PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds: From Pre-Alpha to 20 Million and Counting

[Music] hi everyone my name is Sammy I am here to give you a talk on how our game worked with our small tester community and twitch streamers and other types of content creators to launch our game on Steam early access is very nice to be here I might this is my second GDC in 2016 I came to you know San Francisco for my first GDC and I watched I went to a lot of talks and learned a lot and I'm a huge fan of GDC vault so it is very you know a kind of an emotional experience to be here to talk about how we you know developed the game and worked with our community to launch our game successfully on Steam and other platforms so okay I'll jump right in so I go by the name poopy queen on twitter and twitch it's just a silly

nickname that I have because my friends like used to tease me in college that I poop on their strategy when I play games with them and I thought you know if I had this memorable nickname people will remember me and I think it's it's a tip for a lot of indie studio like community managers if you have a memorable nickname like they will remember you because there were times in like during alpha or beta a lot of female streamers were like whose luck or like poopy something that works on player nose battlefield whatever and they remembered my name so it was very like effective so I think that's a tip I used to do community management but now I'm focusing more on marketing but for all the India teams out there you know you can't do it on your own like in the beginning but don't forget to scale like the team in the later phase because that's what we are like going through right now kind of that's a pain point

we're going through so moving on so these are the key takeaways for my Hach there was an article on Europe magazine titled how an unfinished game with no marketing came out of nowhere to dominate the Internet which is kind of true and not you know true in a sense because it wasn't out of nowhere we started with a small tester community in 2016 and we were like snowballing our tester community until early access like it was invisible to a lot of gaming media and the mainstream you know content creators but we had this community that we worked really closely with to really blow out and give more exposure to our game after the early access launch so I'm gonna be talking about how we went through different phases to slowly grow the community and

give a lot of impact when there was this time where we had to create big momentum without like a big marketing budget we had zero marketing budget in 2016 it was very you know humble we were we started as a small team so I will go into you know details about that and yeah the third point you know how to market your indie game with a zero dollar budget I think this is some you know it's a topic that will be of interest for many people okay so a little bit about our team we started with about like 25 people including a business manager and myself I started as an interpreter I had background in marketing and PR but my main job in the beginning of the project was to translate interpret for friend and player unknown green and the rest of the does so they can't you know communicate and work together part of

the core team was the team that developed a villian which is an action MMORPG and the team had worked together for such a long time they had great teamwork in over ten years of experience in building an online game so they had the experience providing an online service but didn't have experience in developing a shooter game so that's how he started now I think we have about 200 people we are like continuously growing so I don't have the number but yeah so who has not played pub G show the hands okay who has played pub G on mobile oh yeah you should definitely give it a try if you haven't it's dollar e Allah in the pocket yeah but so how we started pub G was that our producer and

the team wanted to develop the first standalone Bell real game I don't know if you're familiar with the entire Bell realloc history of entire gallery Allah drama but when we started our project the only Bellaire games that were available in the market was the culling h1z1 came with the kill and ARMA 3 battery out which is not an official mode and our team wanted to develop a standalone Belle really game and we looked at the industry and there was so much potential that Valeria had and we wanted to use that opportunity and launch our standalone Bellary game as soon as possible so the goal was you know make a realistic serious belliard game with an 8x8 kilometer open world map and with that goal you know we were just doing some research and thinking about how we should you know start the project and we found this guy who had

been working on Valerie games for over 4 years and that player known he had developed the first you know belle realloc game mod on ARMA 2 and he had you know recently worked with daybreak games to help them create a transient king of the kill and we thought you know we want to make something authentic and we had a different direction in the beginning but realized that we really need to go back to the basics and creates a barrier game with the original feel so we reached out to our producer reached out to player unknown and it was just over a Skype call and then within like few weeks he flew to Korea and joined the tag team and started developing pop G together so that was a little bit about pop G so at the core of our community management programs and

strategies there's community snowballing we started with this definition in mind and knew that this was going to help us grow because we were a small team of 25 people and no one knew about us some people know about Terra which is a MMO game developed by our mother company Blue Hole but we're a small team that had no you know marketing budget with the goal very ambitious goal of launching this standalone Bel Air game within a year on Steam early access so that was the goal and we thought you know PR and marketing efforts are not that necessary if we build a good product and with a community of snowballing strategy we thought we could make this work and we wanted to tie this with open development for those of you who might not heard of snowballing you know you've seen like in cartoon movies

