Panel: How To Engage Communities To Grow Your Business

[Music] the most important thing here is we have hip-hop gamers belt here which has just recently been touched by the tom cruise who jared just interviewed for a top gun so it's really awesome he actually he didn't spin the wheel though did he he he just he just [Laughter] so i'm going to get everybody to introduce themselves i'm going to start with sam hi everybody i'm sam fisher i'm ceo ceo of hyper hippo games hyper pro entertainment uh we we build mobile games mostly in the idol genre adventure capitalist adventure communist

adventure ages are three of our live titles i'm amy veneer i run video game strategy for fandom hey everyone i'm yaprakta carmine i'm the ceo and founder of gamejolt it's a social media platform for gamers all right what's up y'all yo jack you the best and i love your hats you know so you know i go down so i'm hip-hop gamer a little bit about me um my grandmother she taught me how to play video games when i was four years old now it's officially my career so today i'm on the front end of the business i'm a journalist um i make songs for different video games i'm a content creator host streamer and on the back end i have a ton of partners that i do big business with to help other businesses remain authentic in a space so that's uh furious esports hot 97 logitech g amd the dual and pelicans and the saints and and more so what i do is help companies be authentic so because you can't buy your way to success in the

industry you still got to respect the dollar and respect the culture so i help them understand that guys hello uh so my name is bill i'm the ceo and co-founder of addicting games and we're a casual gaming studio that's been around for 20 years now uh we focus on cross-platform games so we have games like little big snake which are cross-platform we recently have started exploring web 3 and crypto so ev dot io is our big forte into that and uh we're really excited because this week we're on the front page of twitch at justin khan we had this big tournament so we've you know trying to bridge web 2 into web 3 and uh just trying to have fun doing the whole process and you know learning from when first time in a conference in two years so nice to be here nice to see everyone and hopefully keep getting these seats filled more and more and get get our industry networking again like like it was so happy to be here fantastic well that's our community but what do we mean by community when we're talking about um

our game our game players i'm going to check that to you sam because i know you did a lot of deep thought about you oh well thank you yeah community uh community is really everything right i mean the whole idea of community why do we get up every morning and doing what we're doing and it becomes more and more apparent about the importance of the community i mean it's just this beautiful thing when you can do something and you've touched the lives of somebody when you actually have done something and somebody else comes up to you and says that really meant a lot to me and i want to be a part of your world and for somebody who wants to be a part of our world yeah i like that let's get it so i don't know yeah i was i was going to say i think that in gaming we think about the word community as are our core players and and that's actually true but if you think about the way that community has evolved over the last 20 25 years it's gone from the folks that are very likely to play your game and so you don't really need to to think about

them too much as the ones that you really want to talk to and think about the most and bring the most value to because they really become evangelists yeah i think community is interesting because there's they can make or break your game right like we live in such a unique time right now where your community can actually be your whole marketing team right like they're creating fan games they're creating fan art they're live streaming about your games so i think really embracing your community early on is and like giving them everything that they need to extend the longevity of your ip is super important now absolutely everybody's right on here one thing i would say about community like i come from a standpoint of like both sides of the business side than just being a fan so one of the most important things i would say about the community is make them a part of the steps that you take to build the game

and the reason why i say that is because if they can develop a relationship with what you're creating then it's going to be their baby too instead of just the baby of the developers now don't be bullied by the community there's a difference don't get bullied by community but if you make them a part of it and they genuinely care then they will be the lifeblood so you can continue to create while the community is continuing continuing to help you build so that's the key the way you look at the communities huh yeah i think i mean all these points nail it and then communities it's a complex subject but i will say from in the last it feels like the last even five years it was something on the peripheral and it wasn't because we didn't want it as game developers it was something because it was hard and we didn't understand it we didn't have great tools but now we have really great tools and when you think of a game and like a pyramid you're playing the game for a much smaller portion of the time that you're engaging with everything around the game and that's whether you're watching a streamer or you're on

