Why Forums Can Be Great for Indie Community and Discoverability

[Music] welcome everybody very happy to have you here today about my talk why forums can be great for in the community and discoverability a quick intro I am Philomena I am the co-founder and game designer at strafe on studio we are an indie studio located in Zurich Switzerland currently consisting of 10 people and we concept and develop and publish our own premium PC games so we're an indie game studio who just tries to make the games that they love and also try to push them out and see if the world is actually interested in them so we released two games so far the first one is called niche a genetic survival game and the second one is called an emboss us to space drone constructor and both of these games are very much focused on procedural generation and our simulation games so

this allows us to focus heavily on community-based development so we always like check in with people what they would like to see added next and what feedback they may have and what should be improved and today I want to tell you about forums and about community hubs in general so what you will take away from this session is what community hubs are currently popular and I did a survey with 100 indie Studios and like small teams from all over the world to see what they are currently using as a community hub and what are the benefits and the problems with these hubs and I want to tell you the story on why all of all of these options our studio actually in the end went with a forum and once you have that forum how to bring people in like also for other community hubs but especially with a forum that's probably the biggest challenge when trying to build that up so let's start

off with some numbers and what indie developers have said about community hubs and community building so the first question was is community building actually relevant for Gamze financial success and you can see 96% I was surprised by this number 96% people actually said yes they believe that if a game has a community that can actually impact like your large visibility and your financial success with the game I wanted to know if people are running their community hubs around their game around their studio or both you can see that usually Studios are focused about communicating about their game some had it about their studio and the couple had it about both and now we wonder what are those community helps actually so where are people currently bringing their fans to interact with them and you can see that not surprisingly discord is like almost 50

percent of the people this Court is currently very very popular it has spread like wildfire in the last half year or so and now basically half of the indie developers are using this card as a community hub you can see that for the people that are developing PC games steam forums are also a very big option Facebook groups are still around not so much anymore but still quite a few people use Facebook groups and some people have like other options and quite a couple of people actually don't have a main community hub but have like different ones so they said they don't have one specific hub what what I found a bit odd in the survey was like in this gray part there were quite a few people who said Twitter is their main community hub and it was like is Twitter even a a community hub because with for example with YouTube and with Twitter it looks more like this like you are the developer and you tell people about all

the cool things you're adding to your game and churches basically listening to you and maybe interacting with you but not so much interacting with each other because the only opportunity they have to do that is like in the comments of your tweets which doesn't give them enough space kinda and the community hub should actually be a place where people are like interacting with each other and can share what they have created for your game and so forth so if Twitter is your main community hub maybe consider moving to one like this cord where people can actually interact with each other better so then I wanted to know why do you use this community hub and for this Corti answer was that it was very easy to set up and use and also free and people already have accounts so you don't need to bring them to any side and they don't need to set up a new account a platform independent so if you only have your game on steam steam forums is fine but if you also have it on like PlayStation 4 or like another PC store like GOG people don't

want to come to your steam forum so it's great to have a discord because it's platform independent and they really appreciate the chat feature so that people can both with the Deaf's and with each other like communicate very quickly which for example for bug reports helps a lot when you can just like chats back and back and forth until you figure out the problem together and people really appreciate bots about discourse so especially things that you can apply roles to people or also run giveaways way more easily than you have to like to random numbers and figure out who actually is the winner of the giveaways you can just do it with a bot with steam people said yeah it's you have it automatically and it's free and you have to maintain it anyways because if people are like posting bug reports in the steam forums they expect you to come and reply to them and it may influence the purchase decision of a game so people may are not sure if they should buy the game and then they go to the steam forums and read a bit what the general mood is in there are people liking the

game maybe they ask a question and if they get a good reply maybe it influences if they will buy the game and with Facebook groups also again people already have accounts and very interesting here is that compared to all the other hubs for example with this court you just have like your set community size and you can never like extend it you can never like make a post and then it goes viral into other discards but with with a public Facebook group if you make an interesting post and a lot of people share it you have the possibility for it to go viral which is not the case with the other hubs and also because people are very familiar with Facebook of deaths and users and they're just like hanging out on Facebook and then the question is what other use what other hops so you also use alongside your main hub so we can see quite a lot of people also like as a side hub also use the steam forums again because you

