The Power of an Embedded Community Platform to Inform, Engage, Educate and Retain

okay um so um i'll apologize in advance um if i look very tired um i just landed at 3am this morning after 50 hours of non-stop traveling so thanks for joining this presentation about what you can accomplish and get using a community platform directly embedded in your game my name is nicolas nathan i'm the senior community development specialist at flygames and we are a free-to-play mobile game publisher based in germany so mostly known for royal river two and last year we released um zombie gunship survival which is the game i'm going to be talking about in this presentation unlike many other studios and publishers for years we use external platforms to develop and engage with our communities and most of those have very unfriendly registration process players have to leave the game they have to give up personal information

activate their icons before joining the committee platform and usually that leads to very poor conversion and so you will end up with a very small community of usually hardcore players compared to the amount of players you have in the game and those players tend to you know dominate discussions which tends to lead to a lot of toxicity and making it very hard for community managers and studios to get the large temperatures of feedback and quantify that feedback as well and so for zombie and ship survival we knew we wanted to do something different we knew we wanted to have something that was easy to access so we can have high conversion a lot of engagement so that we could be very ambitious committee strategies and something that would let players to share the content and ideally something that is really easy for developers to implement in the game so quite a lot of things um and so um for zgs we used an sdk from a

company called kt play so that's what ticked all the boxes for us there are plenty of other solutions out there but it's not so much about what you use it's also how you use it so this is the landing screen in zgs so when players are not doing anything or crafting items and as you can see on the right side of the screen there is this little icon community so players could access the community hub directly from the landing screen and the committee hub will appear as an overlay so they will never leave the game when they want to access it but more importantly there is no registration process so as soon as the players join on the committee hub the accounts on the hub is created based on the in-game accounts which means that every players we had on the committee platform there were players in the game as well and having such an easy access to the platform usually we had 40 to 60 percent of our players who completed the tutorial

who accessed the committee hub within the first five hours so how does that transfer in conversion so if we look at the first five months post release the conversion of our monthly new players were between 45 to 50 percent after completing the tutorial and if we compare this to royal river 2 which is a very successful game of our portfolio the conversion between the game to our old external forum was in between 0.1 to 0.3 percent although the form is also somewhat surfaced in the game and the amount of monthly downloads between the two games were quite similar more importantly using a an embedded committee platform gives you more information about your audience um and so as a committee manager um we were able to confirm are we engaging with our most important audience which are players in the case of free-to-play game

on mobile but if you look at box products you have more and more um games with obviously dlcs but also in-game shops and crates loot boxes and so we were able to confirm as committee managers that we were engaging with 70 to almost 90 percent of our payers and the amount of payers not engaging on the committee hub got lower and lower over a month and so having those information we were also able to confirm that 60 to 80 of the monthly revenue came from the payers who were engaging on the committee hub which means that as a committee manager i'm able to adapt my communication strategy better to actually retain those most important players and also see that their feedback came from players so if they complain about something such as in game shop it actually came from actual payers if we look at the of all population on

the committee hub we had in zgs obviously we had more nonpayers but the amount of payers joining the committee hub over a month increased so having a properly surfaced committee hub in your game and if you ensure that it's really easy to access it you can have like we did in zgs 1.5 million committee members so not players committee members on the hub after just one week post release it's a lot of traffic so what about engagements so before looking at the metrics again it's not so much it's not just about what you use it's also how you use it how you implement it in the game so this is the um committee hub when you put it in the game it opens as a as an overlay and resources were put into branding the committee hub so that the immersion wasn't broken so we always have you know those players complaining about us breaking their immersion but the

other day if you brand the committee hub it's it's an easy win to encourage them to to participate to stay in the game and to stay in the community hub they had the most important information at the top and then easy access to the different discussion categories introduction general discussions and feedback and players were able to share screenshots and gameplay videos also written content like game guides and fan fiction so we we monitored the gameplay videos before players could publish them so just to make sure there was no inappropriate or content or issues with copyrights for the screenshots players could post them directly but it actually took quite a while before seeing the very first inappropriate content despite the huge traffic we had on the community hub and like i said we had a lot of written content so you have this really easy to access committee hub directly in your game where everyone has