fandom or your websites or you're talking to people it's so much of a learning experience used to be with friends and that those interactions happen now on discord and other places so if you don't create places where those moments can happen you're limiting how much memorable moments you can have around your content and so community used to be a little bit of an afterthought maybe or people didn't understand it now they're trying to say you know we have a game and that's the vehicle to create all these moments because in the end it's the moments you remember so i remember ultima online moments i remember age of empire moments i don't remember too much of what happened in the game but i remember the players and all the other stuff that came around and that that was community so it's increasingly important we have better tools but there isn't a perfect blueprint which is what we'll all be discussing um how we're all engaging with it so can i ask the can i ask a question to the audience how many of you are community managers okay sweet how many of you are like a game studio

or okay cool so that's i'm glad you asked that question because one of the things obviously when you think about communities but often as you said people think so it's i mean to be realistic it's very hard at the beginning because there's no one there for most games i mean there's big publishers and some of them may be here most of us start off with nothing no one cares except us which is okay but you do want to create an area where people who do like your game can interact with you because it's changed where before there was game developers and i was young i looked up and there was nintendo and there was a giant impassable moat between me and nintendo now how much of our audience in the community has either built a game or works in the gaming industry is an artist developer coder so the barrier isn't that great so there's there's so

much ways so many more ways to connect and you have to create that as early on as you can and it's difficult so you have to lead it authentically you have to want to engage and interact with people and a lot of times it's just being in an empty you know it's like being an empty pub so when the first people start coming in your team is there and you're willing to talk about different things because the first people that i've seen in the community a lot of them are like technical people or they're just interested in how you did something or some fun element or they want to make a mod and you have to be there and engage and there's so many different ways you can do that but you have to want it and you have to enable that you have to have the pub ready and the doors open for people to come in i was just going to add something really quick because now i've heard the word authentic twice and i promise you you're going to hear it over and over again um but i think what is important to think about when we think about authentic is you know we don't have to go out and create the community in a lot of cases the community creates itself whether you're ready for it to or not and so one of the things that i had referenced when we talked last week was

a friend of mine who had a long history as a games editor and so he had sort of an audience and a following and a fan base started a game studio and he said that they intentionally didn't start a community around their game because it was so early on he said we just didn't have anything to offer he said but then we started to notice that this community was forming on discord and then that discord community kind of migrated over to to fandom and so i think that one of the things we want to be mindful of is in the spirit of authenticity these communities are going to form themselves and so then how can you lean into that and and start to grow um what's sort of started organically yeah like both points is absolutely correct uh one thing i would um add to both two is um my favorite game is god of war kratos is my favorite character like ever right so there's the nature of the the greek mythology and all this other stuff there's so many fans of that generally so like if you're a fan of

star wars you might like this if you're a fan of game of thrones you might like this so when you understand what people already have a sense of and they like like get involved with that if you got a game don't just show up the gaming events go to like an anime event go to a movie theater premiere or speak to a movie director and get a hold of their fans understand how the mind works and how the passion works so when you do start out when the community is formed like what amy is saying it takes a life of its own but once it does you're prepared at the highest level that you can be for success to grow it i just want to quickly address when you should start thinking about building a community for the smaller studios in here um you should do it as soon as you can like literally at the concept stage of your game's development journey like if you only just have some scratches on the back of like a napkin somewhere take a

picture of it post it on every social media platform you can if you've done a kickstarter send it to your you know backers and all of that it's so important to just get these people to be a part of your community as early as possible if they're interested because then when you have your alpha out right you now have testers that can find those bugs for you and report them which is awesome and then you also have people that you can run contests with right so the earlier you can build your community the better it will be and i'm assuming you're you know you don't have like aaa money for marketing so like you have to just put in the work you know at the same time as like it's just as important and crucial as like the development of the game and i think that's like a really big misunderstanding that people think like oh i can build it and then six months before launch i can start focusing on