where like a Donald bub picks up some snow and then it just rolls down you know the snowball down the slope and then it picks up more snow and grows you know larger and larger that's what we did with our tester community so this is just a you know general definition of community snowballing we had we wanted to develop a very you know close-knit vibrant tester community so I will go through how we recruited people and the next few slides to build a community you have to make them an insider we're not a triple-a studio no one is interested in a game like who cares who cares like Brendan had his Balrog community but it was a group of really hardcore fans that love Balor yeah and it's compared to other gaming communities it wasn't that big so it was very important to us to really

understand that that core community and make them a potential fan of pub G in the very early phase of development and what's important in communion snowballing is that you have to strengthen relationships and build loyalty this is important to any kind of you know community management but it's much easier to achieve when you have such a small community like right now we have a player base of 40 million people just on PC and Xbox and it's very difficult to build relationships but it's much easier when there's just 500 people like you can't talk to every single one of them if you spend like 12 hours a day and that was so easy back in 2016 when we when I had the time just to give like personal attention to every single like tester that was really

active so that's really easy when you have a small community and it's also important to get them really involved in the development process there are a lot of great talks and presentation on GDC vault about open development I was a I was watching a lot of those presentations last year and in 2016 to study what other games did to be transparent to their testers and what we did was we had a discord server for alpha testers and we would share a lot of information in there and luckily like they didn't care enough to share it on reddit or anywhere so it was just in our discord and there were like 500 people just checking out like whip screens and talking to like player known and myself and that's something you know you could use for your out community so what was special about our snowballing was that Bella realloc games in general have like higher viewability

people love watching it on Twitch or YouTube because you can follow someone's journey from the beginning to end until that person becomes the last man standing and this is something that we wanted to tap into so we thought you know we have to be at least mildly successful on Twitch to promote our game with zero dollar budget and we knew that this could be you know our go-to marketing strategy from the very beginning and the second thing we thought was that we are small game you know and no one was like expecting us to be a game like there are people who didn't believe that we would finish the game and a lot of you know Bellary all players were saying if they're not gonna finish the game you know they're h1z1 was dominating the market at the time and then a lot of bail real hardcore

fans loved ARMA 3 BR so much and although they were in a very supportive they thought you know like they've never heard of the studio and they knew that these guys like didn't have experience in building a shooter game so there was some doubt and we thought you know it's very important to reach out to those who would support us because that would be you know that would help us amplify and give more exposure to our theme in the long run and what was also important was that content creators are always looking for new content and especially the lower tier ones are looking for something that's unique to differentiate their channels a lot of bigger like top tier streamers we'll only player a game if it's mainstream or if it will like grow their

viewership as well or if it's like a very like hot topic of that like week but we knew that we couldn't we didn't have the money to pay the top-tier streamers to play our game when we did our public alpha test and we knew that the streamers that are in the mid tier would be interested because they want to differentiate their channel with low cost and they want to create something unique so they can you know stand out from the crowd and they don't have the resources or the connection to have access to you know exclusive content of triple-a studios like there was this opportunity for mutually beneficial relationship and we knew that if we gave them exclusive content and a chance to create something unique they would you know support us so I've you know lined

out a few points here but I will go through all the details later so we did our first alpha after developing the game for four months you will see that small screen shot that's just the key art we had created you know Brandon had tweeted out hey guys I'm finally you know excited to announce that I'm working on my own standalone Bellary a game and you can see that it got like two thousand likes and we were very stoked to you know have this I'm just having to splash back while I just talk about this and we had one hundred eleven hundred like registered testers that's a pretty small like tester community and only six hundred of them participated and we had six hours of testing so this is you know I'll be uploading this presentation later on GDC you can check it out we had you know we are very scrappy this was our Google forum we just posted

this on Brenda's Twitter and our website so people can click this google form and sign up and we only looked at their you know PC specs and a few other things and on top of this we invited the streamers that have been a longtime fans of brandon spell real mods so this is just the content and marketing calendar that i developed i wanted to establish a healthy cadence for content to show to our community and Brendon was very you know active he was writing the dev blog post and showing a lot of the stuff that was in development on his Twitter and discord like here are the samples like you can check them out on our dev blog and here are a lot of the whip-like screens or videos we had so the question we had before we moved into our closed

