Your Discord Is Lying to You. Watch What Players Do.

So, honestly, if I had to choose between 100,000 people saying they want something and 5,000 people repeatedly doing something, I'd start looking at the 5,000.
And with AI making the cost of development approach essentially zero, magnitude is no longer the problem, but knowing what to build seems to be the key limiting factor. And when we look at the history of games, communities have historically driven some of the biggest insights in gaming. As an example, MOBA came from Warcraft 3 Defense of the Ancient Mod. DayZ, PUBG, and Auto Chess are other examples. There's numerous examples of where some of the biggest insights from games have come from communities and mods. And so, today we are speaking to Pedro Esparza, head of growth at Bisect Hosting. He has watched server communities form, monetize, and die at four companies. And from his vantage point, Pedro sees what demand looks like in raw numbers before

a studio knows it exists. And in our discussion today, Pedro will talk about his framework that speaks specifically to the concept of community-driven development, what he calls the community validation loop, or how can studios more effectively engage with communities to get these kinds of insights.
Yeah, so, you know, are game studios doing enough? I think honestly, the answer is no. In my experience, there's two really good ways to read signals into what a community wants. Uh from one side, you have a Discord channel uh that might ask for multiplayer 500, 1,000 times. You will may have community boards with upvotes, and you'll see a specific request come in, but if players take the time and effort to actually reverse engineer a game to take it further, like you mentioned with DayZ, you know, coming out of Arma 2, that to me is a much louder signal. They built

multiplayer, they maintain it, they run the servers, they pay for all of this, and I think, you know, that is a much different signal than purely everyone commenting and just up-voting as one specific message or one specific direction that they think a game would love to go into. Community behavior for me is more valuable than just opinion. And uh studios are great at collecting opinions. You know, you have Discord, excuse [clears throat] me, you have Discord, you have Reddit, Steam, you know, your community threads, you know, all sorts of surveys. Uh but I think what a studio should be interested in is is revealed demand. Where those players are investing their time, their money, and technical efforts.
So so last year I conducted a study where I tried to find what are some of the most successful games. And so looking especially at PC and Steam games, some of the games I looked at included games like Lethal Company,

Project Zomboid, No Man's Sky, Phasmophobia, Schedule I as examples, many more. But when when I looked at the patterns for a lot of these games, I found that there were three common characteristics. Uh the first was that they were relatively small teams. So teams less than 20, in some cases maybe even one to three people even. Um there was strong community engagement to this point on community, and they had long development cycles in coordination with the community. Well, does that surprise you?
I definitely agree that there's a really strong correlation, and honestly, I've never had a chance to dissect it into these three specific criterias. Uh I definitely think you're on to something, and and the thing to keep in mind is is that the common denominator between all of them is a little bit different. You know, small teams or long development don't necessarily create a successful game. The number of large studios that sit on a project versus the number of small studios that

sit too long on a project is common regardless of team size. So small teams don't necessarily mean, you know, that it's going to be a successful game. If more around the short feedback loop that they have between the studio or or I guess it's it's more about that short feedback that they have between the players and the studio. Schedule one specifically, it's a very interesting example that you bring up because, you know, Tyler, the one developer, can reach differently than a larger organization where community feedback has, you know, more through has has has to go through more like red tape, for example. So from community to product to leadership, then back to product, put it in the road map, then engineering. Sometimes those all of those steps just create a make a specific feature or request lose momentum. And I think as we go back to that schedule one example,

Tyler was lucky enough that I believe he did he got um schedule one all the way to a working game all by himself. So he was a one-man show. That shows a lot of passion and commitment, but that also gives him the benefit of no red tape, no bureaucracy, no stakeholders that he needs to report ideas or thoughts into.
Right. That might be the point exactly what you're saying might be the reason why some of the smaller teams are able to find more success potentially in in the sense that they are able to move probably a little bit more dynamically with respect to feedback that that they're given. And also as the budgets increase, it seems like decision-makers seem to shift from like like the product people to like the bean counters and the money people. You have spent your career as essentially on the business side of game servers. So, MCProHosting, Nitrado, Tebex, Nodecraft, now BisectHosting. And so,