marketing when you're a smaller studio and you don't have that much money to spend on marketing you can't you can't do that yeah as you're saying that it's it's like this is the first time i've ever spoke about community and i felt like i was on the cutting edge you know because usually it's you're talking about something else and so i give a real strong shout out to the community managers here because it's like that's what it's about i mean really it's what it's about and it seems strange that in an industry that we are that it seems like the community has always been an afterthought or something that's back there and we hear a lot about nft and blockchain and web3 and all the things that are so important about things but man none of it means anything if you don't have community if you don't have people that are there and so the fact that we have to re-engage that is a bit of a sad thing i think and i think that that's something in our product world um i think that's something that gaming can really lead the way in entertainment about how we can build community because

we're not seen and done well in a lot of other forms of entertainment whether it's the movies or the tv or the stream you know this is an area where we as interactive digital media and games can really show the world like what this is all about and i totally agree get the fans in there as soon as you can and be a part of it so i give you an example right i mean even though like this isn't a game i'm gonna give you example what i mean my name is hip-hop gamer right so if you ask me questions about hip-hop and i know nothing about it i'm fronting i'm lying to you you know i'm saying you won't get called out there i say i'm a gamer right but if am i somebody that just plays games or am i a gamer like and i know what this is about so the

thing is you're going to get called out on your stuff so that's why when you have developers and they're making a game they're passionate about making it so in their mind they're thinking about what they want so you need a community manager that's thinking about what the community wants and when you put the community first because you have somebody in place to direct that message now they could feel like they actually thought about me like there's somewhere where i could sign up and subscribe and they reaching out to me and talk to me you know who did a great job i'm gonna give you our case study so y'all can know what's up so dying light too right when that game was coming out they was dealing with a lot of problems with the development right and um they had to push back a lot crazy dates and then they came out with a series and they made sure that everybody that followed their game knew about the series you would get emails they would check up on you and it when it's not a generic email too it'll say your name on it it was very personal they wanted to make sure that you cared

about what we was doing and every step of the way you're gonna know what's up so if suddenly right you tell us and we don't get it popping their humility is what allowed them to be great and then now the result is the first one sold like 20 million copies the second one is five million um going to a whole nother level and that's dying light too like they one of the ones that did it really really accurately they turned a negative into a positive absolutely including everybody that that loved them they sort of built on that absolutely it was the humility of it all that allowed them to be great period i think another thing that that you had mentioned before that i love is this idea of don't just think about these about your future players as just game players one of the the truths about people who play games is they do a lot of other things and that intersectionality of interest is also something that can help grow the game it's why in the early days of youtube people were scratching their head going what is this

game minecraft and it was you know this game that had almost no marketing behind it but because it got into the hands of creators and they built a community around it and at the time i remember i worked at a company called machinima and it drove them crazy that there was this game that was highly pixelated and just wasn't this beautiful level based work of art was taking off like wildfire and it was because the community had embraced it and just made it kind of go go wild and so you think about the types of games are these like sneaker hits it's because they go to where the gamers are or where the fans are and that's how they discover it so it's just it's about that intersectionality what else are they into and that also goes back to authenticity i think building your community in an authentic way um the easiest way to actually do it is to bring them into your development process right it could be as simple as like hey we're you know we're designing

this character pick out her the color of her pants right like do a poll do fun stuff for your community to engage in where they feel like they're actually you know a part of your game development and they're helping like i grew up playing a ton of age of empires as well and i just couldn't imagine what it'd be like to actually talk to you know the studio the developers the artists like people behind the game and now like we actually have that opportunity right like you can actually start talking with your early adopters on discord game joel had to do my little plug um twitter wherever right so definitely you know you don't have to just keep pushing like uh promotional content or you know do like giveaways and prizes and stuff like that you can just bring them in to your development

