How Killer Queen Built an Esports Scene on an Indie Budget

Thanks a lot for the creators of Killer Queen Arcade, my friends Nick Mikros and Josh DeBonis, and also special thank yous to fellow KQ players and fans, Dylan Higgins, Charles Pratt, Josh Eklow, Tiana Tan, Joe Pollard, Christopher Pressinger, and Eric Clarkson for helping me put together this talk. And of course, thank you to the rest of the KQ community. You guys are amazing. So, who am I? I am currently the producer at Funtronic Labs, an LA game studio. But more importantly, for this talk, I am I was previously the the COO of Bumblebear Games from 2015 to 2017. And today, I will be talking about Killer Queen Arcade and how we built a competitive community that spans the entire country as an indie and what you can learn from what we've done. This isn't a postmortem on the game or the community, but rather breakdown of a lot of the things that Bumblebear has done that I think are that can be helpful for other

competitive gaming communities to learn from, indie or not. So, Killer Queen Arcade, for those of you who don't know, is a five-on-five arcade game created by Josh DeBonis and Nick Mikros in 2013. Two teams of five players compete against each other to be the first to accomplish one of three different victory conditions on a map. An economic victory by collecting 12 berries scattered around the map and bringing them back to your hive one at a time. A military victory by killing the opposing queen three times in a single game. Or a snail victory by riding a snail into your own team's goal. There's a video here that I've linked that goes into a lot more detail about the game itself. There's a lot of other mechanics to the game. For example, there is a queen character who is different than the other four players. Workers can become warriors. There's a speed gate. So, I highly encourage you to to that video later uh you get the chance. In roughly half a decade, Killer Queen

Arcade has gone from a niche New York arcade game for hipsters to a niche national arcade game for hipsters. Today, there are over 30 arcade machines available for public play in over 20 states, not counting the many privately owned cabs that are owned by individuals and corporations. Every year since 2016, World Championship, which is hosted in a different city every year, bringing in players from around the country to play to see who is the best team. In 20 uh 2016 in Austin, Texas, we had 150 players come to form over 50 uh 30 teams. And last year in 2018, we had Bumble Bash 3, which was in Portland, Oregon with 300 players and 60 teams. And recently, it was just announced that for 2019, we are going to be in Chattanooga, Tennessee. So, how does Killer Queen build communities? And more importantly, how can you apply this to your own game and to your own communities?

So, game design builds community. Killer Queen is designed to bring people together at its core. To even play the game, you need to physically be near a machine. You have to play together to win as a team. Uh you can't win by yourself. Well, you can, but it's pretty hard to. Local multiplayer means that you have to stand next to your teammates. And you also have to be in the same space with your competitors, too. And since you're all in the same place together during the same thing, you are by definition part of the same community. Um the game itself takes all 5 minutes to learn the basic rules, but it requires a lot of practice to work together effectively in order to play competitively. We also have messaging in the game that tells players to meet thy neighbors. This message occurs at the end of the match and encourages players to meet with each other, give high fives, congratulatory handshakes, talk about the match they just played, or even switch players to start a new game. It's also possible to add custom messages on the screen to talk about things like upcoming tournaments, free plays, meetups, and so forth. So, what can you learn from this?

Think about how the design of your game or the nature of your game itself facilitates building a community or building teams. Having a built-in messaging system can give subtle messages to players on how to behave while playing your game, as well as informing players about the larger community. If you're looking for other models of local competitive communities, look at collectible card games and fighting game communities or rec leagues like dodgeball and softball. See how they build their communities and see what they do to keep players engaged outside of playing the game. Um streaming and casting help build community. A lot of the KQ events will stream their games online to let people watch uh from wherever they are. The KQ arcade cabinet has a separate HDMI port built into the back of the cab. You can use either plug into a streaming PC to put the video online through Twitch or your streaming platform of your choice or you can put it to a TV or projector. You can also split that HDMI signal to put out to multiple streams, multiple projectors, and so forth. For bigger tournaments such as Bumble Bash, we'll also use apps like restream.io, which will allow us to show a single stream on multiple platforms or

splice multiple machine feeds into one stream. Um as you can see in the image over here, we have uh the community has created custom overlays that show uh the feed of the game, a player cam, commentator cam, as well as showing numbers of sets being won. Um I think this one has kill and death ratios at the bottom, also. Um this is another example of the one that we had at uh Bumble Bash in Portland. Um in addition, we also have an API that sends out event data such as kills, deaths, and berries collected. Um some scenes have taken that data and created their own stat displays. So, this is an example of one website that has stat tracking as well as logging event data based on where you are on the map. Um this uses a Raspberry Pi that gets plugged into the cab and then sends this data to a website. Um, this website is actually live right now if you go to bemorekq.com. Um, shout-outs to the Baltimore KQ community for putting this together.

