Panel: How To Successfully Scale Your Game Through Community Engagement

[Music] yeah for this panel uh we're gonna talk about how to successfully scale your game through community engagement so for this i'd like to invite uh no less than five speakers to the stage so that'll be margaret mcclure from netflix games uh carolyn wang from forever games michael silverwood from pixel studios sam fisher from hyper hippo and jasmine guerra from moe engage so please thank you all so much for joining

for a moment i thought you were going to leave me alone up here so um all right um well let's dive straight straight into it uh and i thought it would be a good idea to keep it all introduce yourselves so uh let's start over here on this side hi i am carolyn wang i am a marketing manager at forever games we are a vr game company that makes uh casual arcade games for the oculus class dinoculus quest ii we have two titles right now forever bowl and forever darts and previously my background is in community management i work at eastside games on titles like rupaul's diary superstar and the office from how we manage okay and i do believe we have actually some footage from some of your games so let's uh sorry i need to it's not exactly all in the right order so i'm gonna need to uh this is

that's not it uh you know it's just the last session of the day it's one of those things there you go [Music] it's building up the uh tension here all right d10 for ages 10 and up it's the wrong one here um [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music]

[Applause] [Music] [Applause] well you know just trying to shake things up here of course um well uh we'll we'll get back to the uh the content from forever later but uh michael since we now landed onto you can you tell something about yourself in your studio sure yeah so i'm michael um i'm the co-founder of pixile we make super animal rail it's a talk down 2d shooter and we launched it four years ago in early access and just last year left early access and now it's uh on cosplay on all the major consoles and pc all right thanks um let's continue on so yeah exactly i'm going to risk it continue on to market um hi i'm mark mcclure i'm an executive research games i've been there for about

seven months i work on the external development side that means working with all these wonderful type of developers um on you know signing amazing um mobile games to our platform before that i briefly worked uh at meta or facebook um what's gonna be our games whatever you wanna call it um and then before that i spent about eight years working at riot games as a lead producer on balance and team by tactics bears [Applause] take one [Applause]

[Applause] so [Applause] [Music] [Music] [Applause] awesome now before we head over to sam just one more try and get in the forever [Music]

[Applause] all right so that was from caroline's studio now kindly give you the the stage system talk about hyperinhippo thank you very much uh i'm senator fisherman d10 for ages 10 and up no no no no i'm i can talk to under 10 year olds too i'm okay that way i'm fine um great to be here i'm from western canada uh i'm the ceo of hyper hippo entertainment uh we have a couple titles here we are thrilled to be a launch partner with netflix when we started together with netflix we think there's huge opportunity especially on the global side of things and what can happen there so thank you it's great to be here with you um two of our titles uh venture capitalist adventure communist two of the uh top five games in the idol genre they've

been around for a while our studio has been around for about 10 years and in our different games i think we've had about 100 million different just coming up on 100 million players in our different games so just great to be here and talk about community which is in my view what it's all about absolutely and the last one um hi everyone my name is jacqueline i do not have the fancy avs we do have uh yeah i just took a screenshot of thank you so much for doing that so um so morning age i had strategy for a company called moe engage more engage is a marketing uh personalization customer retention platform uh we work with a lot of giving companies uh you know brands like imvu 18 birdies uh johns dot io you know and help them with their onboarding and retention use cases good to be here awesome yeah so most of the questions i'm going to ask the panel are like your

respective communities so definitely maybe you can like answer for like your inventory clients and like what most audience you you work with sure so i probably i i was put on this panel to give the outside of you uh not from the industry at all we may mostly work with b2b so for us the customers are b2b gaming uh companies game developers etc um so you know for us community is so we have something called a customer advisory board uh so essentially that's a board which is uh you know of people who are actually using our software uh you know we kind of made it you know for the lack of a better word more sexy over the years when we give them insider access to you know the new features that we are developing in the product uh you know inside access make them many celebrities within our organization so for me