um but when you do bring those people into your development um how far do you go in that because you know you can't really be sort of railroaded by your community as well it's a fine balancing act isn't it it is well i think you have to have you know testers so you can like set them up as like alpha testers beta testers like whatever have them like give you their feedback have them be heard and then just kind of like explain to them why you're making the decisions that you're making that's like actual good and interesting content if you think about it right like as a community manager you're constantly trying to pump out some content for them to engage with but just literally telling them like your line of thinking and why you're making the decisions that you're making is pretty interesting to your fans who then later end up writing crazy wikis about your game and posting it on fandom right

like these are people that are going to study the crap out of your game anyway just bring them in and like tell them why you're making these decisions like if um cd projekt red told us right like what was and wasn't going to be in the game because they you know like couldn't launch it and do it in time we would have been like okay cool it's when you like catch people off guard that it like becomes a problem um another dope thing i would say that i feel is fire like i think this is crazy so um before xbox and playstation they used to have community meetups this is like like way back like 2009 2010 and stuff like that right so um when a gamer score it was the gamer score club i believe that's what it is with xbox 360 during that time so what they would do is they will tour all the cities and in every city that they go to they bring their game and let the community

know that uh they're gonna be there so they can show up i'ma tell you why that was so dope it was so crazy because especially back then the fans couldn't get into e3 you know what i'm saying like they couldn't go to certain places so they brought e3 to them in their own city and they did a tour it was real it was physical they now check this out they sat down and ate together talked about things that had nothing to do with the game they got a chance to know the people and that right there they're gonna rather die for you you know what i'm saying rest in peace dmx you know what i'm saying but they're gonna ride or die for you when you do that you know what i'm saying because now you gave them a memory you gave them something that's priceless so when the game come out and all this other stuff you got people that's going to be like oh this game is whack and then somebody else will be like what you mean this game is whack yo nah they would like literally stand up and fight for it if the game ain't that good they'll tell you in a respectful way like yo y'all should do this y'all

should do that but the support system you will have when you do things like that it would be a game changer so what i would suggest is not everybody got the ability to do that tour or whatever whatever but with game with um programs like parsec that like ubisoft used and a lot of other companies use like they bring us in like hundreds of people to play their game and they do it virtually and have zoom calls and talk about life yeah and talk about different things alongside the game it's a bit like family isn't it it's like you know you can criticize we can criticize each other but don't you criticize mike yo look at how we do it yo let me put y'all on son you know what i'm saying cause jackie's dope like she's dope she's amazing and um so the zoom calls that we be doing that leads up to pocket gamer and stuff like that we'd be having a ball yo everything is great and then when we see each other in person it's like oh like the energy is different that's the type of energy that you want that priceless genuine energy around your game because now you're going to have success on a whole nother

level to where when elder ring drops that could be more common in terms of success stories because you put the community not first but you put the community within what you're building because you put the conv don't put the community first because they will bully you because now it's like oh we first so like custom ain't always right like you know what i mean so i'm just telling y'all right now keep the community within as you grow so they could be able to share in the flower that gets born yeah you got to listen you got to listen to them but you don't do everything that they say absolutely because they don't know how to do everything you do yeah so you get them in early totally agree that you get them in early and that's that's so important and i think we you said authentic is the big the big deal so being authentic so remember to be authentic like in the sense of um most of the millions of people who have played our games don't consider themselves gamers there's a lot of games that are games that's great you're gamers there's a lot of people who don't consider themselves gamers in fact most of the people who

play mobile games don't consider themselves gamers that's very true and so it's like okay so that's a different way so just be who you are and authentic and go with it and whatever it might mean and so we start off all of our team stand-ups whenever we have a team stand up we always start off with having some with one of our community member community team leads talk about to read quotes what people have what people have said so that we actually first hear the voice of the player that's how we started our team we hear we hear the voice of the player this is what they said about our game sometimes it's great sometimes it's bad sometimes it has nothing to do with the game mechanics sometimes it has nothing to do with the great art or the great programming it might have something totally that you never ever dreamed of what it could be and that's where you're going to be surprised because if you allow yourself to be who you are and your company who you are then you're going to attract a whole bunch of people and uh you're going to be surprised when you go through it there's going to be a lot of different things and so um i love games i love hardcore games but you know

