causes other people to say hi to them uh because someone else has joined the channel. Uh it's it's honestly it's it get this is as difficult as it gets uh in the the sort of coding you need to do. Uh it's it's all very simple and just these things here uh and then this is this is just the permission side of it. So essentially

all you're saying is that in the picker side channel uh if somebody is on is on team Arboreal Enemy or Kinetic, then make it so that they can't read or send messages anymore. So before they could when they were in the channel they were able to see messages. Once they picked a team, their permissions are removed from that channel and they can't see it anymore. And then imagine with all the other channels you flip it. So originally they had no permissions in any of all the other channels, then once they pick a team, it gives them permissions in all the channels. It's that straightforward quite frankly. It really doesn't take more any more than that. Uh you can go a little bit crazier uh which I'll kind of mention a little bit later with some of the idiotic things we've done, but realistically this is just doing this is enough quite frankly. So once you've set up like what I think that that's sort of the basics of setting up the Discord server, you then want to think about what it is that is keeping people in your Discord server. I

I talk a lot about thinking of like the hook to your game and it's kind of the same thing. Like why do people want to not only join your Discord server, but stick around? When I did Descenders, uh we went for a very simple thing. You know, they've they've picked a team and so they're all different colors now. And then at this point we started doing weekly challenges for them. We'd say to them at the start of the week on a Monday, we want you to battle it out doing this thing this week. And it was always extremely silly things. You know, one week it would be we want you to do fan art for your team. The next week we want you to do trash art for the other teams. We want you to write haikus this week. It's It's nothing crazy. It's just silly little things they can do which just keep them engaged. And you can see that all of these channels at the bottom, like I was saying, you know, for example, on team arboreal people would only see the team arboreal channel using permissions. It this this just worked

really well for for the Descenders when we when we first announced the the Descenders server because as well this approach is is quite hands-off. You know, there's not a ton that you have to do here. It was essentially on a Monday I'd post a challenge and on a Friday I'd post the results of the challenge. And whichever team had won the challenge, they would get things like they would get We'd tell them they were going to get a special kit when the game came out. You can also you can have custom emotes in Discord. So we'd tell them each week we'll give your team a custom emote for your team. And so then they would start using those emotes to then essentially trash the other teams. Most of the teams just basically tried to collect the letters of their names so that they could then just spell them all out. But yeah, this this worked really well. When we came to do the Discord for Not Tonight because I'm crazy I just always want to take it a step too far

or at least a step further than we than we did last time. So I tried to do some some weird permission stuff that also kind of worked out. So uh the So the whole point in in our game Not Tonight is that you're a you're a bouncer and you're deciding whether to let people in or out. I wanted to make it so they that people uh in the Not Tonight Discord could essentially uh go to work and earn money. So, the idea would be that uh they would be able to see home. They'd be able to see their home channel, but nothing else. And then they type a command and it would open up places for them to work and remove their home. And then after they decided they'd done a day's work, they could then type a command to go back home. Again, it was very, very simple to set this up. It was just Dino again. So, I'm literally just making it so that I had a role called bouncer to them so that they can then see the channels which have the permissions for bouncer. Then when they type in end job, it removes bouncer, so

all of those channels disappear. I coupled this with a bot called Unbelievable Pizza, which is a great name. And it This is just essentially uh it's the the currency bot that I now use for all my servers cuz it's extremely useful. It's It's very custom There's just so much customization you can do to it. I could pick the type of currency. I could pick how fast people would get the money. I could give them things to buy using the money. And this came in useful later when I would tell them, "Right, if you earn this much money, you can then buy a character in the in the full game or you can buy you can name a pub in the game." Uh or there was there was like the grand prize, which was a free copy of the game that people were were rushing to um to try and win. Uh but again, incredibly simple. I just installed two bots and wrote those uh wrote those tiny bits of of code there. And that's that sort of set up an entire server, which

then The The great thing about the Not Tonight server was that it just worked by itself. I didn't really have to do much to it. This whole currency thing was just running itself. And so I could just walk away for for weeks and people would have fun playing this game that I'd set up. Uh when it came to the Hypno Space, I went too far. Don't do this. I set up an entire 90s internet within a Discord server. I actually got a guy Yeah, it's it's not right. I I actually got a got a a guy found a guy who had written a a Discord bot which nearly did the thing I wanted to do. I messaged him and I said, "Here's the insane thing I'm trying to do." And he said, "I can write that for you." So, what happens here is that someone can go to the search engine channel and they can see all the pages that people have made and they can type a command to join the server. So, normally what would happen is again, cuz I'm admin, I can see all the channels. People wouldn't be able to see all these channels and