alpha was that do we really want to test this like after four months of development our build didn't look like what we wanted to you know show to the world and there was like a lot of debates around it like should we really do a public test although there was an NDA we're very insecure about it but you know this is what our game looked like after four months it looks you know definitely different from what you know you played these days the tone is different and there were a lot of bugs and the UI you know looks very interesting so we had this like debate for weeks like do we really want to you know show this to our small tester community that are really passionate about this project and the answer is you have to do it you know as an indie team there was no pre-launch hype we distributed press release no one really cared about we got some coverage but it didn't give us a lot of exposure and we

had no marketing resources and this you know closed alpha test was a great chance to really communicate to our tester community that we are like committed to this and we have built something just in four months and we're excited to show what we had in store in the next eight or 10 months and we made it a privilege we're very insecure about showing this bill and thought you know people are not going to be happy or you know they're not going to have confidence in us but it was a privilege because you had to you know be invited and you had to be a streamer you had to be you know Brendan's longtime fan or you had to have you know good pcs to be able to test that alpha bill because it was very heavy back then and giving them exclusivity it worked out very well because they had access to this you know

exclusive content on the private disc or server and we were giving them information that no one had access to we didn't even you know share it with the media and we did a lot of communication to help every single you know player and tester understand that this is a very early version of the builds we communicated that on a daily basis and I don't think it hurts to you know really iterate that so they truly understand that this is a product that's you know being worked on so then after a couple months we moved to our first alpha that pubs that's not a typo because we used to call pub G like pubs and in our first like pre-alpha what our game our game looked their friend and it also started different we would have 64 people running out of a starting building and a funny story I

wanted to share with you guys is that our office in Seoul is close to a military base and we would have c-130 like flying over the building all the time and the Brenden thought we have the plane like in other be our most so maybe this is a sign so we should put the plane like into the game so that's you know how we have the plane in the game if c-130 didn't fly over our office maybe it you know Pub G we start in the starting building 100 people running out of the you know okay that would be pretty hilarious but so for the first alpha we lifted the NDA which means we allowed everyone to create videos share screenshots and stream it on Twitch and our performance on Twitch during the test phase was 44 thousand viewers at peak which is not bad but we're like in top 10 and there were a lot of games that had the viewership of you know 128

thousand and we still had a small viewer base and you know this was at peak and average was much lower than that so to lift or not your left we had this debate again before the alpha test because you know we were all insecure again like do we want to show this to the public that this time it was even more scary because if we lift the NDA like everyone will see the game on twitch and we're not very confident that this was at a stage where we can show it to like millions and thousands of people but at the end of the day we knew that we're just showing progress and we have to build you know some sort of hype towards data and the next alpha and Brandon and our producer had this long discussion for

days and days and we thought this is going to you know work for us we have to show what we have and it will be you know great for them because they have access to this test build that no one else has because they were invited or part of the tester community so it's really important to you know reinforce that sense of you know exclusivity like we always communicated this and there were you know a small group of people who are wondering how you get access to that test and you know we would tell them you have to sign up maybe in our next alpha test you'll be included you should wait for that so that really you know drove some interest um like people who saw a game on Twitch and got interested and if there was a twitch streamer who wanted to participate we gave them keys like we wanted to you know we want the streamers to stream it and give us feedback on their live streams so moving on to alpha 2 we did

our alpha test for 4 weekends and you will see that you know our logo looked differently to for our alpha and this time we had a bigger tester who we opened the applications for sign up again and we also identified and invited more testers and streamers a lot of people asked me in 2016 or 2017 how I invited a lot of streamers to our test and it's very simple you just go to their YouTube and Twitter and find their email interest and send the cold emails so you do that for two weeks and that you have this long list of you know thousand people and you just send out a Google Form that's you know how it really works but you know sometimes it will just end up in their spam folder and then after six months you'll hear back from them hey Sami I got your email

it was in spam folder how can I get access to your alpha test like that happens sometimes but you know when you send cold emails they don't really read it or they get interests unless it's something they've heard of but what really works is that if they watch their fellow streamers streaming the game on twitch and they don't have access they want it they want it and then they will you know somehow find you on Twitter and ask for you know keys so that's what started to happen in our alpha because we had it you know we had the test for four weekends and the group of streamers that have been with us from pre alpha Charlotte you know streaming a lot and they really loved what we had achieved they saw improvements and there was you know a lot of positive word-of-mouth going around and that spread across twitch and other streamers who didn't have access were you know wondering like how do I get