probably a good starting point that's that's what community is awesome i like that point of view to many superstars um so a bit of a question for the rest of the panel also like how do you describe you community your community uh who are they and like what profile do they fit do i start never yeah for sure uh so funnily enough at forever games we have narrowed down our community profiles into about three distinct archetypes um probably about 95 percent of our players fall into one of these three they are named after some of our community champions who are like really active in our discord servers and serve as some of our beta testers for upcoming titles uh so we have first one we call him autodidactic after one of our players um he is like the core gamer that you imagine when you think like a gamer um so like the profile is typically like 20 something to 30 something year old man who cares only about the game play and doesn't really care about the community building aspect uh we have the player called angelfires who's named after uh one of our players as well and this

person is a community champion this is the kind of person who loves being on discord all the time making new friends on the games and like talking with people and just like jumping into games like newbies and helping them out and then we have a third uh player profile called logan uh he's not named every one of our players he's named after the son of our vp of engineering because he's a 15 year old boy and this user profile is a kid who likes to meme around with his friends kind of jump around do i don't know dank memes you know as you do yeah um he likes to like troll he likes to do stupid things he likes to push the boundaries of what you can do in the game so those are our main profiles that we try to cater towards and think of when we're building our games you follow it out yeah we um we don't have a great uh greater like we don't have profiles on our players but we did do um a survey uh at one point to get a sense of who was playing and uh our goal with designing

the game was to make battle rail a lot more accessible um and then we also have mode the side of battle royale so we actually uh we found that there was actually a lot more players who had never played a battle royale before than than the typical battle royale players so there was a little over 20 that had played other battle royales like fortnite or pubg but the the biggest uh categories surprisingly were like minecraft players pokemon players zelda players so um for a lot of people it was their first battle royale maybe you don't typically play as many competitive games but uh kind of opening up competitive games to to kind of a friendlier more casual audience it's not quite as hyper competitive yeah so netflix games obviously is very new and right now we're very focused on learning about who our community is and who really engages obviously like for us you need the subscriptions and netflix but that does lead us to 220 million plus people

um not all of them are necessarily going to become gamers that we can help um but we do get a wider variety of people who do try out our games so many people you know you necessarily just they would never say that they play the game they you know when we talk to them they're like this is sort of my first game type of thing and all the way down to people who are like i spend majority of my free time playing games and trying to master games when we think about them in terms of community like why you know who are they and what are they looking for we don't necessarily think about them in terms of the demographics or the point of view but actually what is our motivation why is it coming from a place of you know mastering a skill is it coming from the need to get you know 100 something collects all the things um or is it you know a nurturing point of view they want to like nurture and have fun things um see things grow so we really think about them much more around the motivation because you know demographics and things like that can actually find we finally leave this astray often where we get into a scenario where we think about

next thing and that is great but that's puts us in the past and not in the future looking point of view we're often surprised as who our community is we don't necessarily think that we design a game or build a game for a specific audience this is the audience and let's go build for it we usually build a game and then we find out there's an audience for it and so so that leads to some surprises i think the demographics can be all over i think even people who are in the same demographics can still be very diverse and have very different perspectives so it's very interesting to be that way our our goal at this point is really to deepen the engagement it's not as much how can we make as many players as possible is how can we get more engagement with the community that we have because we find a lot of joy in that and so building out engagement is a big part of what we're doing uh it's interesting to see how some of the things are doing as far as demographics so there is one thing i think that is kind of interesting for us and this is just

something we've been digging in more recently is that just understanding gen elvis um it's interesting from a community perspective we're blown away as to what that the size of that market is and well i i can't even say that market they make that work out of the transcript um just this new generation that's coming is going to change a lot of things they've gone through covid uh they've been in a digital first environment their entire lives uh they're about to come out onto the scene they're the largest generation in the history of this planet and what is that going to do the gaming world we better start thinking about that now so it's just something that has been an interesting thing for us to be thinking about but as far as the community who the community is we're learning that all the time but can we build our engagement together with them and let the community build up the culture of what we're doing yes just to to stay with you for a little bit uh sam so hyper hippo has been around for 10 years now and uh yeah you've had you