they'd have to search in the search engine for a page and join it to add it to the Discord server. They can then type a sort of like a exclamation mark create to make like make a web page that only they would be able to edit and other people could join. Uh it was too much this, quite frankly. It was it was fun and if people were joining and being like, "This is the craziest thing I've ever seen." Um I I don't think you need to do this. I don't think this server benefited more than the Not Tonight one did and it was way more work. Uh but, you know, if you're crazy like me, then maybe this is something you want to try and do. Um Okay, so at this point you've now got your Discord server all set up with all the right channels and you've got some kind of hook for why people are going to join and then not immediately leave. Everything at this point is now incredibly simple. You make a channel that is just beta sign up. We're doing a multiplayer beta for Descenders right now. So, this is a channel that I have live right now. It just links to a Google form where people

are just kind of signing up. As simple as that, just a Google form asking them for their name and email address. The idea is that they're just going to be going through your through your Discord server, finding the link to the Google form and signing up there. So, you've now got them in two places. You've now got them directly so you can talk to them within the Discord and you've now got them on a mailing list so you can keep them up to speed with what is happening to the game. Both incredibly useful in their own way. And at this point, so so what I normally do is I normally now link this up with the announcements of a game. So, if your game is already announced, then obviously you could change this up, but what I would normally do, everything I've done up to now I've done in secret, kind of behind the scenes, not told anyone. And then when it comes to the announcement of the game day, then this is when I start spamming the link for

all the Discord to everybody that I possibly can along with telling them, "If you go here, you can sign up to play in the upcoming closed beta for the game." And that's the hook for why they are coming in in the first place. I I see people sort of they they announce a game or they just make a Discord for their for their game and they they just sort of say, "Hey people, join my Discord so you can keep up to speed with my game." And unfortunately, the vast majority players aren't going to do that. They they won't just join a Discord server to hang out cuz they're already probably in you know, a dozen other Discord servers. The the whole point of timing the come here to sign up to be able to play an early version of the game, that's the reason why they come in. And they do come in. If you do this right and you you sort of get the link out as many places as possible, you can get thousands and thousands of people to to sign up to your server.

Uh it's it's genuinely really not that hard to do. Uh you know, when before I'd done it and before we were going to do Descenders, I was wondering, I wonder how many people are going to sign up to this, you know, it might not be that many. And I think in like 2 days we got like 7,000 people join the server because they were so desperate to play an early build of the game. Uh so there's loads of places I've I've kind of uh listed here which are great ways to get people. Uh one of the interesting ones is there's loads of sites on the internet that are sort of like freesteamkeys.com and all that where people who just want free games are just going. It seems like it's pointless to put them on there because, you know, if those people are just going to grab your game for free, why would they pay for it? But the thing that I've found is that actually is really useful because on the one hand, you get a ton of people playing the game early. And whether or not they're going to buy in the end, the feedback is useful. And it just means that it looks like there's even more

buzz around, you know, the the the playing of your game and all of these different people playing it early. Uh I've also found as well that a lot of the time uh these people, you know, who may not really buy games and are just looking for free games, they'll join your Discord. They'll see there's some cool people around. They they'll they'll be fascinated by the idea that they've just joined a a a server and now they can talk directly to the developer cuz that that doesn't happen very often, right? Like we you know, we we launch a Discord server and there's there's people who are just like, this is so cool that I can just right directly now talk to the people who are making this game. And that a lot of the time I found converts a lot of people who have told me, I just joined this just to play some free stuff, but I've now got so much into this that I'm more than happy to buy at launch. So, yeah, these are all the places I do. Another thing you can do as well as you can talk to some of the sort of big press sites. Uh people

like uh PC Gamer um PC Games and and people like that will do um sort of uh beta giveaways with their uh with their their viewership, I guess. Uh and that can be very useful as well, you know, you sort of throw 5,000 Steam keys at them and they will bring on extra people. Of course, those people aren't coming into your Discord as well, so you're kind of missing uh missing that angle. Uh but again, it's pretty useful to just have more people playing your game, quite frankly. Uh and then again, incredibly simple. This is just the checklist of stuff that I then do uh when I'm then running the beta. What I normally do is I normally have it so that we announce a game and a Discord and have people joining. We leave it a few weeks and then a few weeks later we then uh we then run the beta for the game. Uh what this normally hap- makes happen is that we get the the boost of people