an equal opportunity to feel like they can be an evangelist and be part of the community and not just those who do let's plays and streaming but also those who write fanfiction so if we look at the time span on the committee hub in between d1 and d7 we had an average of 14 sorry 15 to 30 minutes per day and these were usually players who just discovered the platform for the very first time and you know had a look around maybe created the thread to introduce themselves and then went back to the game to enjoy the content in between um the a and d30 the time is doubled so it's 30 to 70 minutes on the community hub and those are usually players who come back to the platform consume the content created by experienced players but also kind of look for information how to get better at the game and then again between d30 to d45

that time is the build so 60 to 80 minutes in average per day and this is usually players who have more experience playing the game and so they will go back to the committee hub and feel quite confident sharing feedback constructive feedback with the team which is as a community manager the most important thing for studio and publisher so if we look at just the contents so post only uh if we compare the the amount of content creating on the community hub versus the forum we had again there is a massive gap uh if we look at may for instance may was only one week the game was released around the 20th of may um so 23rd and then we already had almost 30 000 posts created they were not all feedback but a lot of people were just very happy to have an easy access to the developers essentially super early but how does that perform compared to let's say a social media channel like

facebook so we also had a zgs facebook page and here we are looking at the engagement so only replies and likes on the threads we created to announce in-game events and the engagements in between the community hub and our facebook page it was two to five times higher on the community hub because it's so easy to find information and so easy to access it that it's really easy to come back there and then maybe just leave a like or a reply or feedback so talking about feedback that's a lot of engagement do we get what we need the most as a studio as a developer which is again feedback so if we look at the week of the fourth of july we did an event on the 4th which ended on the seventh and then another event on the seventh which ended on the 10th and the amount of content created in the general discussion section so where we post the official announcements and the feedback section

of the committee hub you usually have more content created on the two last days of the events and those are usually come from players who finish the event maybe earlier than others and went back to the official announcement or the feedback section and then share feedback about the experience playing the in-game events so you know most of the companies who run liveops and in-game events they already have data showing the completion rate of an event and you might just assume if the metrics are very high and positive that everything is fine everyone likes the event but written feedback can tell you if the players actually completed the event but they are seriously getting bored of it if um they're like the rewards or not did they like the deliver system of the rewards or the description of the event or maybe the marketing campaign around the event was misleading so data can tell you that but written content written past feedback

can especially if you have them in very large quantity you can combine the two and then actually make a decision on how to better improve your liveops so that players don't get too much fatigue so what about um committee strategies so um everything that has retention engagement education so having so much um details about our agents on the committee hub the committee team was able to um suggest new ideas such as cultural and law events on top of the seasonal events that everyone does so like christmas and halloween and so we knew that if we did an event to celebrate the 4th of july or maybe the very first time the ac-130 gunship used in a game was assigned to its very first military mission 50 years ago we knew that players would like it and those activities driven by the community team are very surprising and unexpected

but it also helps to establish diversity at a very low cost because the only thing that we did is actually essentially just change the the picture the rewards were the same the conditions to finish the events were the same but they had different context and everything becomes just more than a game where players can actually maybe learn history but what about retention so this is the uh a graph showing the traffic to the committee hub and some of the different community activities we did i'm not going to get into too much details here about primitive strategies but in september we had an update that implemented the law of changes to the in-game shop and the loot boxes based on the feedback we had received from payers on the committee hub and at the beginning of september we did two vlogs to announce those changes and so the revenue coming from engaging payers on the committee hub who had seen

the activities and the vlogs um was the highest in those five months now the the vlogs were not the only reasons why the revenue was the highest but they helped to establish trust and so that when the update actually went live those engaging players and players knew what to expect and didn't have to question their purchases basically but knowing having so much information again helps the the committee team to justify investing more resources into new ambitious ideas so we had this um kind of teasing campaign where we kind of created the character that posted encrypted messages on the committee hub and then players had to use their skills to crack the cards and then get clues to what was coming to the next update and so they had to use their video editing skills and we even had players creating siplus based apps to