know all these different yeah you know you started with a big success and then brought out some following games um did you really build the community mostly around the studio or about the separate games um if we build it around the studio or the separate games i think what we're trying to do um when we started on early in the studio we were about 10 years ago we were about 15 people and i think two or three of those people were in the communities management side of things and people would say uh wow why do you have people over here talking to players it's kind of like i was like blown away in the aspect of why would you not have people over here talking to players this is kind of what we're all here about and so um we really found that the fan base was there it was around the game the second game really didn't come out probably until three or four years later so i guess it was really kind of based around the game to start with but what we're trying to be better at is how can we create a community more for the

studio i guess it would be sort of a way not more more for the brand i hope that we see that brand come together like you'll see more of an iconic feel as we we built going forward you see this you'll know that it's a hyper hippo game that's what we're kind of looking for um so if that kind of tells you that we're kind of building towards that brand feel i'm not going to put the studio on and i'm going to save the brand because i think the community has a big impact on driving where that goes yeah yeah definitely you have some panelists you know trying to build around a game or a brand new like for example michael you have like a you know very sort of i think a very specific audience that goes after your game but you know do you have the feeling to go really more for the the gameplay or do you really follow what the studio is doing as well um i think for us it's been very um bottom-up uh natural where we came up with like a world and wrote a backstory came up with characters and

and then we just uh started getting a few players and then sort of built around that so we were just looking at naturally what is the community doing weaving that into what we were doing and um you know just ground up building from that and since super animal reality is really our only game it is kind of all around that game but the game extends into like the discord community and um and twitter and all the social media platforms so uh it's kind of the you know the characters and the world and everyone uh enjoying those and experiencing those and then across all the different conflicts i was just gonna say that that's very similar to how you know when i looked at riot it was very much same place like the game and like the studio where you have one title are very intermingled um you know you build bands around like the league of legends fans versus right game stands but over time because you go into multi titles and you work towards hotels you do start working towards building that around the brand of like riot games

there's a big effort during my time at riot where we had to make that shift from being just league of legends fans to people understand if we make a riot game game this is what you could expect this is what you should expect from us and what we'll try to unfold and also what we won't do um so i think that's like a very natural place to start and eventual place to grow to um so that's exactly what we did on riot and league as well i feel like super style is a studio that does that really well in building that kind of fandom around their brand and as a studio like they originally were just like the clash of clan studio but i think that they did a really good job with clash royale and brawl stars and expanding that to be like their whole universe and now you have um like a captive audience uh they're really invested for players who are hotly anticipating every single new release of supercells um i think that they are a team that does training management really well and builds that relationship super well absolutely so we also wanted to dive a little bit more into questions about sort of the um

oh that's called the technical side of community management like for example when you look at different time zones and different cultures different languages is that also something that any of you catered towards are you really looking into so anyone who wants to pick that up like i can go that time of i don't know fairly diverse team and a set of customers that we gave one of the very important things that you know you kind of need to find that healthy mix of you know a very audiences or where your customers are in our case and then basis that you kind of take that call so for example uh in the dach belt i actually learned this term you know a little while ago which is the uh the german speaking of europe which is deutsche land austria and switzerland uh you know had probably contributed about six percent of our overall revenue and you know 18 of our overall clients um so

it was uh for us to create a sub community within that community uh you know it was very important for us so so local wherever the customers are wherever the users are in gamescapes that's where you should be i think it's really good for us is we're canadian studio and i think for a canadian studio it's interesting because i mean i think one percent of our game audience is canadian so we're always exporting like everything is going out right and so we have to think about it in terms of how do we go out to the world and so when we go out to the world i would say in this first 10 years we've learned a little bit about how to do some of the the western markets so it's not something that you learn in a day or two it takes a little while so i'd say that we're learning sort of how to do that area well i'd say the next 10 years we really are working our very specific focus is how we're going to be taking community engagement on a more global basis

and boy that's a hairy dog i mean just the things that become your every day you're going to find an issue that you never dreamt was possible about what it is whether it goes from compliance all the way through the language through the customs you've offended somebody in some way that you never expected you were going to do and it's such a challenge and but i would encourage particularly if i'm here when we're talking to canadians or we're talking to others is that that's where our growth is that's where we have to go to and we have to go out into those type of markets and if you think that you can do that just by being like just to give an example we had an ad on adventure communist we had it translated into eight different languages and i was really excited about that because we had it out in eight different languages only to find that i was extremely embarrassed to find out how poorly we had translated it and how poorly we were communicating with our players in these foreign countries by using google translate to kind of into the players support and um