have to kind of Facebook's also still very much in use and people say that often they have started their community building there and they have just they have moved on to discord but they still like keep their Facebook page alive because it still has some decent traffic going on I'm here for the first time we see subreddits so people think that a lot of developers think that their target audience is actually there and that they should go there in order to reach them a few people also have discord as a site hub and if you have forums so we have seen forums are not that popular at least not that popular anymore and I wondered why that is and if people have even considered forums as an option and you can see that a lot of people say no it doesn't really fit our needs or a lot of people also say we have actually never thought about that as an option at all a few people have a forum some are thinking about it and some had one but closed it because they found that it doesn't meet their needs

anymore and doesn't keep up with the more recent options so why not have a forum so people said it doesn't really make sense for small games and small studios because you have to bring in all the traffic by yourself and all the needs are already fulfilled by steam forums and by discord it's very hard to opt-in people need to make an account and it's hard to gain traffic and it's also it costs something usually and it's an effort to maintain it like if somebody does a spam post and so on so very high maintenance there were also some voices that said yes forums are absolutely great because and they're the best structure for long and in-depth discussions I don't know if you have had that but in this court if you're actually trying to find a specific conversation somewhere it's sometimes quite hard and then like two people are discussing about something and then just somebody else jumps in hey how are you doing today and then suddenly like the conversation

shifts and like the in-depth discussion is may be interrupted with a forum you have full control and you can apply your own rules and it's many people say it's the best way to collect user feedback and bugs and not only that but also to archive it so that you can look it up very easily again and people say that it makes sense if the studio is big or the studio has more than one game because then it can cross-promote each other so these were the voices of 100 indie developers and now I want to tell you our story of why we actually decided to go with the forum so our studio was just working on its first game which is called nish and at the very beginning when it was just a prototype we opened up a Facebook group because we thought yeah that's the place our audience is and then we said yeah maybe also let's add a Twitter to reach more people and then we went to events and started

gathering email addresses so let's also have a newsletter and then we did a Kickstarter and then yeah we also have to update our backers about all the new things we're doing now and then we did steam early access launch and then the steam forums were also a new channel we had to communicate on and then people open the discord and can expected us to drop in from time to time then we opened a YouTube channel because we had like regular videos whenever we did an update and then people open the subreddit and it's expected us also to do check in from time to time and we did an Instagram because everybody said Instagram is cool so why not another one and after that we started also working on our second game which is named patches and there we basically started with a Twitter it's the whole story all over again but just like it a bit different so here we fought a subreddit is better because it fits the target audience better then the discord happened the Kickstarter happened the email list happened then we also started

like posting an immature like kind of a deaf insights whenever we had like a new update with the early access launch came the steam forums YouTube lilulu you see so at least at latest after your second game you will have a lot of places where people are actually expecting you to communicate and to react to them and we were a bit overwhelmed by all of this and thought yeah um maybe we can do this studio based community thing right so we don't have like accounts on everything with every game so we looked into all of this this huge pile of stuff where we had to communicate and fault okay which ones can we actually do studio based and we found some so okay Instagram and YouTube we can do those studio based and just use it for both games and upload videos and stuff we can kind of do the newsletter and the Kickstarter studio based but we still have to communicate something specifically for each game and

yeah now that we're actually building up a presence for the studio we actually also need a twitter account for the studio on the Facebook account for the studio and the discord for the studio and you can see that in the end it was just even more community hubs and then we decided to try and solve the problem by adding even more community hubs so he decided to open up the forum but the approach this time was planned to be different so we wanted to basically have the forum as the main community hub for everything where people knew if they wanted to reach us if they wanted to chat with us if they wanted all the infos they have to come to the forums and like just manage the expectations that we will not be online everywhere and reacting without within 24 hours on all these other platforms so we looked around a bit and found the forum software called envision actually we decided on this one also because like

the guys from Kerbal space program we're using it and the guys from don't starve so we filed huh all the big guys are using this software so there must be something cool about it and we looked into it more and we say we saw that it has a lot of options for plugins and a lot of cool features which I will get to in a sec and yeah then we can wear yeah are we really doing forums over like steam forums Facebook groups and discord and at this point steam forums were not really an option anymore because we were also selling the game on GOG so we had to kind of have a place where these people could come so that dropped out as an option Facebook groups we felt that not all of our players or especially with the second game even have a Facebook account and some said no I don't really want to hang out on Facebook and this code is great but I'm also always a bit afraid that how long will these things last so with a forum you have a bit of a stability because you will have people's email address and if they for example have a bug report

