Supercell's Vladislav Perge talks Community Management In 2025

Our next speaker is Vladislav Per from Supercell here to share forward-looking insights on how community management is evolving in the year ahead. His topic is community management in 2025. Please give Vlad love a warm round of applause as he takes to the stage.
Go to the forums. the forums blew up in late 2000s. And this is how your average community manager looked like at that time. Uh that's me. Uh and I was a volunteer community manager, well forum moderator at that time. Uh and we were running gaming community for Blizzard games, World of Warcraft, Starcraft, Diablo, and I would basically translate all those news and all those and and manage that community of Serbian players

uh on on the website and on the forums. Um, then we jump to 2012 and things are slowly evolving. People are still on forums, but they're starting to go into Skype groups and conversations and they're talking a little bit more. And I understand I'm not naming all the platforms. I understand MSN was already there. I understand that a bunch of other stuff was there, but let's just highlight some of the biggest ones uh just to give you a quick understanding of like where we are at right now. Um, and then 2015 obviously YouTube arrives, Reddit comes and Facebook blows up. And this is where the actual communities start being built. And what is exciting about this is the kind of Cambrian explosion of content that's being made right now. So content is starting to be extremely important at this point. People are making more and more content related to the games and people are talking more about the games online which was not the case before. everything that the publishers and developers were making. That was all the

content you could get. And before that, all you would do, you would come to the game store, look at the box, and decide what kind of game you would buy based on the box that was printed on. And that would be your decision- making. Then 2018, we have Discord. Discord is the obviously one of the biggest players right now. And ironically, we are back in 2000s where IRC was pretty much the live conversation platform. And if merits did not disappear, it may have become discord of its time. So Discord is pretty much IRC with elaborate features. And that is very much the proof that we are coming back into circle in a way. And in 2022, we have YouTube, Reddit, Discord, Instagram, group chats. We have a bunch of stuff. We have basically abundance of platforms and places where the communities can gather which is obviously also extremely exciting for the players to kind of share their thoughts. And now if you want to find out how what community feels about how they feel about your game, they would simply go on Reddit and

scan the first 24 hours of what how the update feels about. But now let's jump into 2025. uh 2025 the core of community and our role is that we want to create communities that people are proud of joining. They want to join and then tell their friends that they're part of that community. Um and they when they join they should feel like they belong in it and that is the most successful community that you can create. Um if you are greeted with toxicity and people that are telling you to get better at the game, you probably are not going to have a growing and thriving community. So um we are as community managers we are ambassadors of our games. Um and actually in Supercell community manager doesn't really mean much as a word. Um when you see a job posting on Supercell website on careers for community manager uh you may be misled compared to some

regular game regular publishers and developers that have this kind of same position. Um, so let's talk about what does community management even mean? All of this stuff. So basically community management in Supercell, at least for us as individuals, and again disclaimer, this is only one single game team perspective. This is not something that every single game team, Brawl Stars, Clash of Clans, like heyday, we all cover different things, but this is an example of my role. I cover and touch most of these surfaces on a daily basis and depending on the priority of the day and the month of and that we are in we focus on certain parts of these elements and then we juggle those as we go. So for example, in creator management, we will obviously manage creators much closer when we are closer to the release of an update rather than after the update is already out because we have waves of

moments throughout the game release. And obviously we have sentiment partnerships, copyrightiting and again copyrightiting does not mean that everybody does copyrightiting but we do it from time to time depending on the situation that we're in. We broke player support. We do testing all sorts of things. And and this is something that is extremely unique to Supercell because very often people just focus on content marketing, the one that's at the very top. And people think, oh, all you do is just post on Twitter. Unfortunately, not. I wish that was the case. So, um, your role may not be the same and that's completely okay. You're obviously all individuals and all have your own studios and that's completely fine. But I'm here also to tell you that all of you can be community managers. You don't have to have a title of a community manager to go on a subreddit of your game and see what the players are saying because you have the responsibility to make your game better.

