The power of integrated community engagement

[Music] so today we're gonna talk about the power of integrated Community Engagement which I agree not the most exciting sounding title ever but oh my god you should put community inside your game because it makes such a big difference is a little too long and a little less professional then you know probably should so a bit about me there's my giant face Tara J Brannigan I'm currently the community lead and client service manager at 5ca we're a customer support and soon-to-be community management outsourcer in Utrecht the Netherlands previously I've worked at a whole bunch of different gaming companies throughout the years most recently free-to-play mobile publishing with flair games down in call some of Germany pick back well

inton New Zealand PopCap focused more on kind of the Facebook model so before we get to talking about the new model I'd like to talk briefly about the old model so you're ready to launch a game gotta have a community so what do you do but a perform awesome get PHP VB throw up a form we're good right done oh now there's social sin whatever social is to you you can define it however you want but there's all these different opportunities to engage with people outside of the old model forum and you know whatsapp confuses me and snapchat makes me feel really old so you know let's go with one of the bigger ones Facebook 2.2 billion people I mean that's an awesome audience right and not as much as it used to be so part of the issue there is that the effectiveness has throttled down considerably on Facebook so back in the day specifically when I worked at PopCap we had several posts that got more than 100 percent organic engagement which that meant that

more people then liked the page saw it and I'm not talking small pages I'm talking pages that had three million people on them because Facebook's old model was that if you got likes if you got comments they would just show it to progressively more and more people braum was it kinda turned into a super spammy situation for people so they started throttling that down and they have continued to throttle that down and down and down and today if you're a page that's over five hundred thousand people you are really fortunate if you are hitting above that too percent mark a couple pages I've seen have hit five two toes are legends outside of spending money you are just not getting that these days and as a side note Facebook has outright said a couple years ago that eventually organic Reach will hit zero so you will have to pay to reach your fans no matter what off of that you've also got this drop-off effect I'm kind of picking on Facebook here but this could be any platform so say you've got a game it's

got 30 million people you kind of pick an opportune moment you send them an interstitial it's really shiny it's really pretty it says join our community go here I'm kind of playing your game I don't really want to go anywhere I'll do it later I swear I will you've lost at least half of the people that could have been your community of those that click through they show up and they're like cool gonna be part of the community ah crap I got to sign up sign up I just learned about playing the game screw it I'm done or even I'll come back later they don't so by the time you've actually got people to like the page you've got a fraction of a fraction of a fraction of your actual players that are on that page and of those people only certain portions of them are ever going to see your content and of those a miniscule few are actually good so why change outside of those so control you're not subject to third party platforms and their algorithms are a priority so kind of back in the day when

I was working primarily on Facebook titles we do these comprehensive campaigns that you know a month worth of assets come in Facebook has changed what the sizes for all of those assets all of these things that you've spent all this time and money for all now look terrible and you've got two choices you either go with it as is or you rework it if it's your own platform you kind of control that and off of that it's your platform it's your rules for participation so if you want your community to be a little more edgy and you don't want them to get banned cool you can set that or if you want a really safe space you don't have to rely on Facebook's moderation to account for that so acquisition and retention so the days of $0.25 user acquisition or long gone like that hasn't been the case for so so long I couldn't tell you what it is today because that's really not my area but I know it's more than that retaining players positively affects ROI over time that's not conjecture that is

fact if you get any and you do not have something that points people to community you have lost an opportunity to retain those customers and even if they're not customers if you're a game that relies on you know clans or matchmaking you need a lot of people who are playing the game for free in there do you want to pay to get those players back diversity and feedback so a more accessible community leads to more engagement from those who are not just the hardcore audience so that kind of drop-off effect you're only going to kind of get the most passionate of the most passionate and that kind of swings both ways and it's not to say that you shouldn't listen to those people like you're hyper engaged hardcore audience absolutely have fantastic insight to share with you but when there are the only people speaking up the broader audience just kind of sits back in as quiet they don't say anything because they have a different opinion when you

have more voices in the mix you get a little more opportunity for the people who are a little more chill to have their say as well and designing for the vocal vocal minority is a gamble so if you have a forum and you have you know say 20 guys who post oh my god why did you do this this is the worst thing ever you've ruined the game and those are the only people you're paying attention to you're discounting but like 99.9% of players who might be perfectly fine with it who might actually love it it might be an improvement for them but if you're not kind of measuring the effectiveness there and you're only paying attention to them you're doomed from the start so integrated solutions while back I was working on a game called zombie gunship survival with flare games we knew that this game had a lot of potential to have a really engaged community the story was cool the setting was really neat good opportunity so we worked with a partner called Katie play the I'm not saying use this solution there are other solutions out there for us

this was absolutely the right fit though because it gave us the features and kind of the control that we needed to create the community that we wanted I will be the first to admit we did not do a great job of it we kind of rushed it at the end so we are relying on players to one get through kind of a twenty minute tutorial where we never mentioned the community and we never direct anyone there and then to to go find that little button that says community and click it thankfully it's right above the bow people did find it and when they clicked on it they got this this is in line it doesn't go anywhere you X that out you're right back at the main screen of the game but you all of your community content is here we skinned it to look like the game we used a cons that are represented in the game it's not a separate experience for people the only thing that they have to do and this isn't something that we could remove is they don't have to sign up they just have to agree to a Terms of Service because gdpr have to be you know accountable there

but also because their game ID is tied to their community ID if they are a toxic terrible person and they get banned from the community they can still look at it but they can't create another account they can't participate they have to contact support maybe will unbanned them maybe we won't otherwise they have to reinstall the game and take a gamble of whether or not it's gonna pick up their old ID so from here they can post new threads they can upload photos that can upload videos we did throttle it so that they can't just post a video those were all moderated beforehand just to make sure photos we didn't moderate quite so heavily but we were pleasantly surprised that it really wasn't that bad results so the community had forty to sixty percent of people opened the community hub and if you've ever tried to shove people outside of the game you know that even getting 10% of people to click through to look at your Facebook page let

