Power of the Pack: Success via Community-Based Development

[Music] so hi everybody I have the pleasure of telling you a bit about success via community based game development today my name is Philomena I'm the co-founder of a small indie studio based in Zurich Switzerland we are called strafe on studio and we're currently six people just working on our own games publishing our own games and trying to survive so let's get some insights here of what community-based development actually is so this is indie game guy we'll call him indie game guy he's working on his own project he loves making games he's been working on it in his free time all the time and then after three years of hard work the game is finally done by that time indie guy think the guy has grown a beard of course because we all know making games is hard but the problem is

the game is cool and all but nobody cares kinda didn't work out some somehow I didn't really manage to find his target audience press wasn't really interested yeah that's what's happened sometimes but what if I tell you that indie game guy could have done one thing differently and it could have turned out completely different so this is indie game guy again but instead of just working for three years he is showing the game to people he's actually showing it early in a prototype phase involving them into development into development showing them why they should maybe care involving them listening to their ideas and actually forming a little group around his game then again the beard has grown three years later making games is still hard but this time indie game guy is not alone he doesn't have to be that one person team or maybe that three person small team that is fighting the

war against reaching people but instead indie game guy now has a whole troop of people that he gathered up along the way that they're making all kinds of noises and helping him to get the word out about his so this is a little thing I call the US state this is the state when it's not you against the rest of the world but you and the P and a group of people who really believe in your idea just as much as you do and you all want this game to succeed so you might still wonder why should I get there so one reason to try and really build up a group around your game is that he will get constant feedback and that of course improves your game if you listen to it if you hear like five times that something is off it's probably really off and you should work on it so in the end you have a better game also it will be very motivating to work with your players because we all know this point in development where like you come

across a problem that is so hard and you're just and you know I had this other cool idea that I could be working on and it's probably working out better and a lot of us then just tend to like jump over to the next project and never ever finish one and if you have a group of people that is actually involved in the project already and they care about whatever being fixed and it's being updated it would be prevented from doing that and other than that you will see a lot of marketing benefits because of course many mouths can shout louder than one so if you think this sounds neat and this sounds like a good idea how do I actually get there then this is probably a session that you will enjoy so it all starts with your game if you make a game and it's nothing special at all like it can't differentiate from other games this is not going to work out whatever technique you may be using so first off you should be thinking about making a game with hooks so this can be anything

this can be a very special graphic style this can be a special narrative a special main character or a special game mechanic but you just really need to think about what it is so for example this is the first game that we made we release this last year in September and it's a game where you basically have a group of animals and it's a game about population genetics so you try to keep your group of animals alive against all odds like predators and climate change and we thought about what are actually the hooks with this game when we worked on it so first of all it's a science-based game so you bring in people that are interested in biology or genetics specifically because in this game you will actually learn how genetics work so you've got all the we got all the dog breeders and biology teachers who are coming in because they think this is an interest an interesting topic then there is the cute aspect of it you look at it and you say oh that's

cute if you're generally into cute things you will probably be attracted to this game and the third point is its genre at least back then we were when we were working on its survival and roguelike games were like super hip the marketing is getting more crowded currently but back then it was like there's this cute game and it is a survival game and that's interesting mixed kind of brought people in so you also get some bonus points if you fulfill the following things so it is easier to build up a community I think if you have a game that is expandable we have seen all the cool early access games if you have like emergent gameplay you can add some new things and the game plays differently then people find it very easy to come back to your game and play it again even though they have played it earlier I don't think it is absolutely necessary for your game to be expandable you can have this cool narrative game with the twist at the end but then you would probably need to approach your community building community building a bit differently

because you are not able to show the game all the time but you would probably want to build up a community that is for example interested in detective games and you don't even have to show your game you just build up a community around the topic so you get another bonus point if your game is visually appealing if you can just post it on social media and people can see it and they go like wow this is it and that certainly brings them in easily and another one if your game is unique or at least as a better job at something than other games so if you for example make a driving game and then you like differentiate by saying you make a driving game that is really about the drifting that feels better than any other game and you bring in people from there so you think you have a game you think you have your hooks in place then you start to think about where to actually find those people the first thing that comes to mind especially because we are at one currently are events there's probably

some local events where you live for example we started off by just going to a cafe that is for anime fans and just brought our laptop set it up there let people play engage them and then later on we also started to travel around a bit and this also helped this of course help to find people but it also helps us to figure out who our charge and audience actually is because when we had the first prototype I believe that this was our target audience like girls at around 12 years but by traveling and by talking to so many people it actually turned out that they are also there are also other people who are interested in the game and this showed us that okay there there's also adult people and all the guys we actually think this is interesting and this encouraged us to also add some more complex mechanics to the game to say yeah we can go really deep with the whole genetics topic and it doesn't have to be super kids friendly because we will also appeal to adults so that helped and while you are