joining when we announce and then 3 weeks later we get a second boost of people as we say that we this is happening this week and more people start talking about it that week. So, you kind of get the second burst. Uh but it again, it's very simple. I normally set up a separate product on Steam, literally just buy a second product for I don't know how much it is now, 80 or $100, something like that. Uh and uh yeah, just pick a week and and go for it. If you've not used Mailchimp before, it's very simple to use. It's literally just assign uh Steam keys for each for each of the email addresses you've been collecting through the Google form and email them all on the date that your beta starts. You want to I've seen people when they do this say like, "Oh, we'll just let it run. Just let the beta run or we'll do it for a month or something." I think it's a good idea to have it for a very set period of time. And I've actually done both and I found that the very concentrated one works so much

better because people know when they see that it's only going to happen between these three to five days, they make sure to play it. And so you get far more again, it's the concentrated lots of people all talking about it at the same time. Um so yeah, I always I always stick to that. And and then again, Discord can be really useful at this point for for collecting bugs essentially. And yeah, you could set up a channel that's just bug reporting and you can have a form in there where you tell them this is how we want you to provide the bugs for us cuz if you if you don't say that, then you can imagine what happens, you know, just sort of a million people all shouting, "This doesn't work. That doesn't work." and it's just not useful whatsoever. It's just noise. Uh so yeah, it's good to get that kind of thing sorted. And just another channel for you know, suggesting features. Again, it's probably the case as bad as it sounds that 90% of the things people are suggesting are not going to be useful. But then again, if a lot of people keep suggesting the same thing, then it's

probably a sign that that might actually be a cool thing. And this whole time as well of course, you can be asking people to wish list your game on Steam. Steam wish lists, if you're not aware, are incredibly useful if you can get to a certain level of wish lists, it means that around the launch of your game, you're going to get sort of you know, in the Steam front front page lists. It seems right now that like if you can get to about 8,000 to 10,000 Steam wish lists at launch, then that will cause your game to get featured in more lists. Uh so that's that's maybe a number you want to be aiming for. But when you do this beta stuff through Discord, this is a time when you will see tons of people wish listing the game and you really want to be pushing hard for it at this point. Um So so this is this should be where you're up to at this point. Uh you've you know, you've you've now run the beta. It's the end of the beta. It's now the period between you've done

this public test. You've now got a server full of thousands of people who are interested in your game and you now got to just make the dang thing. Uh And it can be tricky at this point because now you've just got a ton of people who are every day saying, "Is the game out yet? Is the game out yet?" And it just you know, well, we all know how long it takes to make games. Um And uh so it can be tricky to uh to keep people happy at that period and you might find people leaving because they feel like they just sort of um sat in a in a stagnant server at that point. So this point is where I sort of do the the the next step of what I do, which is that I run silly meta games um for for each of the games. And the idea here is that uh running up to the launch of the game, you want to keep people in your Discord happy by just running silly games that

by the time that the launch of your actual game comes, they have to buy your game at that point because they are already so invested in what has just happened to them for the few months before then. Uh it's it it really is I I didn't really do a meta game for Descenders as much. Uh it was more we were just sort of trying to build hype in the server up to up to the launch. And I and I kind of wish I had done a meta game for it because then I did one for uh Not Tonight and Hypnospace and you could really see by the time the game came out people that the stuff that we had done, uh, in in the Discord had made it so that they were already hardcore, you know, Hypnospace fans before Hypnospace had even come out. Um, so I should probably explain better what I mean by this whole, uh, meta game thing. Essentially,

uh, at its at the at the very core of it, it's just doing a bunch of storytelling at people and getting them to be involved in that storytelling. So, when we did the Not Tonight, uh, meta after we'd done the, um, after we'd done the beta, I essentially set it up so that, uh, everybody in the server, they'd all picked a region, uh, when they'd first joined the server, so they had to pick whether they were in the north, the south, or the Midlands in the UK. And then we had general elections where everybody could vote on who they wanted to be the Prime Minister and the MPs. Once we had done that, then I started giving them, uh, I started giving, uh, the Prime Minister, uh, and his MPs, uh, decisions to make each day. They started off all right at first, you know, just like, who should be taxed and all this kind of stuff. And by the end, uh, it had got really horrible where I'd, uh, you know, I was essentially doing things like I'd tell somebody I'd tell one of the MPs that they were a spy and that