access and then they would ask their friends fellow streamers like where do you get keys which sometimes you know give more keys to you know streamers so they can share it with their community or friends or sometimes they would tell you know their fellow streamers like go to poopie queen like she's on Twitter and then you know that's a very easy name to remember so they would come to me on Twitter and they say like where are my keys like how come I don't get them so I would spend like hours and hours sending out keys via Twitter and email and there was one time that during closed beta we were a lot of the streamers just wanted the keys like at that moment that sometimes out hit the limit of Twitter DMS so if you send more than like three or 500 DMS in a day like Twitter shuts you down so you can't so you can't send DMS anymore so there was like there were times where I would post on Twitter hey guys

I've hit my limit again I can't send you keys anymore like here's my email where I would just post keys on Twitter so that's how you do it when you don't have money and does work so we had 800 streamers participated you can definitely see that the number has grown from 128 it's because I was just running around you know giving away keys inviting more streamers and for alpha-2 we also had you know a couple of external teams helping me out to identify more streamers that have not played ARMA 3 BR h1z1 the culling or other like games so the question we had was that if we scale this up by hiring a team of influence or management experts to you know identify more streamers maybe we could grow this bigger maybe we could have a bigger streamer community

and this is not a firm answer but what I want to say by saying no to this question is that they really want to talk to the developers like they really appreciate it when you approach them and give them information even if it's just you know cut it's a couple of Twitter Deanna's they want to talk to the developers or the community manager they don't want to talk to your PR Rabb and you know the folks that the PR agency they might be you know hard-working people but they're not as invested as you like they're not gonna wake up at 2 a.m. and see a Twitter like tweet and streamers like where's my key I want to play it now and then that streamer has like 20,000 like viewers on Twitch you've got to give them the key now but the agency is not going to do that right and like yeah you're like really desperate to get the keys to the hands of the streamers so it's really important that you have

someone that's like fully committed to you know driving this effort while your test is publicly available and streamable on twitch and youtube and what really helps is that there are people on Twitch that still like remember how I used to work with them and that really builds like personal relationships and that you know tastes bad because they just want to help you and they know how you had been scrappy like sleeping for six hours you know and I was always you know responsive and they really appreciate that because I help them grow their business at one point when we were small I you know we were not very helpful and you know giving them push or helping them grow viewership but when we you know made it sort of streaming our game was what they wanted to do and I was available and

they really appreciate that because I gave them access it sounds very simple but they remember that and they will help you they'll help you distribute more keys and talk positively about your game and I said this in the beginning they always look for new or better content to build their business on some people still you know make fun of streamers saying like how do you make money just playing games like they take it very seriously all these successful streamers think like an entrepreneur so it's a business for them and you have to think like a partner how do I provide opportunities and unique content for them to you know be differentiated for them to be different and stand out from millions of other streamers so we moved to closed beta in early 2017 and then we

still had a small community but much bigger than what we had during our alpha phase and we wanted to reach a larger target market so we looked at other games that are not Balrog or have bel real game modes we looked at casual gamers and top tier streamers and variety streamers and I continue to send cold emails you know Twitter DM z-- tweets and also asks our community members to talk to their friends about our game and one thing we did during closed beta was that we developed this discord bot that was in our private server so you would you know a type of command and then that this board bought would send you like five keys via DM like it was a very effective strategy to distribute keys to thousands of people that were in a discord test server and that was the privilege that was only given to alpha testers so they would type the command and get the keys and they could you know give it to their

friends or they could do like a Twitter promotion there it's very easy to develop it's something that I highly recommend if you don't have like a flashy website to distribute keys and we started going to conventions like PAX West and we would have printed out like cars with key codes and we just you know hand them out like candies and our focus for closed beta was maximizing twitch and YouTube coverage during closed beta my personal goal was can we hit the number one like streamed game on Twitch during this phase so that was my goal and I had to distribute more kids to streamers so they would stream the game during closed beta and this is the charts at the top right corner is a survey we did and it says heavier participation in previous alphas and a large portion of closed beta testers

hadn't participated in our previous test which means our strategy of promoting this through twitch streamers were effective you know that was effective because people had not heard about us in the news they just saw us on Twitch and found out that we were you know running closed beta got interested and came to us for keys so this is what we did during closed beta I will go into more detail in the next slide we had like a twitch parachute to celebrate the twig streamer community we had built from pre-alpha we had a small booth at PAX East and one of the interesting things we did is that you'll see on the very rights that we had 64 graffitis of streamers like logos or artwork that were placed in the game so if you went