travelling to those events do me a big favor because I see a lot of any developers not doing that just grab people's email addresses if you have someone at your booth and they're like super enthusiastic about what you're doing just ask them if they want to get more information on the game when you update something when you launch at least when you launch and they are usually very happy to do it they just fill in their name fill in their email address and then you can put it into some platform for example we use MailChimp to just have them all in place and on the day the game actually launches you can just send out an email to all of them at once because otherwise all those people you have met will most likely not know if you're launched once the time arrives so another thing I'm sure a lot of you are also doing is social media especially if you're gay is very visually appealing you can look into the different platforms of social media there are there are like a lot of

specific sub reddits so you can think what kind of group of specific people does my does my game appeal to or specific hashtags or Facebook groups there's just endless things going on there and another thing that is sometimes a bit overlooked is related communities so for niche for this genetics game one of the biggest inspiration for the game was actually a book series which is called warrior cats which is a book series for children where wild cats live in the forest and try to survive and I just thought I would be bold and write the author and email and said hey you you wrote this very cool book series and I enjoyed it and it was one of the main inspirations to our game and she replied to that and she liked it a lot and she just gave us a lot of shout outs on social media and this brought in a lot of people who like the warrior cat series so there are actually a lot of community already in place that you can just tap into and bring in people from there you just need to think where they

could be which brings me to the next problem so if you have those 300 teenage warrior cats reading girls that are interested in your game where do you actually bring them so they heard about it now but they don't really know what to do it because the game is not yet out they don't know where to go maybe they go to the website real quick but then they're off again and not sure you will ever reach them again so you would want to think about opening up a community hub so there are lots of different options again one that is currently very popular is discord where you can directly chat with your fans or you could open a subreddit and put them there or a Facebook group or your own forum though when you open your own forum it's a bit hard because people then actively need to go to your forum instead of when they're on Facebook anyways and they're just notified when your content is post so there's always some up and down sides on all these platforms but there are also some that

are very cool to bring people in I mean if you post an amazing trailer on YouTube and if you post some cool game on Twitter that's nice but that's actually not where you want your people to be I mean it's very cool to have a lot of Twitter followers but that is not actually a community so here indie game guy is just going yeah I make this really cool new update and people are like wow it looks so cool that is not the community you could call that a fanbase but if you have a community what you actually want is people connecting to each other it's cool if they're also connecting to you and they're listening to you but it's very important that they're also making friends with each other and connecting with each other so let's sum this up real quick you're trying to find interested people bring them in from events put them in a newsletter and then you can just send out a newsletter and invite everyone to your discord you can look at related communities or social media so you have

all those people now maybe it's not that many yet maybe it's like 30 or 50 people that you gathered while you traveled around or that you found on social media but the question is still how do you handle them like you have this group of people and it can be maybe a little bit awkward and it's actually very cool if you have very few people in the beginning because then you have time to form up your backbone this is what I call the core of the community so you would want to really at this point establish your point in rules and a tone in the room undrew v oz people so you now have the time if it's like only 30 people to get to know each of them individually you can be a role model they will look at you and they will see how you communicate and they can mimic your behavior and if you're lucky you have like a very nice tone everyone is nice with each other they all know the rules and they then when the community grows this backbone that you formed can then

spread into the other parts of the community body you will want to make people feel welcome and at home so when they are there they are trying to make friends there they feel like they can come back they feel safe when they say something this is really it if you allow people to be rude each other in this early stage it will spread like crazy so this is really the time where you can look at every single thing you don't want to happen in your community and resolve it then this is also a great time to show people that you are human because you still have the time because the community is so small to connect with each one of them you can talk about them with about their hobbies and what you like to do and if something ever happens when that you that gets you in doubt because something happened that is not that talk that great these people will probably jump in because they know you're a nice person another thing that is great if you can do it is if you can

show your community the benefits of actually being on your community so for example if you do a new update for your game and you posted in your own forum first then people will feel very empowered because they see that they are the ones to get information first and then maybe someone is even faster than you chumps on Twitter and posts and you is there and everyone is like wow how do you know and they're like yeah I'm in the core community I know so they feel like really connected to you and really powerful or for example if you give them some discount codes or whatever that other people are not getting to really make them feel rewarded for being a part a part of this core group and I think it's also great if you you don't have to rush too much you can grow slowly with nish who even had the Facebook group and we only invited in like one new person every few days and we actually introduce them to each other so this is person X this person Y and you're both interested