so yeah there's nothing like embarrassment sometimes to motivate you to do something a little bit better and so we've done a lot of work and we've done some great work together with our friends here that has totally uh taken us to a new type of level very very grateful for that but it's a lot of hard work but that's where the growth is and so we need to that needs to happen a studio whatever stage you're at you should be looking at that how you're going to do that maybe not all in-house but you have to figure out how you're going to do that all right all right um and i've i've already heard uh like a couple people talking about discord for example and i'm also wondering like for your audiences what are sort of the favorite platforms or like the best ways to you know get engaged with them and reach out and reach out i'll take a pass of this um and let everyone else be smarter than me um i think it really depends at least from my experience on what you're engaging with them on and

and what the size and scope of that is like for valor for example when we're launching that and we're in a smaller environment we have about 5 000 people in our discord channel that was feasible um for us to actually like somewhat be engaged and have the devs in there and have those conversations you know when you get to like five million and just for general not quite as feasible becomes more like a twitch chat um experience which can be a little trapezing um so i think it really depends on like the depth of conversation you want to be having and how much you need to have that one-on-one setting and like you know if you're solving a problem or actually you need to dig into what they're talking about or and also therefore the size so i think it's more of a tool for the goal you're aiming for towards versus you know necessarily a platform to preference i think also it depends on what community you're talking to so for example for valerian you know that we are tapping into like the cs both players of the world the pubg players of the world you know um the overwatch

players of the world they have ways they talk and communicate and are already have a community around it we need to meet them where they are and communicate the way they want to communicate we can't say oh because we're making the game you should talk like this and it's definitely a challenge actually we're like basically netflix because a lot of that community building has been done around the content side which is a very different style of engagement and communication or even like sort of player support um level that then it would be with a game for you know for example if you have an issue with the netflix login you can probably do that over a quick chat that's probably how you prefer but if you're not getting your tokens in a game it's not going to be a quick like hey let me reset your password for you kind of thing it's like hey when you dig into that it's gonna be a couple days back and forth and figuring out what missions they completed so i think it's a really dependent on sort of that level of death but right and i think over time netflix will korea because we are everywhere and we do a lot of languages um we do want to meet them where they are

i totally agree with margaret's point about like meeting your players on their level and like kind of fostering that environment where they want to congregate like um i'm a big fan of reddit and i i really enjoy like browsing the subreddits for the games that i'm playing but for games that are like hyper casual there's not really a point i've always found that like for reddit it's it's for those like more tactical games where there's some more like strategic depth um discord now is for those like really core engaged players who really care about the communities and want to meet other people who play the game so like kind of understanding where those demographics and where those different psychographics tend to congregate is i think really important to know as a community builder uh for us uh discord was uh is probably the biggest reason for the game's uh success because we created the discord um when we were in alpha and uh we began doing very small tests and we'd have everyone in a voice channel there'd be like 20 people 30 people uh chatting so

we could get direct feedback from the players while they were playing it it also helped us grow a community because people would show up each week we'd hold a play session leading all the way up to launch um and uh we built a little bot in the discord that would give out keys so there was kind of an incentive that you would come in and get a get an alpha key or get a beta key and be able to play the game before it launched so that um doing that for about nine months before releasing we managed to grow our discord to around uh a little over 7000 people so that there wasn't nobody at launch that that knew about the game because we were a battle royale we needed to fill out games that were 64 players at the same time so it had that requirement of like doing all that work before you actually got to the launch um and then since since launching um the discord it's very true that discord that different sizes are entirely different beasts um we were fortunate that it grew uh somewhat like gradually along with the game so it's just a matter of yeah

continually adding more moderators adding more community programs adding more channels and kind of navigating what the community was naturally doing and like growing with it to support that growth because it can be very overwhelming especially if you have a lot of people flowing at lunch and it's an area where i think that it takes a lot of constant review and investment from from the studio to look at and from publishers as well because the world is not static and things are really changing and you have to continuously be looking at what the opportunities are like um not only what you're doing now isn't working but everything's changing like i just found out that gee um like on tick tock i'm like using five percent of the facility of what is available to me there it's like uh okay i didn't know i could do all that stuff wow that's really cool okay i didn't know that last month now i know it now what what do i do with that and it's gonna totally change because who's gonna go faster at that me or my my community

