Surviving 'Vampire Survivors': Agile Community Management

[Music] thank you welcome to surviving vampire survivors agile Community Management my name is Beth Malloy and I'm the community manager at punku I live near Essex in England and I studied business and finance at College before having roles in customer service and sales and I also ran my own children's party Entertainment Company my first this is my first role in the games industry and I started in February of 2022 I love roller skating theme parks playing cozy games and I have two cats called mango and mochi so I work for a company called ponco which is based in London in the UK and we will work remotely it was founded in April of 2022 by Luca galante who is the creator of vampire survivors we are now a team of 14 we've

grown very quickly over the year and you may notice that ponco has a lowercase p in the logo and this was Luca's decision to do this and he thought it would serve him serve as a reminder to stay small and humble no matter what which is very um like relevant considering the success of vampire survivors so far just a little background on the community and marketing marketing team in February it was just me and also Luca um and then in April we were joined by Future Friends games who are a marketing company in August we hired another Community manager and player support person and then in December we hired a marketing manager so in case you haven't heard of vampire survivors vampire survivors is a Time Survival roguelike game and it has really simple controls all you have to do is go around and slay hordes and monsters with one control

um it's inspired by many of Luca's favorite games and it also has lots of Italian references and play on words so unless you're Italian you probably won't get half of the references but it helps to make the game really unique it's currently on Steam mobile Xbox console PC and it's on Game Pass and we wanted to keep it a really low and fair price um because when it first went on to steam it was a really small game and there wasn't much content so it was a low price and since then we've added a lot of content to it but we still kept it a fair price and you can get hundreds of hours out of the game we love to exceed player expectations so today I want to cover a few different topics firstly how I caught up with our game's existing Community how I found the voice for vampire survivors on socials benefits of Early Access

and also some challenges as well the opportunities and projects of varying success that we've had how I reached in increased the reach and engagement and how I learned my role and the games industry so to start off with I just want to give you a quick timeline of the last year so on the 17th of December 2021 vampire survivors launched in Early Access on Steam by the 3rd of January it was picked up by streamers such as Google splatica and Northern lion which really helped to boost the game's popularity and make it go viral in January like from January to April Luca hired some of his friends to help with the development of vampire survivors because he couldn't do it all in his own it went a bit crazy so he was getting help with the development fixing bugs and also the community side of things

by April Punker was up officially and we started hiring our team in May vampire survivors was launched on Xbox game pass PC and in between May and September we did a lot of content updates so we kept publishing new content for the players and adding new achievements and players love to chase all the achievements so on yeah um before 1.0 we did a little road to 1.0 so we did a teaser every day for about two and a half weeks I believe and that helped to like just spread the word of the game and um it was just our Big Marketing push for 1.0 on the 10th of November vampire survivors launched on Xbox console and between the 10th of November and the 8th of December the dev team had to

start from scratch the mobile version and we Shadow dropped the trailer for The mobile version at the game awards on the 8th of December so it was a very quick turnaround then to finish off the year we launched our first DLC which was Legacy of the Moon spell so keeping up with fast growing community the first thing I did was I had to go and grab all the handles I wanted on social media and by the domains set everything up and not only did I set up all the domains all the handles on the social medias I wanted to do immediately I got all of them just to make sure we had them for the future I then prioritized which ones I thought our audience would be on so I chose Twitter and we already had an existing Discord so I continued to grow that I spent a lot of time on them and made sure I did them properly before we hired new people and then we could add new

socials so we started doing tick tock I wanted to make sure that I wasn't just selling to our community um and I did a lot of fun in entertaining posts we welcome everyone in our community and we like to keep it safe and regulated so Discord is our main place for our fans like all our very all our players and we have community helpers on there so they make sure that the Discord is run well and everyone's welcome and listened to we also have bots on there too to help filter out some of the negative things we make sure we listen to all the feedback that our community comes up with um and we don't um we don't ignore negative feedback we don't just respond to all the positive feedback so far we haven't really done any advertising on social media paid