So, yeah, build in streaming tools and make it easy to do things like organize tournaments and show information about your game and broadcast all of it so that it could be seen in the best light online and help raise your game's profile. Spectators can digest what's going on with the help of color commentators and stat displays so they can get into your game without having to actually play there to play the game or even be there. If you can't provide the tools yourself, see if you can open up your data for the community to help you with uh uh displaying it. Uh, provide instructions for folks on how to use all of this stuff. A lot of your fans may not be very technical, but if you have very clear instructions, they may be able to figure it out themselves. Um, down here is a link to a GitHub repo if you want to see an example of the API being used. Um, this is a app called KQ stats. Um, this was done by uh Kevin Snyder as well as some few other folks so thank you for doing that. Um, events help build communities. Bumble Bear hosts its national tournament with a trophy and a custom marquee that it gives to the winner of a tournament. Uh, local scenes also host

their regular events also. Because these arcade machines are already in public venues, we try to partner with them to host events. So, you will see KQ tournaments and events in bars, bowling alleys, family fun centers, arcades, barcades, and even in board game shops. For tournament play, two commonly used apps that are used to help organize and manage the tournaments are smash.gg and challonge. We can use these apps to help players register ahead of time, set up pools and brackets, and post uh results in real time online for players to look at. In addition to doing competitive events, another kind of event to get players interested in playing the game without explicitly focusing on competitive play is to do theme competitions or fundraisers for organizations such as Extra Life. Despite the fact that KQ is a competitive team game, scenes have created less competitive events such as scrambles where teams are drawn from a hat, social nights, draft nights where team queens take turns picking players, and we have our own version of Battle Royale called Bubsy. Silly things like theme or costume events like a winter formal create a

much more informal environment and lets people focus on having fun with and around the game. So, yeah. Events build a community, not the other way around. Organize events as soon as you can. The first Killer Queen national tournament was in 2016, but there were tournaments and meetups held by the community long before that. If you feel that your community wants one, then create one. Or if you can't for whatever reason, help them out in any way you can. The event itself doesn't have to be a tournament. It can be a play test, a mixer, a meetup. Just do it often and do it frequently. Don't worry about failure or an event being bad. You're not trying to plan a Fire Festival. You're just giving players a chance You're just giving players a chance to play together in a somewhat organized fashion. If you do make mistakes, just learn from them and do better next time. I'll talk a little bit more about online events in another slide. But creating online tournaments and having everyone meet in a Discord is a great way to do an event without the need of having everyone to be in the same place. Uh one interesting point um about

planning events is the importance of consistency. Uh in New York, there is an event every single Friday at NYU in Brooklyn called 5 E 5 Fridays. Um it's hosted by one of the professors, Charles J. Pratt. He noticed that by being consistently every single Friday, players can always just show up whenever they have a free Friday as opposed to having to plan for the event that only happens once a month, which lessens the hassle of having to come to play the game. You'll have regulars that come there every week, but you'll also have access to people who may show up every 2 weeks or maybe only just once a month. If you have an individual player-based game, but you want to have folks competing in events like teams, there are ways to organize that too. At Bumble Bash 3, we created an Olympic style scoring system called the Dang system that gave points per player. At the end of the tournament, we grouped players by region and added the points together of the top 17 players of each region to determine the winner. The winning city got an arcade machine. Engaging with the community builds community. Um Bumble Bear travels across the

country to KQ events to talk to players and fans and play with them. Bumble Bear will also bring with them new maps, new game modes to test out, and answer questions about Killer Queen. Uh every year there's also a state of Killer Queen announcement where they talk about the upcoming road map and plans. Um and when I talk about engaging with the community, um Nick and Josh really really engage with the community. So this was recently at the South Florida. There was a Killer Queen event there. Um that's Nick in the I think hot tub being fed a steak. Uh So yeah, um travel to events to promote the game. Make yourselves accessible to the community for direct conversations and feedback, and engage only as much as you're comfortable. Attending community events legitimizes those events in the players' eyes and encourages people to attend and builds goodwill. Uh you should also do regular testing with your community. Try out ideas, keep good ones, throw away the rest. And even with your bad ideas, let your fans have fun with it, and you never know what would happen. Um we try game modes all