Even though you care about the business relations, you care about UA, but what if UA cared about what the subreddit is saying about the ad that they are saying? And we are seeing that exactly that in Supercell. We've seen our subreddit see the ads of Clash of Clans and then comment on those ads. Are those real? Are those fake? How accurate they are? Do they like them or not? And that is a valuable signal to rest of the team to have the certain direction. So listening to your community, not only from a community manager, but as a team as a whole is the key, but also you have traps that you can jump into when you're setting up your community. A lot of teams and a lot of game studios don't think about player onboarding. Like as a player, when I click the Discord link and I join the Discord server, what is going to be the onboarding process of that? What channels are they going to see? what channels they're not going to see, what

the survey is going to tell them, and are they going to be confused and just leave, or are they going to see enough information to be interested to stay around? And that is what we excruciately always think about as we are building communities when they join subreddit. Do they have relevant pinned posts on top of the subreddit or is it pinned post from like two years ago and nobody bothered to moderate it? Do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do you see what is the related content and how much upto-date is your Instagram feed and your descriptions and your bio and your profile picture and all that stuff and we constantly are thinking about this every single month in order for a new player to come in understand oh this is the the game that I just installed and this is the newest stuff that's going on in it. Lack of transparency is the biggest one for us. We are constantly talking to our players. We're not hiding behind

a trans semi-transparent glass and thinking let's just watch them and not tell them anything. We need to have a two-way conversation and I will touch on that later. And toxicity is obviously something that you need to ignore. You cannot let players be toxic and moderation is extremely important. But at the same time, nurturing positive feedback would be better than just directly moderating it because toxicity just removes itself if you have more positivity that's being reinforced. So this is an example of a community manager that has is on heyday and the community manager that that is on Clash of Clans. As as I mentioned, we all do different things. And this is just one example of a community manager from Kday and one of Clash of Clans. And by the way, I took some of these slides from a previous presentation that we did. And again, these are evolving. These bullet points are not set in stone and they never will be set in stone because the industry is changing and we have to change with it. So for example, in Clash

of Clans, we revive scripts, we direct videos. All of those videos that you see where we are featured as community managers in Clash of Clans, we direct those. We don't have people write script for us. We don't want anybody to put words in our mouth. We want to put our own words in our mouth and we want to have the vibe and the video and the videos and the content we make coming from us because we understand our players the most and we understand what we how we want to say stuff that is going to be genuine and the players not going to call us out on that. So how do you as gi managers stay creative? Uh well to us it's all comes down to the passion and having creative juices flowing all the time. So we talk to each other. Um we project our passion and you know we simply are picky about what kind of content we want to make. we don't jump on trends and I will mention

about going viral in a few uh in in the next slide and then for the motivation part basically to me the number three is probably the most important one and trying to make one person happy per day is the key to me because like if you are trying to satisfy players and make somebody somebody's day better just by responding to them and make them smile that's probably the best thing you can do this community manager and again we have KPIs we have OKRs don't worry about that but overall on day-to-day this is the key that we want to achieve and you cannot really measure this this is something that people will notice and we will see that the game has soul if you're actually talking back on going viral you cannot go viral now yes you can of course you can but you need to create a trend, you need to also think about

trends that make your own game make sense for that certain trend. And the most important thing to me actually is to surprise players to make content that they would not expect because that's how you make your own trends. If you're just seeing the trend that's already happened on Tik Tok, you're already too late because again, you're just swiping. It's it goes way too fast. So, if you don't start your own idea and finish it with your own thoughts, it's probably not going to work in the long run when creating community content. Again, I'm not UA. I'm not talking about UA specifically here. I'm talking about community content and the content that's going going to resonate with your own players. So, also creating that content is can be something stupid. If you're thinking about something silly that you think it should should just just try it out, try it out because right now more than ever, all of these

platforms are pretty much open to experimentation. So break the rules. Put images on Tik Tok. It's fine. Don't worry about it. As long as it lets you, you may just succeed. And on talking to players, and the most important part is to be yourself. Don't try to begin the sentence with dear players. The moment you begin your sentence with dear players, you're going to drop 50% of your audience and they will not listen to you because you sound like you're making a PR press release. And these are players. Players are going to see that. Now, of course, dear players works on the press release website, but if you want to do that in 2025, that's your decision. Of course, you need to stay in tune with the meta. The this basically works with the way of like you actually playing your own game and understanding what the memes are and what people are talking about and then making the game also self-aware. Clash of Clans should call out what's wrong

with the Clash of Clans. We should not shy away from saying, "Oh yeah, well, we messed up this update. We're sorry, but we're working on it. That's the best thing you can do. Acknowledge it and then get going and let people know that this is actually going to work for long term. And basically the next slide is going to be the highlight of the whole presentation where you are basically acknowledging your mistakes and then telling players what you're going to do about it and why did you do make those mistakes to begin with. And of course number five is trusted player groups. And increasingly more and more games are making the partners and other creator groups that they're coordinating. But to us, it doesn't have to be only creators. It can be players that are passionate about your game. And it can be people that are constantly talking to you and want to help the game grow. You don't