into Erin Gill and played you would see those like graffitis and this was to celebrate the top streamers that helped us you know promote our game during a second alpha and close beta and this worked out very well for us so we wanted to you know reward loyal testers and streamers and graffiti that graffiti event that I showed you is one of the activities we did and to you know reward loyal testers you might have heard of this in famous player unknown set where you get that you know there are no coat and that was given out to all the alpha testers and for the streamers who have been supporting us since like alpha and who started actively supporting us during beta we would give them extra keys there were some streamers who got like 100 or 500 keys that they could

share with their community and they could do like a gleam giveaway or Twitter giveaway to grow their following and that worked very well because we didn't give out keys ourselves and having those extra keys to share with whoever wanted them help them you know grow their following on Twitter or sometimes random people would stop by and do like a chat giveaway to get keys from their twitch chat and what we also did was that we're always watching twitch a lot during closed beta a lot of our deaths had you know twitch you know up on their screen and while they were developing and there were a lot of interesting feedback from the streamers so sometimes we would actually acknowledge the feedback and act on it and give credit to that streamer or player after implementing that change and then you know in a couple of days it

will be our one-year anniversary and so we you know launch our early access on March 23rd and in 16 days something happened like we were we got like the Guinness record for selling 1 million units on this team as an early access game and then we got six other records for selling too many copies in a short time which was unexpected like no one expected this in our team Brendon and I were the most like optimistic people who are like cheerleaders and our deaths like you guys are crazy like you guys just watch you know twitch too much you guys hear like good things from the streamers you guys are too optimistic then you got a countdown but it's like Brendon and I would feel like we're gonna sell 2 million copies and they're like you guys are being ridiculous but you know we hit the record and it's all history and then during early access we launched our pop G partner program and the pop do partner program is

something we were able to launch during early access because we became successful during early access we're now in a position where we were able to reward streamers for streaming our game so we had a sign-up page on our web sites where streamers would come and enter the information and we were to select streamers that had that could be you know a great part of our community and we would give them rewards rewards like you know VIP access to our parties and access to custom games custom games is a feature in our game where you can create custom games for your community and then change the settings of Valerie L in our game and then there were other perks that comes with the program so the key points of early access we continue to give benefits but now we had the

resources and you know some money to give back and we wanted to give them bigger exposure so we launched a small like advertising campaign and we were able to feature a lot of streamers there so we had a Facebook and YouTube campaign where we would grab clips of twitch streamers enjoying the game it's available on our YouTube channel and you can see you know we tried to capture all the crazy moments they had and it's so fun to watch because their reactions were crazy this was a new game to them and there were a lot of you know funny bugs and glitches and we just showed it all so that people would think oh like I want to play that game what kind of you know game is that we you know had that ad campaign and it gives them exposure and a lot all the streamers that participated in this just did it for free and we later reward them so we also

did the in-game graffiti event that I showed you earlier and it gave them access to custom games and the other thing we did was we created events to really celebrate the community that we built with them and one of the most successful events we ever did was the twitch charity Invitational you can find out more about the events if you google it but basically it was we invited 64 streamers from North America and another 64 from Europe and we had this you know huge group of streamers fighting with each other and through it throughout like few games and we got like so much exposure through this and the viewers loved it because they always loved when there's like rival a going on among like twitch streamers and we were able to hit like all-time peak in terms of viewership and we also had a streamer exclusive PAX

East mixer where we would invite content creators and to streamers and really you know communicate with them we had you know Brendan come in and he would talk about what's in store for pop G how we plan to continue to develop the game until we launched 1.0 there were other programs and activities we did we had deaf live streams we can watch that on our official twitch channel it's yeah we had we you know arranged it ourselves there were laughs audio and sound issues you should definitely watch it to learn what not to do have live streams there are so many issues and it shows how we are not prepared but kind of not afraid to give it a go and fail fast and hurt quickly but you should definitely watch if you plan to do like a deaf high stream for the first time and we gave rewards to all the alpha testers which was the player unknown set which is not available anymore and we had we attended