it's probably my community they're going to go to wherever they find that that new thing for engagement and so i we're running like to think that we're leading i think is maybe a pretty bold assumption i think we have to be looking at the community and where the community is pushing us and they're the ones who are going to probably pick up on a lot of that functionality and uh joy i guess i would call it a way and so it's a constant constant investment and uh so it's not like you're gonna get to a certain point and you're done it's like keep working on it and now are our user reviews in any way for any of you like relevant for community building as well so like reverse reviews on like steam page or an app store page or anything super yeah um yeah reviews are super crucial to forever games um i i think that most game publishing platforms the reviews are super crucial in how your game does in the algorithms affecting a number of your organic users so

responding to those and being sure to follow up with the players who leave bad reviews or who have issues is super crucial i think to try to get them to come back and foster that goodwill and to be able to get them to change those reviews hopefully wow okay so i think reviews as as the possible business opportunity or reviews as a possible business idea is probably the next big thing after the digital first businesses reviews and paying heat to those reviews and actioning on them in the right way at scale is probably one of the most underrated things that brands ignore today i'm really in croatia um you know so yeah i mean holistically speaking uh if you see since covet happened uh there was a surge on in digital first businesses people started a lot of websites apps uh now is the time they've started

collecting they're scaled up you know businesses which were too dire to dive but the ones who are going to scale up are going to do well going to collect a lot of reviews the big question is what do you do with those reviews what do you do with that feedback how do you action that in the right direction i mean that holds true for i'm guessing gaming industry as well to you guys yeah i think reviews are are very very important they always have them we try to respond to them within 24 to 48 hours or 48 hours or our srw the the interesting thing about tuba reviews which i think i i find in talking with a lot of developers that they neglect is the obvious thing that the platform looks at your reviews and they look at your scores and so if you're looking for support from your platforms uh and you don't care about your reviews well you just kind of kind of sunk your boat

so uh being able to take care of that is really important as well it's it there's not just one audience for reviews there's your players which are ultimate priority but you have to you have to be building uh your network with with a number of audiences out there not just your player audience and your your your partner audience is is really important and that's you gotta take care of your customer yeah i will i'll add to that yeah i do think reviews are very important i think the option could be you know moments where maybe you've made a decision or choice um importing something over bring something to a platform that maybe wasn't necessarily what community wanted and it can be a very clear indicator it's a very it's numerical it's right there on the page and you should follow up with them and you should be responding to them because those do influence all the people who aren't speaking i think that's one of the things that with a lot of these different platforms especially with reviews actually that one review actually represents a

much larger point of view and so yes we want to not be overly influenced by the vocal minority you should always back up like oh we see if it's in the review let's go look at the data let's go take an understanding of what actually is going on and what people are actually doing in their behavior and what they're saying and surveys etc but it is like a popular term canary in the coal mine if you have a ton of one-star reviews for whatever reason that represents actually thousands and thousands of other people who either are having the same problem or seeing that same problem and maybe deciding not to play your game so i think yes they're very influential i think you know if you're trying to make a game that people want to come back to and love you know it's something we do look i can look at it as i look at signing games past reviews for their other games as well just the game the game is old doesn't mean you shouldn't care for it and love it and maintain it if you have a foster that community is still there you're diehard fans and that does

actually influence you know publishers looking at your next game so margaret's point uh rule of thumb that i've learned in my years is that for every one person who writes in with a review or a ticket saying that they're having this issue there's probably like 50 other people who've had the same thing and who don't write in they don't bother to put in that like that effort and energy instead they just turn so it's really important to take that uh take that feedback and take action on it so true so true and we start out every stand up with um our community team reading out a player review and so we start our stand-ups because we want to hear from our players that's the voice that we need to hear and uh not only like i think on our games we we have a few million different reviews that have been given and so you learn a lot about your game on that aspect but look at it for other reasons i mean the best marketing fodder we have is players and what they say about the game and what they come up with things that we could never creatively think of and so there's so many reasons to go to