not everybody's going to be there and so just feel the freedom is what i'm saying is feel the freedom to be authentic in who you are don't try to be what somebody else is try to be authentic to who you are and uh so i can't tell you how to do community for your group you're the only one i mean let's talk for a moment about who's doing the listening and who's engaging and who's having the dialogue with their communities and we're sort of moving into the community manager here um i mean how do you see the community manager for an indie uh who will probably be the managing director or the ceo of that company i mean how can they start early doors sort of putting processes maybe into place within their organizations that can help that sort of community management role all right so um i got something dope for that check this out right so um i speak with so many

indie uh companies and all they got is enough to make a game but they don't have really anything else so here's something that i think y'all could tap into because it has a financial gain to it and it has a um a relationship gain to it so wherever you're at right now like right now we in seattle so tap into your school system i'm gonna tell you why so every city has a budget for education and if you can have your game be something that's involved with the school system then the government would pay for that period simply for you to go into schools and put their kids on to the latest and greatest in technology and development because nowadays because gaming is so successful school systems and the educational system is more receptive to having games and creatives and art

in their school system now so if you're an indie developer right now tap into your school system and get a vendor number a vendor number will allow you to get let's say you got like 10 schools you'll get like 20 000 or more each like per school just to be able to bring your game and your knowledge in development to the actual students and the kids and once you got that relationship and they're part of it oh it's over because now you got the kids you got the parents you got the community and it's all paid for because of what you're doing to help them grow so it works in both ways tap into your school system immediately get a vendor number that's a great tip and what about those games that aren't necessarily appealing to you know or that you can't put in front of the kids because of all of the restrictions that we have how would you that's when you do that's when you go to high school route he's always go to high school

high school and college still you could tap into that uh fun like in new york um the educational budget is 36 billion dollars in new york i got access to that so i'm telling you right now tap into your school system there's a lot of stuff that's there but if you don't know you don't know that's why we're here so i'm just putting y'all on yo do that and just cause you're in if you're in seattle it's you're not limited to just seattle you travel so you could get money in other states your game is going to be global you understand so yeah like that's what's really when you know the business of everything that's going on then you know how to leverage it for not just your game but what you want to bring what you want to give back with what you're creating cool so i think one thing you know when we're talking about players and community it's also like how much are we doing for that community we have we have to think that first right we can say like they're testing for us and helping us and they're making our game better but

really i think as a developer what are we putting in and and so that's really important because they're there to interact and create moments among themselves they're not they're just for a job although it is very fun and engaging but we also have to think like what exclusive things can we bring to this community and and sometimes it's contests we sent t-shirts across the world we've done photo we've done so much really interesting oh my god my son wears yaprak's game child t-shirt all the time it's like look at me get the game gel t-shirt yeah it's so true it's just this little thing that you know took more effort that wasn't automated that really resonates with people we sent type racer shirts to the we had a co and it's just a type racer shirt you know but it's something that is meaningful and they know it came from us and they see that it's packaged and so a lot of things you're doing with your community doesn't scale and it's not supposed to it's supposed to seem very like one-to-one that type of relationship another thing to the question of community managers it's in really empowering them because you don't wanna as a developer overpower what the community wants you want to get it to a point where it's leading its own

kind of vision of what community means to it and as a developer you're a participant almost in that community which is very tough because you can't be at the top dictating everything because then the community doesn't have a life of its own it's a very difficult balance because we've had releases where the community didn't like it but we couldn't you know we're just members of it we're just participants in that in that table so community manager is very important because they are kind of that bridge but the community is going to take a life of its own and it's going to drive that when you get to the point that's driving it community managers sometimes just holding on trying to take us along for the ride so you really want to make sure that they're empowered listen to the things that they want because they're relaying it on behalf of the community so you can't ignore what they're saying so it's a very important role it does take a little time to get there because it's hard we can't if you're talking about indie studios we can't do everything at once but definitely when you get to that point you'll see the acceleration of that engagement grow so much because they're able to organize things that you normally can't do