advertising it's all been through Word of Mouth which is really great we have a lot of content creators who like to share vampire survivors I like to encourage engagement by doing call to action calls to action by doing polls and asking the players about their favorite things so asking them how many achievements they've got what their favorite weapon is it really helps that the game is consistently updated as well at one point I think we were doing patches every two weeks so there was always a lot to post about and it made my job a lot easier and to make sure we're reaching new audiences I always check the analytics so I've seen from our YouTube that our main player base is males in America aged 25 to 40. so I need to make my posts apply to them and also try and expand and reach new people

so did it work let's have a look at the stats so as you can see here in February 2022 we had 11 000 Discord members and we now have 58 000. we have 14 000 14.5 000 Steam Reviews and we now have 178 000. they are mostly overwhelming overwhelmingly positive so that's amazing um our steam announcements now reach 50 times more people than they did to start off with and our game is the second most reviewed on Steam we have now got over three million mobile players which is great considering it was not launched very long ago um so that's doing really well we're really pleased with that and also with the top played steam deck game for five months from July finding our voice on socials so when I started up Uncle I didn't

really have a clue what I was doing um to be honest I didn't know how to use Twitter properly I didn't know how to use Discord so I had to learn those and work out the best way to use each of those platforms I made sure I varied the content that I was posting um such as game updates and polls um any yeah any bug fixes and only all of that kind of thing um just to reach all different people and over my time posting over the last year I've really worked out what does well and what doesn't do so well for our posts so things like get high engagement are anything such as big game updates and interacting with the players and asking them for their feedback and what they're enjoying the most and how many achievements they've got if they've 100 if they've 100 of the game or not and the low engagement posts are anything such as fan art unfortunately and just smaller game updates little patches

I like to try and jump on Trends but I'm very selective about what trends we jump on and it's great for visibility and reaching new audiences but you don't want to make you want to make sure that you don't jump on every single Trend um just choose the ones that fit your brand the best I try and use the trending hashtags as well just to get um to reach new audiences and get better visibility for our posts in summary you've got to be agile like study what works and make sure you're looking at your Analytics for example for vampire survivors I realized that the players really love garlic floor chicken and our character poiracho who is our stinky old man and any post about them just they love it they love to share it and um yeah it's really fun consistency and timing is really important so as I mentioned before we

did the teasers leading up to the 1.0 launch where we posted every single day I realized that 4pm is a really good time for us to post as we reach people in the UK and in America and so it gets better visibility um yeah once I discovered what kind of tone of voice worked with our audience and the kind of branding for punkle and vampire survivors it was a really big turning point for me because to start off with as I said I wasn't that experienced I thought I had to be really serious on social and like just post about game updates and bugs and to keep it really serious but as soon as I started relaxing and writing more friendly posts like the one you see there just a bit more fun they started doing a lot better and they were a lot more shareable and got a lot better engagement it's it was important for me to pay attention to the player likes and dislikes as mentioned before so they

really like garlic and Forge again um whereas things like the character reskins all that kind of stuff doesn't really do as well if you're hiring a community manager it's really important to trust them like give them space to experiment with different types of posts to jump on Trends and also to kind of create their own guidelines so what I mean by this is um but they've got to look after their own mental health so not responding to really negative hate comments and all of that is it makes a big difference like if you don't make them respond to those so personally I just ignore these and also set boundaries such as people when you get messages asking constantly for new platforms um it's a lot of work to respond to all of those and ignore those because I don't want to say

the wrong thing and give people the wrong impression so I find that one of the things that panko does best is acknowledge players in our Discord we get a lot of feedback and we're always making sure that our we our players know that they're listened to so we respond to all types of feedback positive negative and any bug reports this screenshot here shows a tweet that I received one morning and it was basically saying that when you load the game the file name shows up and that has the person's actual name in it so this showed up on the loading screen loading screen of the game and it's obviously a big problem for the YouTubers um they don't want their name out there so when I saw this report I told the dev straight away and they managed to turn it around within about an hour like they literally fixed it pushed the patch and