they can't tell anyone and they have to try and stay undetected for a week. And then midway through the week I'd tell everybody else that there was a spy and just let just sit back and just watch what happened. And you can imagine what happened. Uh, a lot of the meta stuff that I do actually is very inspired by just a lot of, um, you know, sort of like the, um, a lot of board games and card games really and and hidden role games. A lot of this really works in text form because you tell some people, you tell like, you know, thousands of people some information that maybe is worrying information about the situation they're in and all of a sudden they they scramble together. They they form little There were There was people in the the Not Tonight server who were making other servers that they were only inviting people who they knew wasn't the spy into so that they could try and work together to work out who the spy was. Um This whole thing ended We had a We had a You know I said earlier that we had a

prize that was to win a copy of the game, but it didn't just do that. Whoever got that prize, whoever managed to earn enough money to get that prize, would become king or queen of the server. And I didn't tell them this until someone won it. So then we had to have a king's coronation where hundreds of people all sat in voice chat listening to, you know, just sort of random songs of YouTube sort of UK royalty songs while people like while the the the prime minister and other people just like role-played a coronation. Uh they decided I was the queen so I had to sing the national anthem and then uh I then I essentially made a bomb go off because it in it ties in with a game in in Not Tonight. It starts with a bomb going off and the whole point is that it jumps back in time you have to work out how we got to this point. Uh and then we had it where we like locked the server down. It was martial law until we could work out who the bomber was and

it got weird. Uh but but imagine By the time we got to the launch of the game, all of these people needed to buy the game at this point because they were already invested. They were already so invested. One of them was a king of the game. We We put him in the game as you could get posters for the for the king and and there was a picture of him on a coin and stuff like that. Like people had to get the game at this point because they just had to. Um So then when I came to do the Hypnospace one, I essentially took what I'd done and just tried to take it a step further. So uh there's a character in Hypnospace called Dylan Merchant who runs uh who runs the operating system uh that you are playing in the game. And so I started I I made a Discord account called Dylan Merchant with his face and I started talking to people like doing announcements like, "Hey everybody, the new HypnoS update is coming out soon." And it all started off very nice and everyone was like, "Oh,

this Dylan guy is great." And and I'd keep saying to them, "Oh, what do you What would you guys like? Would you like this? Would you like that?" And uh you know, and then I said like, "Would you like some monetization?" And I started giving them Hypno coins uh which is the currency in the game which just means nothing which you can only spend in the game and not in real life. Uh so they all started earning Hypno coins. And then it got and then it started just getting really dark. Uh and it started we we kept talking about how there was an update coming out uh but there was there were people some people in the press were saying there was something wrong with it. And uh and so maybe uh so we we made a Y2K enforcement team who were this team of about 20 users in the server who would who were only allowed to say nice things about Merchantsoft. If they saw anybody saying bad things about Merchantsoft, these people had to come along and crack down on it. Make sure no one was uh saying bad things. Uh it it ended up the it ended up uh with uh someone again winning a prize in the

server which made them become a cyborg uh called the Packard who ran around with his bell. Uh and uh and then there was whistleblowers who knew that the new update on HypnoS was going to was going to sort of uh overheat and and uh destroy the basically the entire internet. We had them running around a map where I made up rules for a a a small board game that they were all playing together. Uh yeah, again, it got really weird. And and again, it just got to the point where when the game came out, there was no way people these people who had been involved weren't playing because they needed to see how Dylan was in the game. They needed to see if this Dylan who they'd been talking to, they need to see what that bastard was up to next. You know, like they they had to play the game. And it And everything that I do in the meta then ties into the game in some way. So, this map here uh is actually like a a mini recreation of a part in the game where you're moving around the

map. So, when people got up to this bit in the game, they were all like, "Oh man, look, it's this bit that we that we did in the meta. This is amazing." Um yeah, the the whole point the bottom line of this is that by running these things uh it it really builds hype in your servers to the point where on launch day, you actually know your game's going to probably do pretty decently because all of these people are going to go crazy over it. Which is um again, obviously, a massively useful thing. You know, like if you already know on launch day that you've got thousands of people who are quite frankly going to going to definitely buy your game on launch week, what more can you ask for right now? That's that's the dream, right? Knowing your game is going to sell. Uh and that and that's kind of the point when we get to the launch of one of our games, we know it's going to sell at least this sort of base level of well because we already can see all of these people are going to buy it. Uh and there's loads of other benefits