your reviews and keep that relationship alive that's just so important it feeds a lot of parts of your company right let's uh thank you a little bit more into uh the more difficult side of community management how do you react to like attacks aggression or like non-constructive feedback like do you ignore it do you start a discussion how do you how do you handle it working on league of legends i've never had negative feedback so i cannot respond [Music] um no of course you have negative feedback i had every one of the things i've ever released to do on um besides like taking a deep breath and like remembering it is a vocal minority you know like not everyone in the world all of a sudden hates the thing i put my love into um i think one of the things with it is i default to transparency and honesty you know i'm very and ride on support of this network to support this to an amazing degree

where i've been pretty straightforward i'm like here's the information i had in front of me in the constraint side in front of me and with that and all the things that i you know all of them i can't share of course with all that information here's the decision i made if you have a better one that solves the problems please give it to me like i'm trying to make the best decision possible i'm gonna be wrong gonna make mistakes if you have a great idea that i didn't think of that would be awesome but also if i am wrong and make mistakes and that is what's coming out in the conversation i'm fine changing it like i gonna be wrong and part of when you make these decisions is understanding that you might have to go back and redo it so that's how i usually just approach it understanding that like i'm not going to please that 100 million league players that sounds crazy um so putting out the information saying hey this is what i this is what i did here's how i thought through it it is what it is i'm not gonna be perfect you know i also will say like

i do on those big games have to think about you know i have to remind myself to go look at the data the players who are same thing because i think we talked about bad reviews things like that for every one person at the bedroom there's maybe a thousand or else brilliant for every one good review there's like a million people who are having that good time i think it's like so much larger on the other side and so i think it's one thing i have to remind myself when i see these like sort of things come in that can be very hateful um to go look at like what players are enjoying and how they are using and talking to them because you do actually get to hear a lot of positives you might you want to make sure that you see the whole picture when you're making those decisions to go back and do a feature or something exactly don't forget the happy silent majority yeah we are trying to make fun most of the time personally i'm a fan of zero tolerance for abuse towards uh representatives of games um i've actually had this talk with my boss and we agreed that every person who

works in a player-facing support role should be entitled to free therapy under their benefits um people suck and i think that not enabling that is a good thing to do for the health of your employees write that into your terms of service you know like no views like i get it if you write like a strongly weird email but there's a limit and you should set that boundary very strictly yeah definitely i completely agree with that and then uh one way that we we try to go one step beyond with like definitely dealing with each of those situations as they arise but then we also try to help reinforce uh positive norms in the community so uh constructive feedback um not making it personal uh like feel free to give as much negative feedback as possible because that's actually helpful for us um that's like we all want to make the game better the community wants to make the game better so we we reinforce that ourselves and then we also have community roles in our discord where we recognize players that do a really good

job of that so that they can be role models for the rest of the community so that people have a sense of like what is the right behavior what's the best most effective way to provide this feedback because if you provide it that way you're even more likely to see it actually come to life in the game so right though in the sense of you really have to as a team protect your people that's that's so so important to protect your people who are dealing with this because all you need to do is spend 15 minutes on the boards and you're like holy cow there's some crap out here and it can be really bad it can be really bad and most people don't see that during their day and so uh be generous yeah yeah i love the aspects of like ingredient in your like team culture or like reading you know where you read that doing stand up i think as it's wonderful like you know never have such a strong stance on these things that we get to take um and we look for that in our partners that they believe in those same things options that they always have to remind partners when they're pitching to conclude in the pitch like

that they do care about the community you're like who are you details yeah those things um but yeah it's one of those things like ingredient in your game into your culture into like what is good look like like setting that up is really important because you know i think those are things where we actually can not just stop the bad and like protect people you know our people but also protect the other players by pushing what's good because i think you know we model it by highlighting great players or by not taking you know taking stanford zero tolerance that actually also helps influence it to protect our players i think you know we're protecting our team but we're also actually protecting our community yeah and not to let a negative environment linger too long right yeah and and your community starts to go with you if you if you have that sense of strength and you move forward are some of our strongest advocates sometimes in those bad situations can be other players who are like oh no you crossed the line here you're you know like in discord or