necessarily have to always have the biggest creators and millions of subscribers and filter only the best. Filter the most passionate. Don't filter for the numbers. Filter for the passion because that's your grassroot community that you want to grow over a longer period of time. One thing that I learned from working on on Clash Mini was that I found people that never made any comedic content and any YouTube content before the game came out. And then you recognize those people that have the most passion and then you just focus on those people first rather than people that have millions of subscribers and they've suddenly shifted to your game because you know that their audience is already used to some some other different thing. So okay now we understand all of these focus and passion but what is next for you the people that are listening to this? As I

mentioned, you can be a community manager, but be present and honest. Don't try to write everything on a script. This presentation is not scripted. I didn't write in a script. I'm just writing bullet points and I'm talking about them over it. And it's okay because as long as you directly address feedback in your videos, that's perfect. Below the screenshot is the video where we are honestly talking about our mistakes, where we are talking about the decisions that we've made in the game that did not work out, that were not received positively. This series is called Inside the Builder Hut on Clash of Clans YouTube channel, and we just sit down and address the most negative or controversial feedback that's coming from the community. And your videos don't need to look like this. This is clearly overproduced. We are aware of this, but we already have a studio and that's okay. I mean, if you have a studio that's great, like you

just fire up those cameras and shoot the video, but sometimes just a webcam in front of your face does the trick as well. Don't try to be too fancy at the beginning. And then ask yourselves only these three questions. How often do you talk to your players as developer, as a publisher, as anyone from the game team? And how much do they trust you? As you reply and as they listen to you, are they going to call you out and and reply back to you with the feeling that they don't really trust you or are they is the sentiment going to actually improve after you address the issue head on? And then in the end, what is the ratio of negative versus neutral interactions? Because as we all know, it's very hard to get positive sentiment on internet because people like to be controversial and negative. And the best thing you can do is to get neutral replies from the players because nobody ever wrote that

they love the game and everything's all right with it, right? There's always something to complain about. So that's the reason for the neutral feedback instead of positive. And if you do all of this, you're going to get these kind of comments. I did not. These are not bots. These are real human beings commenting under these videos. These series where people actually appreciating honest and transparent communication with the players where we are keeping the relationship and conversation with our players 24/7. Even is it on Reddit, on a tweet, on subreddit or on YouTube comments, it doesn't matter. go where your community is and be present there because that's the only way you are going to actually build trust with them and they're going to stick around with the game because if they don't know what is your what are you planning next they're going to be

basically left out and they will start speculating. Speculation is going to lead to wrong assumptions and then the community will become toxic and game is over. the players are leaving and you will never go get them back even if you start talking to them after the fact. That's it. That's everything for me and feel free to connect and let's talk more about community management later. Thank you very much. What an amazing speech that was unscripted. Yes. Any questions for Vadislavas slash that
frame? Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah. Any any questions? I'm going to be around so feel free to jump at me. One question. Whoa.
Oh, QR code. Can we bring up bring up the QR code again? This the last slide.

Good question.
Good question. Great question. Love the question. any any any other community management related questions over there.
I'll bring over the um
Sure.
Just a quick one. Um when you said that do you do community management 247, does that mean you have teams sitting in different time zones?
No, no, no. I was not referring to like 247 coverage. I I mean like you know coming into the office. Obviously I work from Shanghai office so that's a little bit more convenient because I can wake up in the morning and then we have the coverage of Helsinki later and that's perfect because again like we have some coverage of 24/7 but we don't really have teams that are like for example based in the US that are like constantly monitoring that and that's okay because obviously we are not working overtime 12

hours.
No, I was just I was just that would that was going to be my next question. Do I mean once you start with the community management does the then gaming community get so used to it that they pretty much accept or expect an answer within let's say an hour or two or if it's totally still you know fine to like okay these guys are also taking a break at some point. Yeah, I mean community generally you starts to understand that you're taking breaks in between and if you they understand that you're based in Helsinki like Supercell is like they will be like all right it's the middle of the night let's give them a few hours they will reply and also the trust is going to play a bigger part because as you build trust they will be like all right let's give them a few hours for them to like you know come back come back to us and one perfect example again this is not super related but actually uh Pokemon TCG Pocket the game that just released a new a new update they figured out that there a problem with the one card that was called out by their community and the art that was in it. And actually, fascinatingly, they are now focusing on addressing player community uh feedback

extremely fast where they released a noticing game that they're saying that they're removing the card completely and they're going to replace it at a later date because the community like highlighted it so heavily. So that's a perfect example of like give it a few hours or maybe a day or two until you can actually have like a proper response but the response when it gets released it's overwhelmingly positive response
and it's actually human response and at some bot you know because to me it's most frustrating when you get into some chatbot for example which is the extreme other example and then you said oh somebody will be with you right in a minute and then it takes an hour right so
right yeah
so honest honest community management is the best
exactly and And and in case of Clash of Clans when we had this controversial feature, we tweeted that we are working on this. We are internally discussing this feature and we will record a video at a later date to address it deeper. Right? So as long as you somehow signal that you're aware of the problem, you don't have to come up with a solution on the spot. And that's great because you