in dogs go and then they started talking to each other and friendship started to form and these friendships and those people that are like very connected to you become very important in the long run in the beginning when you community is small it's cool then you feel connected to them that's nice there's no huge additional thing going on there but once your community grows you will see how that becomes important in sec so if everything goes well you will keep growing what you will always want to do is listen to feedback because if you don't want to do that you probably don't need the community in the first place they are there to talk to you they are there to be heard so you should always keep your ear open for feedback and it's great if you can actually implement some of these suggestions because people will feel reach sense of ownership when you do it so don't know Tom and Lisa made some cool suggestion and then you add it to the game and you say this is Lisa's cool

suggestion and Lisa will feel like yeah my game my idea made it into the game and it will feel a bit more like her game and she will feel a lot more invested in how it actually goes if it actually manages to sell some copies and to keep sustaining itself you want to make your community feel understood so if there is something going on maybe some little argument just don't just walk away from it but really talk it out so you don't have some leftover bad energy in your group and one thing that I've seen helping a lot of developers really communicating clearly with their community and getting good feedback is if you actually manage to communicate a clear vision for example with our game we had some people suggestion suggestion that we should add like base building mechanisms like your animals should be able to build traps to lure others into and we just clearly told them no this is not the kind of game we want to make we

want the animals to be real animals they are not able to think like humans we want them to migrate around and then if they understand it the feedback that will come in the future is a lot more accurate to what you actually want to do so you know that this is perfectly in line when the thing is you want to add to the game and the things your community wants to add to the game are pretty much the same and it's important to be always honest and transparent so if your update is coming in late and just tell them yeah I was I kind of didn't manage to finish in time I was sick or I didn't feel so well I'm sorry I'm putting it up and if you're just being honest and transparent on why you're not delivering something people are usually very very forgiving so if you're doing all these things well then your community just keeps friends are inviting more friends and again the core people that you connected to early on are becoming very important because at this point you will need some people who help out with the community who do moderations

there might also be other communities of your game papi jump in other places so suddenly you have a subreddit you didn't open it yourself but other people's open it and some people of your core community jump over there and take on moderation rules so cool you have a group of people now you're well connected to them they listen to you you listen to them question is what happens now so there's a lot of things you can actually do with your community have been empathizing on this already you get a lot of feedback and if you like manage your community well you also can build up your own internal QA team because if you teach people how they actually should report bucks like when you report back tell us which version it is add a screenshot and so on and if you manage to do that early on those early members pass on that knowledge and it actually becomes a very useful resource on finding and fixing things in your game

community also loves to do localization I've seen various games who have done this in our case they have localized the game to six languages we basically just gave them the Google sheets when and some people were in charge of each specific language and they translated it by themselves they're still doing it whenever we are doing an update they're jumping in they're adding some more things because again this is their game as well they want to see it expanded they want to see new things edit and they are happy to help with tasks such as such as this one we're currently working on our second game which is called Nimbus and there we added an option to very easily export gifts from the game so these are some drones that players have built inside the game and this is very useful I'm sure you've all had the situation it's Saturday again I have to post something for screen chat Saturday I was too busy

to record equal jiff or whatever and at this point you can really just look at what your community is making and usually the things they are making are very cool and you can just go there credit them this is also good for you this is good for you because you have social media content to post and good for them because they feel honored that they have been featured so when when they're and also other fan art which is again cool to post on social media this is from niche and it's also very cool and motivating for your team or for yourself if you see that people are actually spending time creating art for your game especially if it was like a four year old girl who does her drawing experiences with your game another thing are funding options so you can think of whether or not your community would be willing out to help you in actually funding your game these are two very popular options here the first of which is patreon I'm not sure maybe you have seen how our fortress handles it so

they're basically getting in their development money over patreon another very nice example of this recently is couplets who managed to get some of their development costs covered by patreon we personally have not used pastry yet we are more of the Kickstarter guys we have done two Kickstarter campaigns the first of which was for the first game niche and the other was for an impetus for some reason they both pretty much acquired the same sum so around 75,000 even though they were completely different I'm going a bit more into depth about that now with niche we already had a community in place when we started the Kickstarter and we thought like yeah Kickstarter's may be cool to just engage them more and let them and offer them a way to help us out but for animators it was completely different there we didn't have a community in place at all and we actually managed to somehow build it up on the run doing the Kickstarter so I think Kickstarter is good for both

engaging your community but also really building it up and making it bigger and then this was the point for me where it really came down to see is this actually our game is this not just a game of our studio but is it the game of our players so when we launched it back in September we clearly communicated to our players that if we don't manage to ship 50,000 units then we could no longer update the game because we would not have the funds necessary to keep working on it and then we offered people like a small list things they could do to help they could write their favorite streamer about the game they could retweet things they could reach out to other influencers and press that they want to read about the game and they went not stay put in so much effort into this they wrote out hundreds thousands of emails reached out to so many people it resulted in a lot of coverage which we would never have achieved on our own and then we actually managed to easily beat that goal because