automatically crack the code and seeing this in the mobile game is is quite insane it's amazing and so all of that helps the um the committee to feel connected and to share unique memories but it also helps the studio to focus on the next update and then have an activity just driven by the community team to tease what's coming next in a very safe way but also very entertaining way so it's like a game within the game almost no cost or at least not coming from the development team so talking about players creating videos and content we look at the first five months again the um the amount of feedback was quite a lot so these are unique threads so in june after the the first month it was about a thousand unique threads just about feedback about features then we also had a lot of gameplay

videos but like i said a lot of written content as well like game guides and um fan fiction um so all of that it was a lot of content that we could use in committee spotlights featuring those potential evangelists and kind of help educate the players that everyone has an equal opportunity to become someone in that community and all of that helps to create a positive vibe and you know get rid of a lot of toxicity so obviously this was the very first time we um we actually implemented this this platform in our games flyer games so there are quite a few learnings and best practices to share with you so one ensure and easy access so um and that does not mean the um the surfacing but also the way to access the platform so if you can have it on a landing screen uh as an icon or let's say building or something like this it's it's a lot easier than actually adding the um the link

in the submenu so if you play um if you work on the box product the best way to do it could be maybe in the pause menu and rather than having it in a separated tab let's say social you have it just right there it says form two branding is key um again there are a lot of players always complaining about us breaking their immersion by the end of the day it's it could be a very easy win to encourage your players to re-participate in um on the platform but it also helps to keep everything consistent and you know keep the branding of your game intact three proper introduction so um if you have a tutorial um it's it's definitely a good idea to introduce this committee platform to your players even if it's just to say hey if you click here you can join our community the conversion the monthly conversion we had in zgs so this average of 50 every month we didn't have that so i'll let you imagine the potential if

you actually introduce your players to the community platform as part of your tutorial it could be quite high four prepare deep links and redirect so it's good to educate your players to know the kind of the core platform where they can get information and participate with the rest of the community but if you are able to redirect your players to somewhere specific it's even better so that you can make sure that the most important information are surfaced properly and then you can also track if the players come back to the committee hub a low external access so you can have the choice to a low access in read-only for players who sorry for people who don't play your game yet so that they can discover the potential of the community but it's also good to have a way for players to visit the committee platform especially when you have several maintenance or downtime so that you can keep them

posted on the call committee platform during those um those phases where they cannot access the platform from within the game and then six uh thing long term so if uh if you have a what i call a global portfolio account um like something similar to batonnet essentially um imagine the potential if those players the if they knew that they could kind of transfer their reputation from a game to another on the platform that works in the same way and then they will feel part of your portfolio and that's great for the players but also great for committee managers because when you actually start a new game you don't have to start from scratch you already have your well-established evangelists that you can trust they understand the rules and they will be there from day one and they will help you to then educate other new players and so on so that's pretty much all from my son on

using a committee platform embedded in the game so if you have any questions please [Applause] [Music] i just shouted hi and thanks for being here um i was guess what kind of information are you getting from your communities is there any kind of like backdoor access that shows you kind of things information about them that maybe they're not aware that you're getting or is it all just like based on what they directly communicate to you so it's all about tracking essentially so we don't get information about like personal information like age and

gender we don't get that um because we don't want to have it surface in the first place but i think there is um activities such as um looking at the threads uh coming back to the committee hub or you know engaging on specific threats that we created and so on so it's it's purely about tracking um activities in between the game and then what happens sorry again like engagement like what they're engaging with yeah absolutely yeah so it's a good way for us to actually determine if a campaign was successful like a committee activist essentially so yeah gotcha cool thank you well first um thank you for mentioning live ops because that's been brought up in in my job um but i'm wondering i noticed that you said that um the platform that you're using um it brings players in by their player id

um and i'm just wondering how does that cross over with like your customer support team because in the game that i'm working for i need that player id to do almost anything in a support ticket which is distinct from community management yeah so we we don't do customers department platform but the name used in on the community hub will be the same than the one used in the game so if you have a game that is a multiplayer focused game we will usually have a lot of conversations prior to launching the game to ensure that everything there is unique usernames and so on are there so that as a community manager if i see someone complaining about something and now i can use the username rather than ask the player can i have your user id and so on that being said we do have access to their unique user id which then we can reuse on our platforms