as well to doing this. So, the the day your the day your game comes out, what we've found with our last few games is that we get a a flurry of positive reviews on our Steam page because all of these people want to buy the game, and they want to be one of the first to leave a review on Steam of it. They They want to be able to leave a review and then link their review in the Discord saying, "Guys, I've just reviewed it." And then other people will say, "I've reviewed it as well." And we all know that that Steam reviews are pretty useful, you know? The The more and the faster you're getting Steam reviews, the more potential people are going to see that and are going to going to decide, "Yeah, go on then. I'll I'll buy the game. It seems like people are enjoying this." Um and and of course then that just it's kind of kind of rolls along. The more reviews you're getting and the more people who are playing it in a very small space of time, you know, if you're funneling all of these people directly on launch day, that shoots you up the Steam charts. Uh it's just it's it's a flurry of action

that all happens on launch day thanks to this Discord. I mean, obviously there's outside sources as well, you know, you're obviously still doing all the trying to get press and YouTubers and streamers, etc. to play your game, but you will at least know that this chunk of people are going to be hardcore supporting your game on launch day. Um so yeah, I I said a bunch of words. So this is just kind of a little round up just to really show how simple everything I've just said is. Nothing I've just said in the last what, like 45 minutes, was really that hard in any way. The vast majority of what I do is incredibly simple. It can be a lot of work is the one thing I would say. Um especially, you know, when I was talking about the meta stuff, that would be me every day doing announcement in the afternoon and then pretty much just what, sitting back and watching it happen or maybe nudging it in different directions for the next couple of hours afterwards. Uh there's um yeah,

it can be a lot of work and so I I guess something I would say is that if you're in a situation where you're looking at this and thinking, "Yeah, but I need to make my game. I don't have time for any of this what is quite frankly stupid crap. It's I would find someone to do it for you. Whether that's a partner or just bringing an extra person on because it genuinely is I think we all know at this point this stuff is important now. It always kind of was but it's just so important that you are actually getting You can make the best game ever but if you haven't done any of this kind of stuff and it gets to launch day and no one knows it exists. Plus obviously a terrible thing to happen for your game. But yeah, I would I would very much suggest starting off simple, not doing some of the stuff for example that I did with Hypnospace. Maybe maybe start off less crazy than I have. And and as well, you know, the stuff I talked about there's other stuff you could be doing. There's this website discordbots.org

which where you know, where I found these bots that I use and where there are thousands of bots that people have made that all do very specific functionality. And it's literally a case of you click the one you want and click the install button and it installs into your server and then you can tinker around with it. It's worth going there and just looking for weird stuff that you can do cuz there's bound to be loads of ideas that I haven't thought of that would work very well specifically for what the theme of your game is. Right, I'm done. Thank you very much for listening. There is time for questions. About 15 minutes so there's a microphone there. I think if you basically just exactly what you're doing line up and that's great. Thank you. Hi, I'm Garrett. Hello. How was the sound? It should be. Maybe maybe try talking louder into it. I don't know. Hello. Okay. Yeah, I can hear you. Yeah.

At any time did you feel like you were running a Stanford prison experiment? It It's very It is interesting like when I started doing this stuff, you It doesn't um It's very hard. When I was just describing stuff to you then, I actually don't think I really got across like how how crazy it gets. There was stuff I I went on holiday for 1 week uh in the summer last year, and I was basically just on my phone for the entire time because people There was those people in the server who in the Not Tonight server who had um all convinced themselves that there was another spy in the server. I hadn't done anything. Like I just I purposely tried to leave it for a week cuz I was trying to I was trying to relax. And And I did not really relax much because these people kept messaging me over and over again. Um and uh yeah, it it You You don't know what it's going to be like until you do one of these community things. Uh but you at least at the time

know it's probably a good thing. Uh so, yeah. Was there ever like a point where you like, "Oh my gosh, these guys are going too crazy. I need to like do something to like calm people down?" Yeah, with with Not Tonight especially cuz it's cuz it's it's about Brexit. It's a little bit of a political game. And that was a tricky one. It's kind of stuff I didn't really touch on the moderation stuff. Um that one in particular got difficult at times because there were people who were talking politics as the meta, and they would have heated debates. And then someone would say, "Guys, calm down." And they'd say, "Oh, it's just meta. It's just the meta. We're just playing the meta." And And at that point you're like well, okay, but maybe yeah. It It was It was It was a difficult one. Uh Hypnospace was easier because there was less politics about it. Uh but yeah, people definitely go too far at times, and you need to sometimes just like take them to side, just like go into a direct message and say, "I'm really happy that you're