like it is a miracle off of that our forums which were you know kind of a traditional forum model one I'm over representing their success here it's because if you try to represent less than 1% you just can't see it here so this is actually taking into account all games across the play the portfolio as well so we're giving the forums more of a chance here still didn't even equal 1% of the player base so payers engaging with the hub this was kind of taken about six months in so it does skew a little higher than probably the first seven days but anywhere between what was a 60 and 90 percent of payers regularly engaged with the community correlation does not equal causation however 60 to 80 percent of monthly revenue came through on the community hub and I will

tell you that in a community position when you can prove this suddenly the conversation is not why are we investing in community why do we care it's what can we be doing in community what could we do more of what insights can we get out of this so it just it substantially changes what you can do some weird results we had two to five times the engagement on hub content versus Facebook fan page that's just comments and likes it doesn't include clicks so we we posted live events both in the hub and external because an internal solution doesn't mean you don't also do those external things it's just the results are substantially different we had over 1.5 million community members after just one week the community hub engagers actually played longer so this was a big worry that we were gonna integrate this community solution and that people would get distracted by it and they actually wouldn't play the game as much and therefore they wouldn't spend much money Oh was people who indicate who engaged with the hub would play their normal

game session they'd go spend up to an hour in the community talking tactics posting screenshots strategizing then they would go play another full game session people who did not engage with the hub were much more likely to play there one session and be done again community ID tied directly to the game ID meant that there was less toxicity so about for the first week we were all kind of on edge tackling any Content that came in people realized very very quickly that if you got banned from the community you didn't get back into the community without making an effort and as a result they just dropped off very quickly this gave us the opportunity to do much more complex content so Nico not in the senior community developer at that time now the head of community put together this amazing Arg teaser campaign that had audio files and cryptographic puzzles and the sort of stuff that you've put it

on Facebook maybe somebody engages with it maybe they don't these players banded together wrote scripts and had solved the puzzle of the a in like a day and one of the guys actually built a little bot to decrypt the messages and they loved it and it was very highly engaging we also got just so much user-generated content and this was unsolicited we did not ask share your best piece of fanfiction and then we get like three entries and we have to choose one we didn't even make a contest it just started pouring in hundreds and hundreds of pieces so that we actually had to create a whole new section that we hadn't planned for because otherwise it was just gonna overwhelm everything else and just as a note like this is the super condensed short form version of a presentation that my ex-employee gave at GDC highly recommend checking out he shares a lot more insights about kind of the raw

metrics there he's also on Twitter very nice very approachable guy he gave me the thumbs up to include his handle here so feel free to reach out to him directly and again not to say that like that's the one solution that you should use there are many different models ranging from you know super complex fully integrated community to this these folks up in a very very small company in New Zealand I think it's like 20 to 40 people run away play they do really cool nature games the one thing that they did that was really interesting is their news every time they have an event or something they want to drive engagement to they just link to it they link to their Facebook page here they still get substantially more engagement on their Facebook page than most pages of an equivalent size and audience type consistently and then you've got a course supercell which is the kind of king of being on every platform that your user could possibly

want to be on they still actively push people to that content and I guarantee that they are tracking who's engaging with that content who's clicked the little heart does that correlate to payers do we invest wort here best fiends they're really big on their YouTube channel and they post a lot of content there they drive people to it from within the game they do incentivize some of it don't do that with Facebook but you know YouTube's probably fine and yes being the incentivized ones obviously overperformed 30 high numbers but even that that TV commercial has 17,000 views so getting started start early like do not try to do this a month before you launch you really want to think about this as integral to your game design you want to be started in three six months early if you can you

want to be thinking through like what's your motivation like what is the player experience here what are they gonna get out of it what do we as a business want to get out of it is this something that we care about is this you know something we want to put priority on and how are we going to measure the results what are the triggers that we need to put in place so that six months from now we can look at amplitude and get the data that shows the results and yeah identify your tracking needs and you want to review and iterate cuz you're not gonna the first ride nobody does like we didn't there are absolutely things that I would change that would make this a much better solution you know I would introduce the community and the new user flow I would you know redirect people into that anytime we had really interesting content we didn't do any of that I'm sure we could get much better results if we did and you want to miss them you just want to keep iterating you don't you know consider this part of the ongoing evolution of your product and just a special note on risk mitigation

anytime you bring the community into the game and you give users the option to post things you need to think very carefully about what's acceptable behavior what are the things we're going to allow what are the things we're not going to allow if it's not allowed how do we deal with that because otherwise you're gonna end up with you know some unsolicited duck pics thank you I thought it was funny so that's it any questions please let me know I unfortunately have to run to the Train fairly quickly but feel free to take a business card hit me up on Twitter and pretty much there 24/7 we do still have some time for questions yeah what is the part of video content in user generated content so we actually had the option for people to upload videos and I will

say it was not the easiest situation like getting video for mobile you know ideally we would have built a solution that let them capture clips to upload into the community we didn't do that we still got a ton of video content there was actually a guy in the community who within the first week had not only played through every level he had created video walkthrough guides of every single one and uploaded them and this is where this is interesting because that guy did not engage in the community in any other way he never commented he never really other like otherwise just didn't really participate but he was just a content machine and you know yes we could have spent thousands of dollars creating video walk sirs he did a better job of it and all we paid for it was like hey man that was really awesome thank you would you like some in-game currency like we didn't incentivize it at all but we of course

said thank you and gave him some in-game loot because you know why wouldn't you encourage that behavior [Music] you