of them and now they get more free updates so it's always like a symbiotic relationship between you and your community that you should try to achieve stone let's sum this up so you create a game first of all you create a game with hooks then you try to find interested people you bring them together you treat them well you grow together then you rock and hopefully indie game guy will have a super happy healthy community and a lot of a lot more games that he can work on in the future thank you so if you have a question for Philomena please come up to one of the mics in the aisles and while we're waiting I have a question for you so were you the only one working on

community things on the team or was it a whole team effort or did you have somebody else doing it um it was mostly me some of our team members sometimes jumped in especially on specific platforms where they were maybe more used to such as reddit but yet it was mostly me and you can do it you can still be a game developer actually get some work done and manage your community if you do it smart especially if it's growing bigger you just have to give up more responsibility and give more responsibility responsibility to your moderators and show them if you are really needed how they should contact you and if you're not needed how they can handle the situation themselves so it has actually even though the community has grown a lot bigger the effort has not grown with it because you can give it to people that care okay cool just making sure so when cultivating

your community did you find certain platforms doing better than others and like based on what platform like did you I guess kind of tailor how you I guess worked with the community based on the platform like what like how much are the platforms like changing based on how you approach your communities so you mean how to choose your platform for the community hub where where to bring them yeah like Reddit versus discord versus forum depends on the game for example with nish our target audience seemed to be a lot more on Facebook and they greatly appreciate it appreciate it the Facebook group they were not so much on reddit for nimbletoes it's mostly read it in this court so I think you can just start up anywhere and see where it sticks most and then choose this as your main hub cool thank you

I know that you were saying that it took a while for you to get to the point where you were I guess you were handling all of the social media but how often were you updating each individual branch of that how often were you checking it how much time are you spending you mean which how much we updated which social media jack exactly depended a lot depended a lot on where we actually were in the game so what we're trying to do with the company is that everyone who is working on the game and comes across something interesting they just like hit screen record real quick put it in a folder and I can go from there while we are not in a intensive marketing cycle such as close to launch we usually update like two three times a week and usually it only makes sense to update if you have something interesting to show them so sometimes there is a week where there's not much going on and sometimes we have like we're on the roll and we put out a lot of stuff yeah no

thank you rule there sure are you so actively updating each is that still like an active development it is okay because I have a question about how do you handle as like in the slower periods of development or when you begin to sort of stop these development on a title do you have any plans for how to sort of maintain community engagement as you are say working on the next product yes so with niche we're working on it one day a week still making some updates and how we handle it is that we like every few months we do a community voting so they can make so the whole year they can make suggestions and then at some point we say okay this and this and this and this this would be possible to add to the game and then we announce it like now you can vote on new features and then they jump on that and vote on their favorite features and talk about it why this would be better that would be better and then we add that to the game but development has slowed down a lot recently so before we were working on it

full-time now it's only one day a week but still because they can discuss what would be best and really what should we suggest for the next community update they're still very much there maybe at least this year and if it keeps selling well then maybe beyond do you have a way to measure the effect of your community on your business results and if you do I'd be curious to hear about that yes to some extent so we know a bit of where the traffic is coming from from what and we often hear for example if we have a big youtuber streamer playing it they say yeah I'm streaming this because a lot of people have requested it or not because we reached out to them or something so we see where the community actually is taking effect but we are not doing like super in-depth analysis do do you see that because Facebook and Reddit

and disk were such open platforms users can create their own communities do you see that happening a lot to that users and players are actually creating their own communities and if so how do you see that ecosystem working with your official community mm-hmm requesting yeah that actually happens quite a lot and sometimes you just see that people are nice to each other it seems to work on their own sometimes you want to maybe talk to the moderators about how they could maybe improve things but most of the communities at least for an issue were opened up by the community itself and again some of the backbone members were the ones who opened them so they sometimes even informed us said hey I want to open a subreddit in them like yeah sure because I know that this person already knows what we are trying to like have in terms of values so but if it's not going well just try to reach out to the moderator and see and if it's totally not going well then you can still think about opening an official

subreddit and like this is this is not the thing this is the real thing if you want to cool thank you hi yeah my my question is you did mention all your game revolves around community building how do you guys steal when like the community itself starts becoming very toxic and do you guys just like drop the banhammer or yeah we have bent some people it doesn't happen so often if you like warn people about what you like if you just tell them what's the rules in this thing and not try to correct their characters you can be an that's fine but please don't be an in here the rules then they usually listen to it even if there are some pretty bad rules we had to ban some people do and usually then that's the good idea to just yeah cool thank you [Applause]