like twitch meetups twitch is a bit you know interesting because they have a lot of local meetups in different cities and states and we attended those meet ups to talk to streamers and talk about our game so I was like a salesperson for for any month and you have to understand what it's like to be a streamer so I created my own twitch channel and streams like for three months and I highly encourage that to all the like community managers who do not stream because it really helps you understand what it feels like to get like donations and grow your following and that really helped me understand how they think when they want to grow their business and to viewers and it's also important to what it's like to be a viewer or a fan so

what I did was I watched Twitch like all day long during our alpha or beta phase and wanted to understand what kind of relationship they build with their viewers at one point I was subscribed to 50 streamers and I was just paying that out of my own pocket I just wanted to support them for being such a passionate part of our community but it really helps like because they know that you are from a small team and I'm just you know like a fangirl that want to support them and it also helped me build like a special relationship so just to go over like the key points these are the points that I wanted to really highlight through today's talk number one you have to start with a small like exclusive community of hand-selected members first we were we had the privilege of you know starting with a small community that brandon already had built for many many years

and there were the big fans of valerie all games and what's important is that to really strengthen that sense of exclusivity if it's open to anyone they're not going to be really interested they want you know to be treated special and they want to have something that's just exclusive to a small group of people and if you take good care of them and start you know treating them differently and after like a certain time they just become like genuine ambassadors for your game the second point would be that you have to you know especially for streamers you have to give them something exclusive something they can you know consume even if it's just small nugget of information that's really important to their business and you have to make them feel like an Insider and that really helps them build their business and for

testers they feel like they belong to the community and you know you allow them to shape your game by allowing them to give feedback and you act on them and you have to communicate the changes you made based on their feedback and it's also important to communicate how what they were gained from being part of this community it's there in it for some reason they want something back it's not that you have to you know pay them or you know have to reward them in some way but it's always good to provide them with all the perks or benefits you can and while it's difficult to do that as a small team without a big budget there are a lot of things so you could try it like I've shared the examples you ain't if you go to our dev blog you will find a lot of like evidence there the things that we could have done like but didn't do because we didn't have time I still

kind of feel like if we gave like in-game badges for alpha testers that would be really cool because you can brag about that and we wanted to launch an activity point program to reword testers that were more active than the rest of the community but we didn't have time to so it's something that you could look into and you know it also we wanted to have like a multi-tiered reward program for the streamers and testers but we're just busy I was busy handing out keys and talking to all our testers so this is something you could I would like to do if I could turn back time the third point content creators for streamers they have to be you know part of your marketing plan if you don't have the budget and they will you know help you if you build the relationship the right way but they're not marketing tools a lot of publishers pay them to play the game you're not going to be able to build a relationship by doing

that and it's just a one of thing like they have to be emotionally invested and to do that you have to commit to building a mutually beneficial relationship with them you have to you know invest a lot of your time that's how I did it and to do that you know you have to understand their business yeah you have to you know you are highly recommended streaming yourself and becoming their hardcore fans and also treat them as your business partners the last point I wanted to emphasize was that you have to directly talk to your players and streamers like having an agency or outside help is always good when you don't when you only have limited time but that's you should only do that when you want to scale things up or when you don't really have the time to reach out to someone who's not a hardcore like fan or who is like a you

know streamer that wants to support you but not as someone you know as passionate as your key like tester because you have to directly talk to them to build relationships and that level of intimacy you build like grows and then helps you in the end if I could turn back time I you know would rethink how I want to build a team out because when we came out of early access we didn't anticipate the kind of success we had and we only had you know a few people in the community I was the one who was start talking to the streamers and they were like community coordinators and assistant Kumi managers that would interact with the testers and I really regret not scaling fast enough to be able to communicate to a community that would grow exponentially in the next few months and

we also failed to maintain the level of transparency we had in 2016 and 17 because things grew so fast and we were not ready for that so I highly recommend you know growing the team before things take off so you're ready for that kind of exposure and the need for interaction so that's it for my friend thanks for your time and we're currently growing our team based in Amsterdam so Santa Monica and other liked regions so if you're interested hit me up on Twitter I'd be able to talk to you about tough G and other positions that you might be you know interested thank you so it looks like I have a few minutes for questions if you have any questions you can come up and then I'll be happy

to answer any questions you have got a question to what extent do you validate the identity of streamers I find this quite time-consuming okay so what it takes to validate the authenticity of streamers my answer would be that you have to spend a lot of time to watch them and check their Twitter you know see what kind of content they've created in the past it's definitely time consuming and it's something that is difficult to overcome but one thing you could do is look at what other what other games have worked on like we have a list of partners available on our