I responded to this person in an hour they were really impressed and it just helps to show you that you're listening and that you actually care about yeah the impact your game has say summarize on social media we focus on Discord Twitter and tick tock but it's really important to delegate like I don't do all of these on my own and one social media person one social media manager can't do everything um so you've got to make sure you prioritize everything so Discord is where all of our vops are it's our most dedicated player base they get game updates first and they always say get access to the beta versions they it's a great place for everyone to report bugs and give suggestions and share challenges that they have and it's quite independent now when I first started I spent a lot of time on Discord I think when at the very beginning I was reading every single message we were getting which was just

not working um but yeah with Bots and also really good community helpers um it's quite independent now Twitter is a really good place for creators and press for us to interact with them and we also do a lot of giveaways and polls on Twitter so we've given away a steam deck and we give away um like game Keys just lots of things to increase engagement and it's a great place for Trends as well because it's fast turnaround I mainly run the Twitter and I try to post daily on there now since I started posting daily it's grown a lot Tick Tock is the other one that we focus on and this is really good for us because since we launched on mobile there's obviously um player base there um it's a younger demographic and we make really silly unhinged tick tocks and try and try and make the most memes and trending

sounds WE Post every few days like every two to three days in there and this is run by Lucy who's our other community manager and also feature friends releasing an early access there's many benefits to releasing an early access and one of the main ones is you can involve your players with a development from a really early stage so you can listen to their feedback and their suggestions and they will help you make your game better if you listen to the right ones um yeah you can re as I said you can receive and Implement that feedback early on I made a Trello board which was a public issue tracker and we had a lot of the most common bugs and issues on there and the players could go on there and see what the progress was with those whether we were like fixing them or whether they were fixed yet which really helped and that helped to

prevent a lot of repeated questions as well especially in the Discord it helps you to build a really strong community and create brand advocates and it also helps you to develop your brand image if you're a new company so for ponco I believe that we're quite quirky grounded and responsive company and making sure you listen to your players creates a lot of good will like I feel like they trust us and they know that we're going to listen to what they have to say there's also many challenges of Early Access such as constant changes with the game which means I was making a lot of content last minute which it's difficult to schedule um because timelines are constantly changing and for an overnight success game like vampire survivors it's I don't know it was really um hard to create systems on the go so

at the moment we have notion Trello um hack and plan we have loads loads of things going on and we still haven't worked that out but um we'll get there but yeah challenge State organized is tough when you have a really fast growing company and um you have no idea what you're going to be doing the next day opportunities and projects are varying success so in my first week at punkle I was approached by Discord and they wanted us to do a French speaking Discord server we thought this sounded like a great idea and also they had the promise of trialing a Japanese a Japanese Japanese server next so we have a big player base in Japan so we thought okay that's great we'll try the French one first and see how it goes it was a really good idea and I believe it would have been really successful but

um we did know that we didn't have that many french-speaking players so it might not go too well we spent a lot of time and energy on it and as expected it didn't really pick up so I would just say there's a lot of really good opportunities out there but just be selective about what you go for because you don't have to say yes to everything um pick and choose the opportunities that sound best to you we Shadow dropped the soundtrack during the teasers to 1.0 and this sounded like a good idea at the time but I feel like if we had to put a big marketing push behind it and done it as its own thing instead of just one teaser it would have gone a lot better so Shadow drops can be really good but it has to be the right timing and the right product and you want to make the most of something big like a soundtrack finally making merch boxes for 1.0 as you can see here on the screen this

is lyric opening up his merchbooks on his live stream um so we wanted to do merch boxes for 1.0 just to thank creators that had helped push the game and play it and we did look from a merch company for probably two or three months we were on a really tight timeline and in my like personally I thought okay I could probably do this um because it's a really tight turn around and I can put some things together in a box and send them out um so yeah we we looked for a much company but we weren't really successful because everyone thought it was way too tight of a timeline so I ended up doing it myself anyway and it went really well but it was very stressful because we had a lot less time than I could have had so I would just say evaluate the situation and look at the facts and the timelines and just make sure that I don't just consider all the options