the time. For a long time there was a mode in Killer Queen that had scorpions. Um which having scorpions and bears and bees, I I thought it was a terrible idea, but people liked it and whatever. Um keep the game fresh. It keeps the game fresh and people will keep talking about it. Um turn these tests into an event. If you can't travel to other scenes, play online, host and play with your fans and players once a week, do an AMA, blog. Uh you can even do things like having regular tests where the highest scoring player that week or month gets to challenge the designers and developers. Uh and whatever you do, um put it online and stream it. Uh if there's one thing that you should take away from this talk, it should be that aside from designing a very compelling and engaging game, Bumble Bear's accessibility and engagement with its very, very active community is a key factor to the suc- success of Killer Queen. Being part of your community gives you the opportunity to get insight about what the community wants to say or to see, as well as instills confidence that the developers will be able to shape the game into something that

people want to play. And even if Bumble Bear can't do it themselves, sometimes creating the opportunity for the community to help fill in those gaps can be still just as effective. Having said that, I don't want you to walk away from this talk thinking that Bumble Bear knocks it out of the park every single time. At one point, we came up with the idea of establishing a membership-based national Killer Queen League. You pay a fee, you get some cool stuff out of it, and you help fund an organization dedicated to managing a competitive uh national Killer Queen League. I'm not going to get into the details of what it all entailed, but long story short, it was not well received by the community for various reasons. Uh this is one of the posts that was on the Facebook page in response. This was a situation where we got insight that the community wanted something, but we didn't create what they actually needed, and we executed very poorly. And as a result, the community told us how they felt. So, we realized the idea wasn't quite a right fit, so we wind up shelving it. So, merch and fan art build communities.

Merch is merch. People like to buy merch to support the things they love. Originally, Bumble Bear had an Amazon store, but we decided to create our own storefront. We had issues with people making cheaper counterfeit versions of our stuff and selling it on our product pages. So, it was just easier for us to take our merchandise completely off Amazon and just do our own thing. If you don't want to deal with your own inventory and stuff, and I don't blame you, there are companies that you can partner with such as Fangamer or Sanshee. Um in addition to Bumble Bear created merch, Bumblebear encourages the community to create their own merch and express themselves in the universe of Killer Queen. It gives the fans a chance to contribute to something that they already love, and our fans make some really amazing things. From picture frames, t-shirts, posters. Um, I'm actually wearing a fan created shirt. This was done by one of the Chicago players, uh, Michael Sparza. Um, and yeah, we have one rule for fan merch. Don't directly rip off the art from the game. It should be transformative. Reinterpret the art in your own way. Um, so all these three things were

created by our fans for either events or for teams. The calendar in the middle was actually a fundraising project for Girls Who Code. Um, Bumblebear also makes our source assets available for fans to use, which I didn't think was a crazy thing until I told people and they thought I was crazy. If you dig around the press kit, you will find player sprites as well as some quality versions of our logo. And a lot of people will use these assets for the basis of fan art or for graphics to use for their posters, t-shirts, and all sorts of other things. Um, the image on the right over here is an example of someone using one of our sprites and customizing it for their posters. All these other images here are fan art and event posters that the community has made. And you'll be very surprised that, you know, your fans may be able to make art art better than you. In addition to encouraging folks to create and sell fan created merchandise, Bumblebear takes it a step further and will actually sell a a community approved community created merch on its own online store for a cut of the sale plus cost of shipping and handling.

Um, these posters over here are created by also I think a Chicago, uh, player, uh, John Doong, and they're they're gorgeous and they're available on the store right now if you want to buy them. Um, we'll also do the same thing at events like Bumble Bash where we have a merch table where fans can sell their stuff there for a percentage cut. By keeping things to merch table at events, you can see all the kinds of cool things that people are making and it keeps all the merch selling in one area at a venue. The only other note I have is that you should be careful about tax laws as you're conducting business in some states and they may consider that vending and therefore you have to deduct or collect sales tax for it. I'm not a lawyer, I'm not an accountant, I'm just letting you know ahead of time. So yeah, there are caveats to making your own merch but like I said there are companies that can do it for you. Either way, you know, it's definitely something you should do. Encourage people to create fan art, do competitions, do contests with it. And if you're as crazy as Bumblebear, sell merch actually created by your friends or by your fans. And if you're worried about things like