you will be pretty sure that you can reach them again because you have their email and you can reach out through that and yeah we've discord it suddenly popped up and I'm not sure will it still be there in a year or in two years maybe but maybe they also like decide to do something else with the company and then I will suddenly not have access to my community anymore which sucks and then I cannot like bring them to another place very well maybe and also the other big reason was that we now had two games and we kind of wanted to people to mingle a bit so if they played one game they many people like played one game but didn't know about the second game also because the target audience was quite different and we thought yeah maybe if we bring them in one place together and they chat with each other a bit maybe they will also take a look at the other game and ultimately become fans of the studio so after opening that forum it basically went from very loud and we had to be everywhere to this like completely quiet

nobody is online and that was probably the biggest community management challenge or build up challenge that we ever had compared to disk or Rich's open it here's the discord oh there's a hundred people I can chat with now that's nice and yeah how did we actually try to make sure people visit the forums so we were very happy with the features that the forum offered it was exactly the place where we wanted our community to be and we fought like the we'll make our life so much easier if they are actually here and use all these features but yeah how to actually get them there and one important thing was just real inking so in the steam forums and on many other community platforms we basically just had this little note that said yeah hi we sometimes come here and chat with you a little bit but we're actually mostly only in our own forums yeah we come here and check out your box but other than that if you want to chat come over were online almost every day

and that was a very big relief to me because I felt like okay now I don't have to reply to every question that is posted somewhere and yeah people can just if they really want to chat they can just do that extra step and come over to the forum and then I will take the time and chat with them over there and then we needed to make sure that people actually know that so whenever we send out like a newsletter we said yeah and if you want to discuss what we should add to the game next click on their join us in the forum's chat with us there or whenever we released a new YouTube video with new contents that we had just added to the game we made it like a little overview video and said yeah if you want to check out the full list of touch notes you can just do that in the forum so always incentivize them to at least come check out the forum you don't have to make an account but maybe take a look at it I think one of the most important things was a cool feature

that forum has and we're kind of trying to like we have seen all these different community hubs have have benefits right so we've read it for example you have this very cool feature that you can up-and-down vote things and we saw that okay the basically the forum has a very similar feature that we can use as this and then we told people that if they have an idea for the game they have to come to the forum post it there and we will then look at the top ten ideas from the last month or so and this was also a big relief because previously we had like received emails that were like this long with an idea it was like I could read feedback all day or I could actually work on the game and now I could just tell them if you want your idea considered please post it in the forum and make it appealing so people will vote for it and then we will check it out and so people also like started doing little doodles for their suggestions so they get a lot of up votes and that made it so much

easier to like see what people are actually interested in adding to the game another thing that is cool about the forum is that you can show who is actually online you can also do that with this corpore for example in the steam forums people don't know if you're actually around or not or if you're asleep so people knew okay now i'm fuel and misha are online and we taught them how they can tag us and they even learned like who is responsible for what overtime so if they have like a gameplay question they may be tagged me if they have like a buck they may be tagged me huh and so I could just like every morning come online and check if I was tagged somewhere and if not okay everything is fine they're they're busy we also have a couple of moderators and they try to answer people's questions and if they can't find a solution then they tag us and we always know basically if there's somebody in need of our help and yeah not only that but people yeah

started to to get to know us a bit more as people because they tagged us with our names and also in the forum you can have cool customization features so we made all of the developers into emojis that people started using and suddenly everybody knew our markers does the art and our Claudio is the game it's the sound designer and so they started to know us and their roles and our character a bit and you can also do like a lot of customization with the SAP forums and people like really appreciated when when the things are like very much designed towards the game and I think to this expand I mean you can even on this card you can have some customization but not as much as in the forum with the signup process we try to make that easier with signup plugins that you can like use your Twitter account or your steam account and even more useful plugins so trying to bring all

the best things from all the different community hubs so for example in this Court people really appreciate those roles right so we looked around is there maybe a plug-in and yes there actually is one so now we could for example give people's the roles of nimbletoes tester and then if we had like a testing session coming up that was like urgent so we have to test this by tonight and see if it works then we can just do at Umberto's tester and they even get it in an email so that's even stronger to like trigger them to come to the forum then it would be on this code where they get a disc or pin so that's great and there's also some cool plugins for example for your newsletter so with MailChimp when people sign up to the forums they can just like check the box and then they're also automatically add it to your newsletter and get all the latest news so other things we try to get the community going a little bit is we try to run a lot of giveaways so every couple of weeks we said like on