Twitter maybe you know you could look into that because that means we've spent our time and that's like the resource you could use because we validated them there are a lot of other games that have like a list of partners available on their websites or you know so that's something you could use yeah did you find key Mela useful at all Oh key mailer it's a system of distributing keys to to streamers oh and using white I can get that key mailer it's basically a youtuber or a twitch streamer would register with key mailer developed okie mailer oh we use like we worked with some beta test focus media to distribute more keys and I don't believe we use key mailer but it was a platform that we had interest in and if we you know would have used them if we had time to work with them okay thanks thank you oh yeah I'll switch languages on your Sao it

immediate urgent need ah and I'm gonna swim switch back to english now I'm a community manager for a mobile gaming company on called Mehta mochi and I know you know we're rolling out a game and the devs are really keen to kind of bring people in so some of these I'm gonna tribe although it's mobile so it's a little different and my question is this well first thank you for sharing kind of like your insights and your fails but that's something I'll probably be tasked with is kind of getting a feel for the key times to kind of scale that team up right you know and to expand and that's something can you go a little bit deeper into like what those key moments were where you probably should have so when did I realize that I should scale up my team I realized that a few months ago because it has been a very overwhelming experience to have a game that has like a 40 million player base on Xbox and PC

but when I think we had this moment during closed beta when streamers are really enjoying the game they couldn't get enough of the game so they would beg us to extend this testing time and they were enjoying the whole experience so much they couldn't stop talking about it on Twitter or twitch and I feel like oh we have these like hundreds not dozens of people hundreds of people talking about our game on twitch on Twitter that's when you should really scale things out when they are really emotionally invested and they want your game to succeed and they actually talked about it on livestream like we had shrout saying I want to support these guys these guys just made a great game within like a year and I feel like that's when I should have had like for people to start building like more relationships with content creators thank you I so you mentioned that having an initial nucleus of a community which

knew of Brendan's work helped but what would you suggest to people who are starting out and have to build that community from scratch and the second question is that on mobile I know you haven't shared that part of your journey here but given the context that many similar games were already there on mobile how did you choose to launch babji mobile and how do you how do you plan to expand the community there so your first question is what do you do when you don't have player unknown right so you know what we did was friend and had a community about what you can do is look at the fan base recruiter that already exists that are interested in the genre of the game that you're going to develop because there will be a community that's interested in you know your competitors

and you look at them and you can approach them and say we're gonna develop like a similar game but differently that's how you can you know start building your community and that's what we kind of did with people who are not really interested in our like standalone game and your second question was how do we how do we decide to launch pop G mobile and how we plan to grow the community there you know we thought it would be cool to you know play Bellary all on your mobile phone and we worked with code developed the game with Tencent and it was an easy decision like we want our game to be on all platforms so that people can enjoy Bellary out wherever they go and it's I I got a lot of tweets from our players that it's so cool to play pub G when they're you know pooping so that's that's you know and it's cool like what you know we had the

resource and time and we knew that you know the players wanted that it's all about providing what they want for mobile it's gonna be a challenge but we definitely want to start you know implementing same strategies and introduced similar programs to mobile as well thank you I was just wondering within the grand scheme of things what role if any did early access play yeah was it necessary it was definitely it was not necessary in of community management it was the our deaf team's goal to develop a standalone ballerina game as an early access game within a year and I think it was definitely necessary for development because it helped us snowball the community as well because we were pushing out patches and fixing everything on a weekly bi-weekly basis and that you know really got our community excited because we were

listening to their feedback we were fixing bugs as we go and it was an interesting time for our community to see the game evolve and change like on a weekly basis and that you know alongside the snowballing strategy for the community helped our community like grow further thank you thank you for the talk I think you're the greatest Community Managers one of the yeah in the world and like I thought you share your knowledge and your experience right now and I think there will be more people copying it and if you had a next project I think and I think at that time you have a marketing budget more than this time so what will you do to like expand your community for that new title if I could turn back time and had more money