rip-offs and stuff like that, in my time at Bumblebear, I found it very effective to tell people to have to make their art more transformative. It challenges them to make something better without saying no and in the end they're likely going to make something cool and in something that you may not have thought about yourself. Sponsors can help build communities. In order for competitive communities to thrive, they need competitive events. A healthy community has frequent events and you're going to need to pay for all of that and sometimes tournament entrance fees alone may not be enough. Bumblebear encourages people to host their own tournaments and to find their own sponsorships for these events. In general, Bumblebear's open to letting folks arrange their own events as long as it doesn't appear to look like it is an event endorsed or sponsored directly by Bumblebear or Killer Queen Arcade. Killer Queen Arcade has also gotten to the point now we have been lucky enough to have the attention of some of the largest sponsors and marketing brands like Red Bull. It is through a lot of hard work from people within our community and within Bumblebear that has raised KQ's profile to this level.

Because the game's located in a lot of bars, beer sponsors are great sponsorship source for us. These are two events, one in Portland and one in Minneapolis, both sponsored by beer companies. I think Surly Brewing sponsors Minneapolis and Not Your Father's Root Beer uh Killer Queen Events in Portland. Um before you actually pitch a sponsor for an event, um here are some things you probably want to think about. How much control do you want to have over the portrayal of your game? How do you think the community will react? Is that something that's actually important for you? Are you now sanctioning official events yourself, and can there only be one event? What does that mean for non-sanctioned events? Are you, the game's creators, the only ones able to seek out sponsorships now? And what does an agreement look like between you and the sponsor? Um what I I added this image here just because uh there was a lot of text, but just as an example, um this is Richie's Plank Experience, which is a VR thing. And one of the cool things that they do is that they also will do um sponsored versions of their VR experience. So, I

think this one's um Fear Factor, uh the Richie's Plank Experience, and I thought that was really cool. Um so, once you've thought about that, you want to look for sponsors that are most appropriate to your community. In addition to beer companies, there's a wide variety of adjacent gaming-adjacent companies that are willing to sponsor game events. Um food and beverage, which can include anything from snack distributors to local restaurants. Venues can help you also get a discount on rental costs. Uh there are also a lot of people companies, or companies that target uh people in the tech or tech-related field are always looking for marketing opportunities. Uh gaming hardware brands uh and lifestyle brands that want to sell clothes and consumables and apparel to your players. Uh if you partner with a bar or venue, oftentimes they'll have their own food and beverage marketing reps who are usually pretty interested and open to helping sponsor different events for that venue. Uh in terms of the kinds of sponsorship opportunities available, uh there are a lot of options. Uh asking for money is one of the more difficult ones, um but asking for merchandise and swag for use at the event or for giving away as

prizes uh are much easier. Uh I'm not going to read through this list, um you know, it's pretty self-explanatory. Uh you're at GDC. Just take a look around at the many different sponsors we have here at GDC, and see how they make their presence known. From the lanyards they're wearing to the free t-shirts to the hats that you get or you'll probably get sometime this week. Um when pitching a sponsor, be sure to know the following: your audience attendee demographic and size. Where will this be broadcasted or streamed and what's the size and demographics of that? Uh what else are people going to be doing at this event? What's your social media reach? How will you be promoting your sponsors at the event? Any solid data that you might have for previous events and similar events or even surveys that you do with your community. And more important most importantly, what are sponsors going to be able to get out of your event? You want to let them know that they're going to gain something positive out of the entire experience. That players and spectators alike will be able to take something positive from having that brand associated with your game.

I say sponsorships can help people or can help communities because sometimes it can backfire. Maybe your brand isn't the kind of brand that likes to look like it's sold out. Maybe it does. And for those of you who don't know, this is from when Street Fighter 5 tried to do sponsored content skins and this didn't go over very well. Uh social media builds communities. Um these are just some of the many Facebook pages our community has created for Killer Queen and they're all divided by region. Facebook pages and groups allow fans to organize their lives outside of the game and they function as a way for players to organize themselves in real life. It also helps the community support each other and stay connected when they're not playing your game. Uh Bumble Bear itself did not create any of these Facebook pages, but we are a lot are part of most of these. It's another great way for us to engage our community and it's always to good to know what your community is talking about even if it's memes most of the time. Uh uh so yeah, build your social media very important to build communities. I'm not going to talk about this too much. There was a really cool talk yesterday about Discord. Uh it's 2019. If you