getting so involved with this and you're so infused, but maybe use half the words you're using and don't use caps anymore. That would be really nice. Yeah. Hi there. So, you said yeah, in your talk you discussed doing this for various titles. How do you get buying and trust from the developers to handle their IP properly and taking in all these new directions to build up the game? Yeah, a lot of the time what I do, especially before I start the meta stuff for a game, is I will I will have like chats with a developer where I mean, by the time I do a meta, I normally, you know, I would hope that I know the game pretty well at that point, but I like to sit with developer and say, "I'm planning to do this for the meta and use these characters. Does this fit into into what you're doing?" There's a game the the game that I'm announcing like in a few weeks is a game about like taking a journey from one place to another. And so, for

the meta for that one, right now my plan is to make the meta be starting from somewhere else going to the start point of the game. So, the idea is all of these people will play will play this Discord game and they will get to this place. And when they get to this place, we'll tell them, "When you get here, we're launching the game." And then they will get to the place. Obviously, you know, behind the scenes I'm going to be controlling it, making sure they actually get there. And the game isn't delayed inevitably. But uh yeah, we're going to make it so they go there. And then the idea is the game will launch and they will carry on their journey then. You know, like it's for them it's the obvious kind of story arc. They're playing the next chapter of what they've already played. So, yeah, it's definitely talking to a developer and working out is does this storyline make sense? Does this Discord setup make sense for your game? Essentially. Hey. Um so, if the Discord is kind of like your

endpoint where you're gathering everybody to build up for the eventual game launch, um how do you build the entry points? Like, uh Twitter, for example, or spamming Reddit if there's other ways of doing that? Yeah. I mean, I I guess that's still is is a whole of its own, right? Like, about how you're actually um sort of building up presences in other places. Uh I mean, a a lot of it is doing very similar stuff, you know? Um uh when when it comes to things like Twitter, uh it can be a slow build-up, but you can do things, you know, like uh running, you know, like I was saying, I was I was pushing people into the Discord by giving them something that makes them want to. Or you need to ask yourself that question about other platforms as well. Why are people going to follow you on Twitter? You know, why are they going to follow the account for your game? Is there anything that you can offer them? Like, is there a reason why they should join you? Is it that you tell people, "If you follow this game

account on Twitter, then I'm going to pick some random people who have followed, and they are going to, you know, like, be able to pick a character that's in your game or something like that." There's lots of different ways that you can with with all social platforms, really, that you can incentivize people to want to actually follow you. A lot of the time, just saying, "Follow me cuz my game's great." is not really enough because everybody's saying that. No one's saying, "Uh you can follow me if you want. My game's crap, whatever." Uh yeah, it's it's all about incentivizing people, essentially. Hello. Hello. So, um you mentioned that your one of the hooks to your Discord server is like telling, "Hey, come play a bit of the game or an early version or an early version." Yeah. But you keep the community going all the way until lunch. So, I was wondering how well um in what stage of the of the game development should you start

building community? Because I think you can't do that too long or people will get a good That's a good question. That's a good question. Uh so, what I normally do is I normally I normally tell people that I like to announce games that are, you know, under my publishing label uh somewhere between 4 to 6 months before the game is is going to actually be ready. Uh yeah, it's it's going to be released. Uh the reason I say this is because I think it works time-wise. It It It's like you're saying, you know, if you if you announce it a year before, you can't run a crazy meta game for an entire year. That would That would destroy you. Yeah. And also, people would probably just lose interest. Uh I I think that the 4-to-6-month uh time frame works because it's, you know, sort of you announce in that first uh month or two, you do the beta for the game. That you can then sort of have a month to be um One thing I'll sometimes

do is deliver feedback that happened from the beta All right. uh to people. So, uh so, for example, uh with this game Family Man we've got right now, we ran a beta. We were tracking a bunch of stats from the beta. And now, every few days, we're putting up these images in the Discord that are like uh you know, like 1,000 people did this thing in the game. And here was a decision you all had to make. 40% of people made this decision. Like the analytics or something like that? Say again? Like analytics in the game? Exactly. Exactly. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And uh so, right, that's the stage we're at with Family Man right now, where we're doing this that the the the meta hasn't started for that game yet. Right now, we're delivering these uh cool ideas to them. Uh we've also in that one just started doing it so that each week we're giving them the opportunity to name characters and and dogs, things like that in the game. And then, uh when we then know, cuz the game the game is nearly ready essentially, you know, it's on the cusp of be of of us saying,