our other social media platforms like on Twitter repost hey we're running a raffle in our forums so come on make an account set post there and yeah we will give away a steam key randomly between everybody who participated and this actually got a lot of people to make an account which was nice and then it's easier for them to come back and check in again because then they will already have their account so this helped a lot with bringing in new people and some then sticked around and looked at other things that have been posted and became members of the community so we still do that pretty frequently but it doesn't really matter how many people you bring in in the end it's really about how many people you can make stick around so people that really want to stay in the forums and chat with people and I think the best way to do this is to help people become friends so in our forums for example for our first game we have a lot of people that like draw their characters and they have like an art

section and then they like give each other tips how they can improve their drawing skills so suddenly the forum is not about the game just the game anymore but has a completely new kind of rail you so suddenly it's about like improving your art or other people's like started a beauty contest of their creatures so they posted like screenshots and like where churches of each other's breeding and it was kind of like a cat show and they like did it every month and it was very cool and I was very happy when people started picking up like random topics in the forum because if they are only talking about your game there's only so much they can talk about right so if you haven't released an update in a long time maybe there's not so much to talk about anymore and now they're just talking about Hamilton the musical and interesting biology stuff so because they have met people that they enjoy chatting with they can just now stick around and visit the forums and talk to their friends so to sum this up a little

bit I have some numbers we opened the forum around six seven months ago and so far around 3700 people have registered and about thousand of them also signed up to the newsletter with the plugin which is nice and around like 15 to 16 people are usually online at a given time of the day so now people actually have somebody to interact with compared to the very beginning of the forum's even though it was quite a bit of work now it's actually quite consistent and we don't have to do so much anymore to like bring in the traffic because people are just stopping by to chat with their friends so all in all I would say it was a good decision but I agree with like the pros and Contras at the beginning of the talk that it's not a good idea if you're like working on your first game and it's still like very small and it will be very hard to also bring those people over to the forums but if you

have an already existing community of some size then it might make sense and it made really a lot of sense now that we have two games and people are really mingling and exchanging like experiences from both games very well and for us it has basically just made things so much more comfortable and I like enjoy our holcomb you management a lot more since we have the forum and can check in there and I can really recommend it so I hope you will keep building and growing your communities and have a lot of fun with them thank you do we have any questions I run a rather large forum using the Zen 4'o software and I manage you mentioned you have done some research and ultimately settled on envision so I was

wondering if you could speak to some of the advantages that invision offers over the competition yeah the question is why envision is actually a nice software to use as a forum software and I think because of the features it has inherently so with the whole up and down vote feature and also the backends is like very easy to use so you don't have to be a programmer to set up like your different chats and whatever and yeah there were a lot of plugins and like the plug-in developers were quite active for it and I also looked like really liked the basic design and how the site is structured I think it doesn't look so old-fashioned as other forums do as a matter as a matter of the appearances isn't that isn't that a matter of a front-end design isn't that something that you could customize yeah you can customize a lot of it and but like for

example I was in charge of it and I'm not the web programmer and so I saw that I would save a lot of work if I would go with this approach where I can just set up everything in the backend but yeah we sometimes do like small changes for example we try to really make the forum look like part of our website and then we had to have like the web site header programmed into it and then we had to tweak some things there yes Thanks so if I have some extra time I can talk a bit more like about community building that's a thing I really like to do and one thing that I really enjoyed is building up developer communities I think that a lot of developers are still like seeing each other more as competition then actually as like beneficial relations and for our first

game we built up basically a community around people who make games about nature so we have like a shared website with like 30 games that are all related to nature and like a shared chat and it was really great like cross promoting each other with that and I would love to see more developer communities like resolving around a specific topic so I would love to see like a space developer community and like if people like space games that just have to come to that website and then they see like 50 different games and then you can sort them by genre or whatever thing you think is important or is it a single-player or multiplayer like as a discoverability benefit for developers so if you haven't considered that please do and I think we are done if you have any questions feel free to reach out to me at any time and please fill out the survey that you will receive a mail off

in a couple of minutes thank you oh yeah sure right community how do you kind of keep all those members engaged kind of constantly when it seems maybe dying down a little bit so for us the most important thing to keep people engaged even if we are not like pushing updates very often is just the fact that they can discuss what should be in the next update I mean for the first game we only like releasing you update every six months but in between they are very busy you like chatting with each other and so the Deaf's only have this much time so we really need to come up with like small suggestions that would be really great and there they they spend a lot of time doing that and also like if they can talk about anything else than your game then you don't really need to come

up with new content all the time you're welcome