um I probably should have done it myself in the first place and it would have been a lot less stressful so increasing reach and engagement there are many things that you can do to increase reach and engagement and some of them can be controlled and some of them can't so one of the things that you can control is doing giveaways so on Twitter as I mentioned we did steam key giveaways and we've also done a steam deck um to celebrate 1.0 you can also do press releases future friends started helping us with press releases in July and it helped to create a lot more articles um from the Press of course um which really helped push the game and advertise the new patches live streams is also another big thing so as you can see here this is Ellie Joy panic and she did a live stream for us on our steam page on launch day it went really well um and it just helps to expand your audience that you're going to show all

of your um you're going to show off your game to all of their audience it was really hard to see the the exact impact of this because we did a lot of them we did a big marketing push for 1.0 however we do see a lot of people still a lot of scored coming coming to us saying that they saw vampire survivors on Ellie or lyricstream so it did make an impact it's just hard to like quantify it and also doing in real life events such as egx and wasd in London we've done both of these events so far and it's really nice to meet players and just connect with people in real life so there are some things that are out of our control as well um we're really lucky with vampire survivors that it took off the in the way it did so we were nominated for some awards and we won a couple so being in the award shows has created a lot of exposure for us and also we entered the steam Awards so

I believe anyone can enter the steam Awards and when people vote for you they're encouraged to leave a review so just entering that um we got a lot of reviews so that was really good for us I think at one point we were getting more reviews than Eldon ring for a few days so that was really cool um it's it doesn't hurt to reach out to platforms so if you're working with Xbox or steam if you just contact them and ask them their requirements for um like what they need in order to retweet your post or anything like that because they'll have requirements that they need to meet then you can make sure you're doing that and there's a lot more chance that they will help you out and to work with you and retweet well so working with creators and companies um it's really good to work with these and you could just ask to collab like we asked a club with lyric and Ellie and

the worst thing they can say is nice so you might as well give it a go learning and growing into my role and into the games industry so as I said I'm really new to the games industry and also to this role of being a community manager so over the last year whilst I've been working on vampire survivors I've had to learn a lot of new skills I did this by watching videos and doing courses and also attending talks at industry events such as develop in Brighton last year I've been trying to familiarize myself with the industry by watching showcases and award shows such as the streamer Awards and bafta and spending a lot of time on Twitter and Linkedin to just learn about the people and the companies that are around and also about different content creators so we know who to work with it's really important to stay up to date

with the algorithms and just news around socials so signing up to newsletters has really helped me there's Victoria trans Community Dev newsletter and also there's a tick tock gaming newsletter that you can get and that will help you with all the training sounds and also just watching YouTube videos um of course talking to people um there's Discord groups that you can join um I'm in some for indie games I'm also in some Community manager squads as well um yeah just spending time on Twitter and meeting up with people in real life like we're doing now and also online gatherings finally there's podcasts So I listened to one called she plays games by Lauren K and that one's really helpful because it's a lot of different women in the gaming industry talking about their roles and their experiences so um earlier in last year I did safe in

our world which is a mental health training course that was really important for me to learn about the impact of Community Management for my own mental health and also to help our players so in our Discord um I also did limit break UK which is mentorship program and I was really lucky to get two mentors who have helped guide me and give me advice throughout the last year and also I've just been trying to play more games instead of just spending nearly 400 hours on Animal Crossing [Music] um so yeah how have I built my confidence and learned question processes along the way there's been a lot of trial and error over the last year um with all the different posts so yeah just seeing what works and what doesn't and when you find something that works it obviously gives you more confidence to keep going and try that again um and yeah just more knowledge about

the industry has given me a lot more confidence as well it helps me make better informed suggestions and decisions in my job and it also helps to improve my like it helps that I improved by organization so the more I learn and the better processes that I made like using lotion and everything I streamlined everything a lot more so that helped to free up more time start new projects so yeah I just want to summarize my talk for you quickly so um I've learned how important Community Management is for growing nurturing and entertaining your community how a strong tone of voice and branding will help build your image of your company and your game how being consistent willing to listen reliable and authentic as a company goes a really long way how early you can get a lot of player feedback and build your company image and values

and also that you don't have to say yes to everything and not everything will go to plan but you can always learn from it also that it's really important to keep learning making connections and developing your skills Community Management is crucial for your game's success and is definitely worth investing in that was surviving vampire survivors agile Community Management thank you for listening you've been fantastic terrible [Applause] [Music]