don't have a Slack, a Discord, or a Facebook page uh and you you're you're a game, you're you're behind. Uh champions help build communities. Find your super fans as you build your communities and enable them to be your champions. For Killer Queen, these were the ones who helped organize the first local tournaments in different cities. They were the ones that created all the cool merch, that streamed our game, that did commentary, that got new players into the game. Um we even created an award for this, the Charles J. Pratt Community Service Award, uh which was won in the first year by uh by by Charles J. Pratt. Um but reward your champions. Uh if you have an upcoming game, give them keys to give away. Give them assets if they want if they ask for them to make art and uh and fan and merch. Uh ask for their feedback. Ask for them to help organize an event and help ask them to help you promote your game to new fans. Um another thing that we did at Bumble Bear was that we had a small committee of fans that we talked to about upcoming events and ideas. If you have an idea you want to do with the community, it's always good to have a small group of people to test it with first before you

go forward with something. They can help embrace an idea or an event. They can help hype up the community. Um and in general, they just help make good ideas great. Uh partnering with a streamer or YouTube was something that we always wanted to do, but given the nature of our game, uh this makes it kind of difficult. Um luckily, most of you aren't making arcade games, so that shouldn't be an excuse for you guys. Well, for you all. Um other communities can help build your community. Killer Queen attracts all sorts of players looking for competition. We have folks from the fighting game community, speed runners, recreational league dodgeball, softball players, who are just attracted to competition uh and the competitiveness of KQ. It would be smart to engage or partner with other communities to cross promote events and games. At Bumble Bash, we will actually host games made by other indies. Uh so if the image here is a game by uh called Death Ball Arcade by Tony Hauber, who's the one playing it. Um it's worth looking into other competitive gaming communities and think about the opportunity for collaboration

on events or promotion. Um in this situation, I think a rising tide lifts all boats. Formalized communication builds communities. Clear communication builds trust, prevents confusion and uncertainty about your game. State of the game announcements, public road maps, and blogs are all very important. This is the Trello board for Killer Queen Black, which is the upcoming Killer Queen title coming out for the PC and Switch. Please buy it when it comes out. They did a pretty good job of showing their work with the public Trello showing release notes, upcoming development, outstanding work, and so forth. With all forms of formal communication, keep it simple, straightforward, and consistent so it's not a pain in the butt to maintain. And if things change, be sure to update it. Also, try not to update or make any major changes before on your game before tournament. Otherwise, you're going to piss off your fans. I thought this was an original idea, and then like somebody showed me this on Saturday that Fortnite actually has this, too. And then obviously Epic has their own Trello board, so you know, it's a popular idea and you know, it's

easy. You can do it. So, final thoughts. I can't stress the importance of working with your community and enabling them to do cool stuff with your game when you're an indie. They can surprise you with what they're capable of doing, and they are literally the lifeblood of your game. Oh good, I blacked everything out. Here's an example of where things could have gone south. We had a cab owner who just wasn't feeling the game, and so they were talking about getting rid of the cabinet. But through the efforts of our community hosting events like fundraisers, meetups, you know, we organized our events ourselves there. Or just just showing up and giving the game some love, that cab has never left the venue and still continues to generate money for the owner to this day by way of quarters and food and beverage when the players come to play. So, yeah. If you're indie, be nimble with your community and be personable and authentic to your game. To an extent, you can respond to and work with your communities in ways that the bigger studios can't. The community can be very forgiving of your mistakes if you show

the effort of trying to make the game better. Be clever about how you do things and don't take no for an answer. Move fast because the big boys can't and don't let anything hold you back. If you're a larger company and studio and watching this talk, engage with your community and empower them and celebrate them. Learn about what they really want and really need because you may have more noise to deal with with a larger community than us as an indie. Experiment with your game and listen to the community and build goodwill. If you're scared of backlash and negative feedback from things going wrong, run ideas by a subset of your community and see how they react. Do the fun things that indies like us could only wish we could do with money. And open up a little bit. If you want to know more about Killer Queen, we have our Twitter link, the Facebook link, and our website here. This Saturday we are doing Killer Queen San Francisco over at Brewcade SF. So, please check it out there. Otherwise, look up your local scenes for Killer Queen machine and come join the community and

play this dumby game with us. Uh oh, in exchange for me using Nick in the pool, I had to put up a picture of Nolan Bushnell for some reason. But yeah, I guess we have time for maybe two questions. So, if anyone has any questions, please step up. Uh if not, um thank you very much.