something like that it's it's like no it builds the culture of what is an acceptable behavior and uh you gotta support that yeah yeah definitely and and like margaret already highlighted i think openness also from the dev team really helps with that to sort of you know cultivate that uh we have a few minutes left on this panel so if there's any questions from the audience raise your hand and otherwise i'd be happy to continue asking a few more questions um so oh can i can i borrow your microphone thank you thank you so related to that last point um so in your teams uh and michael i already know your answer so you can tell everyone else um do you uh encourage like members of your team to get involved with the community if they aren't community managers uh do you encourage people to get involved uh

or not and why what's your thinking behind that yes we're all game makers like everyone on balance everyone who works on league everyone wants a riot even on that game is encouraged because hey you're you're doing something you love you put your passion and your you know your effort into this thing you should definitely be engaging with the community not just as an encouragement but it's like a big push because it connects you with the joy we bring which is very fueling for a lot of people but it also connects you with the community and you hear directly from them and that is just there's no amount of like summary and a tableau version that i can like summarize what the community is feeling talking to someone answering like a ticket or something just as a real true personal connection and you can you know help them change their lives and hear from them and it just can't be stuff it can't be like summarized i guess so yeah i definitely encourage it that being said it it's scary it's really scary so like

butting up and like learning from community managers who do this and like having that partnership where they can have a safe space to like you know write the post and then get someone to come read it and just be like hey help me out i do like put my foot in my mouth i don't want to say anything weird you know and so i think that support is needed to do it but if you do commit to that it it is awesome i agree totally it's such a rewarding experience as game developers to be able to interact with the community that you fostered but to that point i think there is the caveat that if you are not in a public facing position if you're not in media or community we tell our non-community employees that you should be careful about what you say publicly um like just treat it as if it's gonna be quoted in an article and we also tell them that if someone asks you for like a quote specifically um or for something for uh tests uh direct them to the proper channels like for i don't know like a community

email or something like that or to the pr representatives of the company yeah i think this is just a personal journey but one thing that i've learned is that people who are dealing in our community management team with the community they're much better at it than i am so they're really pros they're really really good um but when we started as a studio like 10 years ago it was a real joy to get up and just read the read the reviews and read what comments were people and like that was just like because it was just so much fun you wanted to get it in here and and then honestly i kind of weighed away from that and i started kind of like getting busy in the business and doing a number of different things and there's pros that are dealing with it so i'm okay and i've gone away from it a bit and then one day i i was just watching an interview with tim cook who runs this little company called apple and it's like tell us how your day goes and he's like well i start my day by getting up and reading customer reviews and i'm like man two by four to the side of the head

uh like yeah it doesn't matter how big you get in a company you still gotta go back and you gotta look at what your customers are saying and so the customer reviews so so it's a habit for me now i have it on my calendar then i look at customer reviews it's not on my daily calendar i'll be honest but it's on my weekly calendar to go back and look at the reviews and go through it and if i'm sitting in an airport or something like that and scrolling through my phone you'll often see that i'm scrolling through customer reviews or looking at things so um i don't care where you are in your organization i think you need to know what your your customers are saying about your product yeah i think it's it's hard to do a really great job of um building up a good community unless you're part of the community and so uh and it's also very rewarding if you're if you're doing a great job of building a fun place to hang out and making friends then uh yeah so we've even hired a lot of people from the community too because they're people who are really passionate about the game and understand the world so yeah totally agree with everyone okay

awesome um i thought it would be fun to close it out with maybe you can share an anecdote or something something that you really learned from the community and the value that the community brought to you i'll take you back to microsoft anything that comes to mind to anyone i don't know something that you learned from the community there's so much it's just constantly like i mean game balancing and different features we're adding to the game um but one of the more fun things that we've done too is uh weaving some of the creative things from the community into the game so we had our old backstory we thought probably the animals would be likely to start up their own cult and one of our community members started saying praise banana all the time and it kind of starts spreading through the community because we have banana weapons that you can slip each other on and so we sort of weave that into the story of the game where there was this