to you know do community management for pucci I would spend that money in building platforms for key distribution which took up my time and I would also spend a lot of time in building like well branded assets so that we could in a raise brand awareness and you know how the streamers you know help them with we want to give them content they can post on Twitter we had a very like scrappy graphic assets and you want the streamers and youtubers to use your assets during like in their content so we you know can get exposure through their channels but we're not very good at that I would spend a lot of time in graphic design and to provide them with all the graphic assets that can they can post on Twitter yeah okay thank you thank you I was wondering if you could provide a bit more insight into how you channeled some of your community feedback especially as you went through

alpha and into beta because this communities grow you get more and more different groups pulling in different directions did you would you say you put more time into that an initial alpha group and gave them more weight or did you try and spread things out evenly or do you have any insight you can provide around that so your question is how do we channel all the feedback we had yeah did you give any weight to certain groups like that initial alpha core group are the streamers as you brought them on board or as things opened up to just everybody did any group hold more weight to what you brought forward um well it's not I don't think it was about giving you no weight more way to certain pieces of feedback it was more about testing something and then iterating so we would act on something we think that's gonna work and we iterate if that works you know we implement that to the next build that's how you know things worked there were some feedback that we're not sure of you know in early phase of alpha we're not sure that whether we should

have liked first-person perspective which is something you know ridiculous to think about now when like a large part of the community enjoys first-person perspective but there were a lot of streamers behind that idea and testers that supported that and we gave it a try and people just you know loved it and they said this is like the real like Baloo yeah so I think it's something that you have to learn as you go and implement the changes and you just have to iterate you might fail but you have to accept it thank you I thanks for the talk first and my question is that at certain point when your community becomes so large I'm pretty sure like you know players all over the world like the play pop G and there are players from Brazil players from Japan players some from Spain they do speak different languages how do you you know manage the streamers and youtubers and make sure to keep them for saying you know personal

touch and to maximize the effort so how do we how have we been communicating with a lot of content creators from different countries that speak different languages um we didn't have that luxury during early acces we only had someone for Korea and China as far as I remember but what we did was we had a lot of Meece for other languages so we had one person for China Chinese Japanese and then we had one person for French at one point so you could you know hire freelancers who would do the job to talk to the content creators if you're not sure about whether your game is gonna scale up and have a bigger community but it's something that you could definitely like train other people to do and do it like on behalf of you if you have like the core programs lined out thank you

congratulation for party success and thanks for sharing I'm curious about that so we know pop juice ms2 the publishing work and the reverb to the marketing work so how do you say that as a beginning impact gee is almost zero budget for marketing so while why was it this way so you're saying we had you know some agencies that we work with and then we had you know yeah well we did the minimum we got to get the news out distribute the press release so we had you know PR agency that distri would press release and arrange interviews for us but if we know that's not really marketing it's like the minimum you have to do to give you like some kind of exposure but by saying zero marketing budget what I wanted to you know deliver was that those you know activities weren't effective it didn't do us you know a lot of favor and we didn't get a lot of exposure from that and all the results that we had came

from the activities we did outside of that of course you have to have a PR agency you know you got a you know you know you don't know if you're going to blow up and then have a lot of media requests coming in thank you hi so you guys have a forum that's on your your own site you have a forum and discussion boards on Steam and on Xbox and all these different entry points and places for for community so but I noticed that through your talk you're just saying engaging with our community as one entity but in reality it's actually very fractured and splintered on your own community there's hundreds of thousands of posts on Steam there's a factor of 10 less how do you manage all of these different communities is there a strategy to doing that is there a desire to have a singular community for all of that what are your some of your thoughts on

that so your question is we have a lot of channels how do you be efficient in madge then do we have a strategy to manage all different outlets well it's a bit of like a painful question to answer it because that's our pain point right now because we didn't have time to you know consolidate everything in like the last few months that's what we want to work on this year and in the beginning we only had a few channels like discord our forum and that was it but now we have a lot of different channels different players that speak you know different languages so what we want to do is we understand that's going to be difficult to have a singular community we just want to find like the right platform or even build one that will you know help our players interact with other community members and really enjoy having a conversation around pub G and that's something we want to explore in the next few months since we've been so

busy developing the game and growing the community thank you a great talk thank you for sharing during closed alpha did you allow anyone exclusive access to share what they were doing either through a video or a writer or something along those lines or did you decide to keep everything closed for closed pre-alpha there was an NDA so there only allowed to talk about it but not post any screenshots or share a video and then when we started our first alpha we lifted the NDA and then allowed people to share any videos screenshots from the previous tests okay thank you thank you thanks for your time [Applause] you