and just organize players in a way that maybe they don't want to do maybe they don't want to do the nitty-gritty of organizing a tournament that's you know for me for someone else they want to participate so what are the moments that they're going to get from being in your community that's number one and what they get out of it we can take a little but it's it's supposed to be more of a giving relationship than a taking relationship so i would just say hug your community managers but really listen to them because they're the ones that actually know what your audience and then in the future your customers are thinking right so like at gamejolt we have over 60 000 ugc communities and the person on our team that knows all the trends that are happening all the feature requests that are happening is our community manager so she lets everyone else know on the team and we do a lot of fun stuff you know like

we we get to troll our users because from the information that she gives us like they wanted uh they wanted dark mode right so we decided to just make the whole site like completely black where your mouse cursor was like a flashlight so like these are like these authentic like relationships that you can have with your users right they've been like bugging us about voice chat because discord has voice chat so they want voice chat so we literally just took like all the meme i shouldn't say this actually say it don't sue me but we you know we like took all the meme sound bites and then uh we attached them to stickers so that every time they used a sticker in chat like it would it would play like a meme sound right so that was like that we were like we built you voice chat so and these are things that you would just never really know if you don't listen and be a part of your own communities

right and sometimes you know you're gonna have toxic users sometimes they're not gonna be fun to engage with but this is where you know if you have that like direct relationship with your community manager where they can come to you and just say like hey this is happening and i don't know how to address it i need your help that's that's how you can you know deal with that the worst thing you can do is like ignore these people right because then it's power numbers they grow and they get louder because you're not paying attention and they're different with each we know we're talking about very different games too you really have to know that audience so on our web 3 audience they're builders they want to be in they want to see what's behind the scenes they want to talk to developers because they're almost vetting us as part of that process for mobile games it's a different thing it's more tournaments it's more kind of fluffy feel good and other ones are just really in-depth so you really have to know what your audience wants out of that out of

those moments when they're in your discord or wherever and sometimes it can be very high touch it doesn't need to be in depth but sometimes like for web 3 you're you're getting into the technical details with the people on our team so you have to know that audience and you have to be true to it because engagement on different games is different some games don't facilitate certain types of engagement some games must you know in order to have that retention so you got to know where you are and and be kind of comfortable in that you can't look at the other community and say oh i wish i want to have this community but you're a totally different type of game totally different type of audience so you got to really know where your lane is and embrace that and make the best of all those opportunities because different communities like web 3 is just a whole different beast than anything i've ever seen than anything else and a lot of people i think would want that but we're not going to get the same type of engagement on type racer we're going to get on you know an nft crypto white paper reading audience 100 so amy yeah i was going to say i think that um we're fortunate or you guys are fortunate to be launching games now with

the conversation that's going on around web3 and knowing what consumers are going to be looking for you're not having to if you think about some of the the legacy aaa publishers and how they're having to redefine what their community engagement looks like because they started the function maybe 20 years ago and it literally was one person managing an owned and operated platform and then when things like reddit and fandom and discord and gamejolt all when they all materialize they're like oh my god it's like whack-a-mole i don't know how or what to do with all of these communities sprouting up to come into it now and understand that player participation and player input needs to be part of the game dna that's a huge advantage because you can start as you mean to go on and not have to you know reverse bad behavior fantastic so just wrapping up i'd like one thing that you want to communicate to this audience about how to or tip or a trick or what's

what's the most important takeaway you'd like them to have starting with you bill sure i mean create moments for them what can you do to create moments to facilitate that to happen and so whatever that looks like the moment is what they need that's what they need from you and that's what they're going to take away so what can you do to plant those seeds or make that attainable or achievable start with that and then all these other things kind of come from that so start start with the moment you want to create because that's what they'll walk away with and everything else you kind of work backwards from that so like uh i wanted to see if y'all had a question because i know you're wrapping up so instead of me just talking because i've been talking like crazy dude anybody got a question that uh what's popping dog oh of course man yo at me sir you don't say it playstation xbox pc you don't matter so