banan cult and there's a secret uh mountain shrine that you can find a cave and place a banana on the thing that starts playing like banana chanting music um so we really like adding that type of thing and uh we did something similar with uh we were getting a lot of um really really great fan art uh we wanted a way to like kind of showcase that so we built a museum in the game um where you can walk through the museum and see the the latest uh fan art uh winners i mean on that sort of thread um of course like the pretty obvious one for league of legends of the game motivate aram is created was created by the community and then literally just playing that mode and then you know i was there when they turned it into a real mode um which is still beloved by many and for many a main way they play league of legends um so i think things like that are great which you can like if you are connected to me you can like see it and actually bring features into the game i

think for me in terms of like personally what i've like learned from community you know i think there is i feel like i've been doing it a while so i feel like my view of the community has definitely changed over time from being a fan of certain games to working on that side of it to you know just seeing the communities grow and change over time i think one of the biggest things i wanted is to remember there is a like we are trying to bring fun and there is a lot of people who love the game and though there was frustration we've all played games where we're like please don't let me fall through the world and you know when i'm trying to ride my motorcycle piano um but like at the same time you're doing it because you love it and there's a million people out there like also love it with you and you forget that i at least i forget and sort of get blinded by the job and the work and trying to improve and try to make it better that actually this like group of people who also want to just talk about the game i love so like i even today somebody asked me like what's your favorite character on ballard and i

immediately went into the like well i really like working on sage but you know he was really fun mechanic we built for the game i was like oh you mean as a human player yeah i love playing page we really love having people up let's go you know i'm like oh yeah you're with me on that let's go um from a product uh perspective um you know very close to what i am you know doing here right near this week so last two years uh 45 of the product enhancements that were developed by the team were actually based off of the suggestions given by the actual customers so feedback community the user advisory board kind of is the nucleus of whatever evolution that the product will see for the next five years and from a product standpoint this is what we want to kind of continue uh to do just about seventy things that flash through my mind when you ask the

question so i was trying to figure out what to say um but i think one of the things that that is it was important from a higher level for us is that there's such a diversity in the community that um that there's a real strong core and i underestimated how strong this is is that how strong that your community wants you to be a good you want they want you to be good you know in the sense of like you're reflecting this this is your promise and there's something more to you than just what your game is and so whether it's your social community whether it's your your brand image whether it's how you're involved in the community or any of those type of things um there needs to be a consistency throughout your whole your whole business your whole life your your dna uh say the company that is is so important and and to assume that your community doesn't care about that would be a mistake um i think it really kind of drives who you are as as as the people that are

working together to build your games so uh to think that um we work over here and building everything and our communities out there playing everything and they don't somehow interact um our community taught us to know that's not the case the community really does care and wants to be a part of something of engagement with you and if you can make that connection with them you can go a long ways together and i think that's kind of what gets us excited about what could happen in the next while i think that my biggest learning uh from my time in community has been really hammering in the importance of understanding your community and speaking on their level and really being like in the trenches of what they like and what they believe in when i was at eastside games i was really deeply involved in the go to market and community plans for the rupaul strategy super second and if you know anything about rupaul's drag race um it is uh very heavily adored by the lgbtq community and so one of the

biggest considerations that we had to take into account was how we were going to make sure that we did this community justice in terms of like how we spoke to them and what kind of language and messaging we used um and so what i really love about that team was that it was a team primarily made out of people who were involved like people who are in the career community and people who really understood drag and what that community likes and and all the nuances of the community the lead artist and the community engagement manager on that project were both like drag performers actively which i think was super cool um i think it was really important uh for me as well and i think it was really rewarding too like as a queer woman of color to be able to be involved in this project and to really make sure that all the different identities of your players were accurately and accurately reflected within the game and that you were able to

approach everything like that sensitively and in a way that was fun for those players i think that is a great place to uh to end it so thank you all so much and give a warm applause to to our panel right that doesn't only end the growth track that also ends the entire program for here for uh track room two uh thank you all so much for coming in and listening thanks to all of our amazing speakers thanks to our sponsors and uh just so you know there's already the tickets for pocket gamer he'll sink you're already on sale so if you can't get enough of it you know where to go thanks