are keeping the channels open and as you tweet that you're looking into the problem, they can reply back to you and highlight other issues or elaborate more on the problem and all that kind of stuff and that's great.
Hey, thank you for the talk. Uh I'm just h I have two question. The first one is uh when should the game consider community management activity and the second one is that do you think it makes sense to expect some measurement of ROI over like the investment in community management or like if so like how do you do that?
So when to start community activations and management? Uh well one example is when I joined Supercell in 2021. I joined in January um and Clash Mini only launched in November. So I had one I had

around 10 months or so to prepare all the surfaces and all the places uh where I think the community is going to be the biggest and where people are going to gather. Um and not one thing that is very important is that all these platforms don't need to be run by you as a developer or as a publisher. Um you can let your community self-organize. For example, in the case of Clash Mini, Reddit and Discord, you can just let them do whatever they want. We don't really own the servers. We just let community do their own thing and we just monitor and we show up and they give us the roles and as we reply they can see, oh, Supercell is here. They're actually listening. they're actually talking to us. But that's enough. You don't need to moderate. You don't need to like delete comments and all this. No, no, no, no. Then never do that because the subreddit will set its own rules and you just need to follow those and you will make sure that you know you get the answers and and the feedback that you need. But don't try to like be too heavy-handed on

those. Now on ROI, that is the question that I keep getting the most. For the past 13 years of my whole career, everybody is focused on community management ROI, right? Like what what is how but how much money can community management actually bring me? And to me, the most important thing is that positive sentiment leads to everything else. Because if the community sees the transparency and honesty and feedback and the loop, people will stick around with your game. And as they stick around with your game, they're going to tell their friends about it, right? like they're like, "Oh, wow. Okay, the developer replied to me. Where do you see that in other games, right? And that kind of thing is really hard to measure, but we do measure sentiment. We take a look at the positive comments, negative comments, neutral comments, and we see the spikes. We try to react. And our biggest KPI is actually to try to resolve controversial topics within 24 to 48 hours."

Because if you again if you keep things simmering for long, imagine just a conversation with your spouse or a girlfriend or a boyfriend like if you just reply back to them and they don't reply back to you. What you're going to think, oh why they're not talking to me, right? You're going to start speculating. You're gonna try to put things into your own head and not think like like don't like just try to have a conversation going and you will have the positive reinforcement that people really do want in any normal human relationship. Um and and to me that is the core. Of course, Clash of Clans team is unique in that way where every week we have a report called the vibe check, which is basically what are the players saying, what do they hate, what do they love, like what is the vibes, what are they suggesting, and what is the most controversial thing and what can we what can we do about it, right? And that is super important. And we don't really focus of like, oh, this is how much money we're bringing. Like, no, it doesn't doesn't work that way. So, yeah.

But I just have one last question. This will be the last one. Any more questions? I'm sure he'll be happy to answer you after adding the QR code, right?
I'll be outside as well.
So, how much you work directly with influencers and how do you keep them engaged and motivated?
Uh, we have a Supercell creator program which is extremely uh robust at this point. Uh, Supercell creator program is one of the probably leading platforms in terms of uh creator management in the industry. Uh you can visit it on creators.superscell.com and uh the creators voluntarily sign up to become supercell creators. Uh and then once they sign up and once they grow to a certain size uh they can also join uh our slack server and they can talk to us directly and we provide sneak peeks exclusive content to them. We play test with them. We listen to their feedback. But that doesn't mean that the smaller creators are not heard as well.

uh community manager comm community managers almost every week check for new creators that are making content for your game. And if they have potential and they're growing very fast, even if it's like a few thousands, that's fine because we also want to support players that are passionate just right this moment instead of just like focusing on the top tier guys because for us again passion is the key and it's not the numbers. So, we keep the relationships open and we also just sometimes even add them to Discord and just talk to them in the DMs. Like, we don't really shy away from like having agencies do the work for us. No, like we actually talk to them because we're community managers and they want to talk to the people that are actually part of the game team rather than just like somebody else that's some that goes then to us and then we go to them and there's like a bunch of middle management in between because then it feels disingenuous and it feels like you're not really putting in the effort to actually care about them and for their

content. So yeah,
that's everything. Yeah. Thank you so much everyone.