so there is a way to to get that as well but in the case of zgs i can just use the user name any more questions okay that is one just breakfast i work with him so this is somewhat a biased question yeah that's a tricky question she's testing me spike is very high um yeah so your conversion rates were really good for this game obviously what would you do to actually boost those in a future title um so like i said i think having the community platform introduced to players as part of the tutorial is definitely a good thing to boost that um so i i we are kind of about to test this in a new game but i'm very confident that as long as your players finish the tutorial and you have made the ftue quite quite

good and quite optimized there is a chance that you can almost get the 100 conversion um so that's definitely like the car idea to ensure that the conversion is boosted um aside from that everything there is in that message with reminders is also a great thing but also think about rewards as well so um everything that is um joining the community and get these tiny rewards or currencies is also a good way to encourage players maybe to join for the very first time but also join uh sorry return the committee platform later i have a couple questions i'll ask them one at a time first how did you decide on the different sections you had in the community you had feedback you had weapons you had those how did you decide on those what was the process so obviously you can customize those um so at the beginning we only had general discussions and feedback and others based on the

audience we had in the game and then we quickly realized that it might be good to have introduction because there was so much traffic that we didn't want players to introduce themselves in sections that were not meant for it so we put introductions at very top so that new players who join they see that okay this is the place where i can create now general discussion is mainly for announcements and general feedback but then we put feedback in third because that's the most important thing for us yeah did you see that once you introduced sections like that did engagement improve from that or um engagement yes obviously because they know so there are more sections obviously so they tend to have less traffic it's mainly for those that are really looking for specific places to share specific content but yeah if we had put introduction at the very last of the list then i don't think it

would have impacted the engagement but i think it would have put more resources into moderation so we will have spent a lot more time to actually move through it around since the the last question i'll have is sort of the relationship between the community that you've built within the game to communities that exist outside of the game like on facebook and other platforms uh what what happens in those communities since you've built your own what need is being served you think by by those other facebook communities yeah um so at the time we were quite happy with the algorithm on the facebook page and so on and so we will usually have different content as well so the car activities could be on the same platforms so on on the facebook page and the community hub such as committee spotlights but there are specific activities that would work better on facebook and maybe less on the committee hub and sometimes some of them could actually be seen as spam or rifles is a good

example so on the committee hub we would run maybe a competition or a contest like a creative contest on the facebook page we would just do a a kind of comment here and have a chance to win something um so it's it's mainly about you know thinking about your your communication strategies and kind of find what's best for the different platforms the advantage of using um a community platform directly in your game is that you actually kind of you're in total control it's it's yours you are not dependent to an algorithm that is made by a third party and if one day it changes then and you don't reach people that that's yeah there's nothing you can do about it actually sorry one more did before you introduced the communities that were within the game yeah uh did you find that there was a lot more activity on the facebook

communities and that obviously as soon as you introduce it within the game there's going to be a lot more people doing it there than on facebook but so in between phase i can make a comparison in between um not having the community hub and having an extra platform like a forum so we had the phone before for a very short time uh during the beta phase um and obviously we definitely saw the kind of you know the most hardcore players made the effort to go to the farm but it stopped there so again we would have if we had kept the from and not use the community platform like this one directly in the game i think we will have ended up with a very small cluster of hardcore games dominating that platform and a lot less potential i never imagined seeing so many players writing fan fiction about a game set in the post-apocalyptic context and using real weapons from the army for us it was kind of a shock and a good

one nice cap by the way um with the success of building a larger community did you see a largely increased need for moderation also especially considering that this is you know very tied to your brand at this point yeah yeah absolutely um arbitory honest with you we do not expect so much traffic you know it's a good thing but at the same time it's um we were prepared internally so we you know we had maybe agencies and sound and it was okay to actually you know we had the proper moderation tools to share the task and so on um but the good thing using this platform is that you can easily spot and you have more chances to actually find evangelists who are okay during moderation as well so we know like maybe a month after release i was able to actually find players who

were good players and then i could i had a good feeling i could trust them to take on new responsibilities and moderate which also helps because it comes from different perspective right it's not official moderation it's community moderation um there is also in all of features like built-in features like if if a post is reported multiple times it's going to be put in quarantine and so on so you already have like this sdk already has a lot of pre-built tools to actually do this thank you any more questions okay thank you you