everything hip hop gamer let's get it like word up that oh anybody else you don't say you got a question and i appreciate the sound so much love to you dog anybody got a question though before i just say anything okay so then what i would say like uh in terms of um gathering that community like the biggest uh tip or something like that is know what you want to be in terms of whatever game you're creating if you don't know what you're making there's hard to get people to embrace what you're making you know i mean so first off know what you're making if it's a shooter okay what kind if you're making an action adventure okay what kind making a puzzle okay what kind when you understand what you're creating now you know where to find your allies that are like-minded with what you are building that's the key because if you you know how it is if you're if you're on the same page it's gonna be a problem so as long as you get people that's on

the same page of what you're building you get the correct allies to support any uniformity for what you're building i would just say troll your users because you would have to pay attention to them to know how to troll them right and they would talk about it so that's free marketing for you there you go you're welcome [Laughter] i would say discoverability um so rather than this idea of you know creating an environment and then expecting your community to live in that environment embrace all the different platforms where they have gone so sort of fish where the fish are because you can lean into that to help them help other players find your communities the more places your players are and then you can learn those platforms and how to engage on those platforms that just means good things for you because that means that that your community is going to be discovered by look-alikes

and that that's how you grow it that's how how you acquire new users um i'm going to speak as a studio owner and also as someone who spent a lot of time with fans and then i'm going to speak to the community managers and i'm not trying to be overly dramatic but um literally i'm going to stand up because for the community managers i want you to stand up and fight for your community and fight for your community because in your studio they need to hear the voice of the players and so if you're not doing that your studio is going to die you're not going to be around in five years and you need to fight for your community and your players are going to come up and they're going to thank you like you will never believe and your your professional career is going to change because you touched the lives of people and you did different types of things and the fact that we have to talk about that as something that's new in a game like in the industry that we're in

doesn't make sense to me so please stand up and fight for it because we need the community otherwise we have nothing so very good closing thoughts thank you sam so any questions yes what are your tips for dealing with things when you know the community might be not so happy with you so i could we've had releases even recently that i mean you're never going to satisfy everyone for sure but i we had failures where we tried to be heavy-handed and failures where we tried not to care at all or not to appear like we cared at all so you really you aren't trying to dictate the conversation because there are some updates that you will do which will not be good for the player and you need to know that the studios need to recognize that and almost if you don't acknowledge like this is what we did and this is why

we had to do it and some people will accept that they might not like it but they will accept it and not become vocal i guess um you know enemies of the studio thinking you did this and you didn't even care so so it's a really touchy subject but just acknowledging why you did something and not trying to lie to yourself and say like it's like i know that this is not for the community we added 10 more ads per page or whatever it would raise the price of something that is for us but we did it so we can do this and at least you can turn those people over at least to like back to neutral is sometimes the best you can do and that's okay but if you go heavy-handed it probably won't end well and we've seen many examples of that and if you give the appearance of it just wanting to blow over it takes this life of its own where the community is like you're not even here so we're coming up with the narrative and the content and it's fun because we're going to just keep on on you until you say something so i think it's very important to get out there and give that message some things are not good and that is okay but don't lie to yourself and then lie to the community after

i would also say just remember that just to my point before your your your community team is not alone um that there are resources to to help um you know solve different problems that might be on different platforms we had a a publisher that was having there were some issues in one of their community pages on fandom around some of their employee employee policies that they had and we worked really closely with them our trust and safety team worked with them to make sure that the conversations were still productive they weren't toxic because i think that you know there is uh there's productive conversations that need to happen maybe they're not super positive but if you have practices and you have partners in place to help you guys work through what isn't isn't acceptable but there are resources it shouldn't just be on the community manager to deal with them oh i'm sorry now you go ahead i'll go after thank you um