"Okay, this is this is ready to go." At that point then, when we know that, we can then start running sort of this intense meta thing for for sort of a couple of months to the point where we've built people sort of into a fever by the time the game comes out. Uh but yeah, I I think sometimes if you do longer than that, um it can drag. It can really drag. At Descenders, we did it uh we announced the uh the game and launched the Discord server 8 months before the game came out, and that felt like it dragged a little bit. There was times when we were just sort of you know, people were coming in the Discord saying like, "Uh what what can we even do in here? Why am I even in here?" Uh you don't want that to happen is the thing, cuz then people just start leaving. Okay. So yeah, it's definitely worth tightening it up essentially. Thank you. Cool. Cheers. Um I'd be curious to hear a little bit more about the demographics of these people. I'm curious about the age ranges and the gender balance, and I'm also

curious if this was a subset of your total audience for the game. Yeah. Um what are some Are there any unique characteristics to the Discord audience as compared to other segments? Say that last bit again, sorry. Um So, if this is just like one segment of your total audience, like some people came to you through other marketing, are there any unique characteristics to the Discord audiences that you could observe as compared to other people? And I'm curious about the demographics. Yeah. It Well, an interesting thing about this is that uh uh one thing that you really want to be doing is trying to mold your Discord community to be what you would like it to be. Uh and again, I I didn't really touch on moderation stuff so much cuz I think there are quite a lot of other talks about it, but in general, I want it such that when I get to the launch of the game, um the the people who I have fostered, and especially, you know, sort of like the the mods and the regulars in there, are

as as simple as it sounds, just nice people. You don't want it so that when you launch the game, you've got this toxic group of people who when someone comes into the Discord asking for help about the game, they're just shut down, you know, and and people are just, you know, doing sarcastic being sarcastic at them and stuff like that. You want it so that you are fostering these people. And and I don't think it's that hard to do, quite frankly. It's It's uh I I personally have this I don't think a lot of people do this, but I have this like uh sort of scorched-earth mentality to it where if I see someone in a server uh being any form of bad, I just get rid of them immediately. I don't do like a a three strikes and you're out or anything like that. I know a lot of places do do that. For me, if I see one person just saying a word, you know, that I that is a word that is not okay with me, they are gone immediately. And I find that works quite well for me because by the time I get to the launch, peop- people

just know. If someone comes in and starts talking weirdly, other people are like, "Yeah, you might not want to talk like that because Mike is going to see it in a second." Um which, you know, is is I don't know. It It It works, I think, because I think when people don't do that and they do the three strikes or whatever, I think a lot of the time that's when, you know, like a YouTuber is trying to build a community for for their streams and their videos and stuff. We make games, and we don't want I I I don't want idiots talking about or playing my games. I just want nice people. I mean, I've, you know, it's it's a bit I mean, we've seen the Steam forums, so that's never going to happen, but yeah, that's kind of what I tried to aim for. The actual demographic graphic of people in the server, to be honest, is not a thing I think much about because because quite frankly, like when the game comes out, the important thing is that this

group of people are just ready to go as your sort of hype you know, sort of hype train for the game. I I think a lot of the time it is it is younger people, you know? And we've had some servers like the Family Man server, we've had a lot of what you could tell is very young people coming in who, you know, you you can you realize they're probably not going to buy the game when it comes out and are just looking for a free game. Um but but it honestly, with each game I've done, it's just kind of worked itself out in the end. You find you slowly but surely you find the the people who are right for your community. And you just start to mold it around them, really. Thank you. Thanks. What time is it? Hi there. Hi. Um how do you manage um the process of funneling people into the one uh community access point that you want people to be in, like the Discord, because that's where your energy is going. Um if people are starting their own community, like a Facebook group or Facebook community uh

external to that, like how do you how do you manage the process of stopping the fragmentation of the It's for for me, it's um it's just a whole lot of spamming that link everywhere, you know? I I wish it was uh I wish it was more professional than that, quite frankly, but really, when I announce the game, I just make sure that Discord link is everywhere, you know? I'm putting it I'm putting it in the press release for the game. I'm putting it at the end of the video. I'm putting it in the trailers' description. I'm spreading it on Facebook and Twitter. I'm I'm like I say I'm I'm emailing. I I will directly email all of these free Steam key places saying here's the game I've got coming up. Please, would do you want to post this link on your site? Uh it's it's just a a whole lot of just putting it absolutely Subreddits are another good one. Uh Reddit, there's loads of people who want to play a a free early copy of a game. Uh you know, there's there's there's the games one, indie games one, game dev one. There's loads of different Subreddits where