so i think i think let's not kid ourselves and assume that every community member is equal right there are just some people you're never going to convince right and if they start creating a toxic environment for other users or if they're attacking your community managers right and it's it just becomes very disrespectful you have to remove that person right and this is something that we learned very early on with gamejolt is that if you can't reason with people and then they're you know they're going on these like really offensive tirades and it's like very disruptive we ban them right from the platform permanently and this isn't just like oh you know like kick them out of your server so that they can just go and join another server and do the same exact thing there this is like permanently gone right like and then they have to appeal and usually we get like a really

long letter like apologizing and even then we stand our ground and we allow them like hey we'll let you make another account to start fresh but you're you've just lost everything that you you did here because you know you you created you broke our side guidelines so it's also really nice to have site guide or guidelines that you can point to and that way people can you know you can your community manager can always point to that and be like we already said you know that this wasn't allowed here so you know two things bro one thing i will say one if there's a gen if there's a genuine uh problem with a game or something that it is fix it that's one like fix it and the two market that you fixed it so you could control the narrative of what has changed so if you gotta call up zip davis and all this other stuff be like yo like i need 20 articles saying

that we fix this and this work and people love it and then next to you know it creates a cool factor one of the most important things that you got to have is cool factor find your cool in whatever it is you're making because now it's going to be cool for everybody to support this and then they're going to be like yo well i'm talking about the hottest thing right now you understand what i'm saying so it shapes the narrative so you fix the problem and you market it that you fixed it so now if somebody try to come out and hate on you the community's gonna be like what are you talking about you look dumb right now because they fixed it everybody knows that they fixed it i played it it's better you probably didn't even play it yet you're just trying to hate so now you expose what the people that try to destroy what you're doing so those are the two things fix it mark it that you fixed it nice i found you cool yeah fine cool i'd add a little bit to that this is for the people who aren't in the community management team um

you take a lot of crap when you're in a community management team and so the people who aren't there support your team yeah you gotta love them and and um when it comes down to the crunch you gotta support your team more than than anything and um last word from bill i'll tell a story since you talk about you know community we all probably have some stories so maybe this is a story that i'll in part with saying we talk about the good of it and some of it this is a crazy story that maybe some people i'll leave you with it because it's one of our oddest things so we had a a game little big sink it's a very popular game people are insanely passionate about it and there's a toxic player that we have to get rid of our community just very toxic um sexist the whole list of stuff that you just don't want in your community and so we banned them and we thought nothing of it and then we start getting the long letters you know i'm gonna come and i'm gonna come from san diego i'm gonna go in front of your office i'm like okay just send it through zendesk it's fine so we forget about it and then i get a panic email on you know we have a

protester in front of the office uh we're all leaving and i'm like this is new okay it's like an achievement unlocked so i'm kind of like scared but not scared yet and we go to the office and there's a guy with a tent and a billboard and just you know looks angry so i said you know what's wrong what can we give you refund your stuff give you a bunch of stuff and it was very hot i said can we stand in the shade like it's hot and been talking about he goes you're racist i said what he's like you don't like vampires and then he lifts up his teeth and he has implanted fangs and then i'm like now i'm getting a little scared now i'm wishing i had a community manager do they double as bouncers or it was me so i was not bouncing i was looking to run so it's a very difficult job and and you can get a lot of really crazy stuff so i commend everyone who's out there doing it and hopefully people can share their

stories happy to hear them but it's very hard it's the wild west out there and so hopefully people enjoy that story and that's my small role to my small time is like when i had to step in as a community manager which i am still here so i navigated it okay well my fabulous team are wanting to wrap up now so thanks everybody i'm sure that if you want to talk to anybody um after this uh please do grab any members of our panel i'm just putting you out there now um and please do return after the break for our next session this afternoon thanks once again to all our sponsors pango for for looking after this particular track