there's tens of thousands of people in those who are pretty happy to click a link and sign up to a thing. Um so, yeah, the the horrible answer is just spam as many people as you can. There's I would say there's nowhere not to put it, you know? Because because if people have showed if people have joined a Facebook group or something, they're interested in the game in the first place, so you might as well um try and funnel them into that place. And if if someone does create their own group community group that you don't have control over, do you try to create your own version of that and just um drive people back to the Discord or just let that be? Uh I usually I mean, if you're in that situation where people are creating their own group, then that's pretty nice for you, right? That shows that there's a decent amount of interest in your game. So, I I don't think I would ever try and take control of that or close it down. Uh it's more like I I I guess I'd see if there was ways I could support that group. Uh you know, if it if it made sense to be telling people, "Hey, there's this other group with these other people in it as well." I might do

that. Uh but I I don't think I I don't think I'd ever be in a position where I'd want to sort of take control. Uh I guess there might be a situation where maybe the group is not nice and you and you kind of want to shut that down, but I I personally haven't been in that situation yet, so. Thank you. Cheers. Hello. Hello. Uh so, coming to the part that you mentioned that some of the developers like me or someone, they would think that we don't have time for all all this stuff. We have to make our games, right? So, we might have to go and find some partner or someone who someone else who would do this for us. But, I feel like in the earlier stages of the game that the amount of involvement and the amount of knowledge that we have about the game, some other person wouldn't be able to do that good in the game sharing and all. So, I would still feel that I would need to get involved and I would still have to spend a lot of time doing all all of this stuff and get away from the development. Yeah, cuz you cuz you're like me, you're a control freak, right? Like you you need to Yeah, you you you hate the idea that somebody else will be running this thing for you. Yeah. Unfortunately, I've

been having to learn that I have to let go at some points and just, you know, I have to try and let other people take take charge on other things. I would imagine that would be if if you just do not have the time to be doing this stuff. If you can admit to yourself, there's no way I can do this, it's important it's it's still important and you can't it's better to try and find someone who can do it for you than to just not do it. Uh so, I would probably say you you need to find someone who is passionate to do it essentially. So, like there are two parts. Maybe I'm not able to find the good person, so I'll I'll have to invest some more time finding the right person. Or should I take some time out of my schedule to do all of this stuff myself? It It's different with each case. I like I you know, it depends on the game you're making and the and the time you have and and whether if you're doing this will delay your game by a long time and you know, it's There will be situations where people most people making games is quite intense, right? Especially as you're getting up to the launch of your game.

So, it might be that you can't be doing this stuff at launch because having the intensity of making a game and the intensity of running a Discord server might make you explode. So, so yeah, it sounds like from your situation you probably maybe need to find someone and just sort of grit your teeth and and and see what they can do. So. Okay. Thank you. Cheers. Hey Mike. Hello. Um do you see any value in doing company Discords where you're putting your games and like that? all the people do? I know there's all publishers who do. Um I was talking to one of them from Raw Fury yesterday. They have just a singular Discord server and then channels for each of the things. I don't like to do that. It's less work doing that obviously. But I don't like to do that because I I think there's benefits I would argue that most players

don't give a crap about me. You know, they don't care who No More Robots are. They care what the game is. That's why they joined the server in the first place. So why would they want to join a Discord server that's filled with other games they don't care about? And they care about the singular one channel. I imagine for you it might make sense because all of your games, you know, so you've you've got the games and the sequels and they're all sort of quite similar. So maybe it would make sense for for someone like you, but there's other benefits as well, you know, you getting a verified server. If you put your game on the Discord store, they then put the store link. It automatically appears at the top of your Discord server. So people can now buy Descenders through the through the through the Descenders Discord server. Um So I I think I think there's benefits to each way, but I just like my way better. Yeah. Thank you. Thank you Mike. I really appreciate this great information about pre-launch prep.

Now No worries. is there anything in here that can help a product that has gone through a less than stellar launch already? Yeah, it's a tricky one the whole, you know, is there something you can do after launch of a game? It's it's not just the Discord stuff just, you know, for for everything. Um Um I I imagine if I was in a situation where I'd sort of had a a launch that wasn't great, uh I would start to wonder how I can sort of take what I've already got and maybe even spin it off into a separate product that can then be, you know, sort of announced and have a a beta for, etc., as as a separate entity. Um but it but it depends on It just depends on what it is, I guess, really. But yeah, it's it's it's a tricky one. I don't think anything I talked about today

can can probably help after a launch, to be honest. It's probably pre-launch stuff, this, really. So. Sorry, that's probably not the answer you wanted to hear, is it? Cool. All right. Thank you again. Cheers, everyone.