you're you're kind of like a landlord for tens of thousands of game communities. And based upon that business, what is it about that the kind of game server business gives you the insights um a- about these kind of games and about these communities?
And and so, in my 20 years, you know, I was able to observe, you know, whether people are willing to pay for something, how many communities form throughout all of that all of this time, how quickly they form after a specific mod happens. You'd be surprised how someone can make a mod about something, and then another person can say, "Hey, I like this. I want to build a whole business around it." And so, that's a very common thing to see. Uh trends around novelty spikes, for example, when a game, you know, releases a 26.2 updates or 26.3, I see all of the momentum, the revenue that impacts not just the game owner, but all of the communities around it. As well as things like player versus

server behavior. So, you know, when a new game or or when an existing game has an update, how does that impact communities? How does that impact servers? And as a server hosting company, how does that impact us? How do we prepare for these updates uh for you know, for based on demand and things like that. Um we also see whether people keep, you know, paying month after month after a specific update. We see that decay, we see those trends. Uh and then how community server demand compares across different games. And not not every major update has the same level of impact. And so, in the in the 15 20 years that I've been here, I know exactly, to a degree, what sort of impact a specific game within a specific genre with this type of update has on its, you know, number of active users, which is every game studio's North Star.
And so, when a community does start building something like a mod um that the studio itself did not ship, but is there something specifically that you look for to understand whether this

is something that the game studio should consider to officially support or not?
Yeah, so there's definitely three things that I look at when a new mod or a new UGC type of vertical stems from that from a specific game title, and those are adoption, persistence, and friction. First, are people actually using it beyond just the original creator and like a handful of friends, right? Uploading to a UGC platform and measuring downloads, likes, and comments, as well as actual adoption, which requires a little bit of telemetry on their side, helps. Uh the second part is persistence, you know, how does that usage persist after the initial novelty spike? It's like, "Okay, cool. It's great. It's awesome." But then like 2 weeks later, people aren't using it anymore. What happened? Um and then the third is how much friction are players willing to tolerate to get access to it? Um this is a very strange criteria, but it's it's probably the most important of the three because if

players are downloading unofficial tools, well well walk with me here on the number of steps here. So, unofficial tools, joining Discords, configuring servers, troubleshooting mods cuz they don't sometimes they don't work out right out of the box, and sometimes even paying money just to get a feature the game doesn't officially support, that tells you a lot. And but I wouldn't jump from that to the studio should build it. Just because it hits these three criteria doesn't mean that. The signal tells you that there is demand. Um studios still should decide whether that demand aligns with the game, the road map, and the economics.
You know, I think that last point on friction is a pretty interesting point to raise. I have a friend who's uh largely considered the creator of one of the world's largest games, Valorant, actually. And that was one of the points that he was mentioning to me, which was that he felt like if you have a game that's good enough, you don't really need to worry about like the initial

fatality or login or tutorial because if it's good enough, the players themselves will get there, will bring friends in. And so, that's part of the signal that actually he looks for is just what are they willing to [laughter] do to play the game. And I I even remember, you know, playing the Dota mod from, you know, off off of Warcraft 3. It was such a pain. And then I on my first game, like people were like cursing at me and things like that. And it's it was just like, "Oh my god, like this is such a fun fun game." But to get there is so brutal. But [laughter] But there were so many people playing despite that, to your point. Friction. How Like if you were to put yourselves in the shoes of a typical studio, how should they engage with these communities?
Yeah, so I think with game studios, the the biggest mistake I see sometimes is treating the community as a broadcast channel. Uh the best studios I've seen in in my

experience, they create a continuous feedback loop. They talk about what they're thinking, but they also spend a lot of time watching what players actually do. Discord is very useful. Reddit is also useful, and so is Steam. But I'd probably be looking more what mods are growing, what community servers are being created, what's all happening inside them, which tools players are building, where players are encountering back to that friction point, and which behaviors persist. Uh in terms of frequency, I'd be rather have consistent engagement every week than a massive community survey once every 6 months. That creates, you know, big disconnect between you and the community and you're setting yourself up for failure. And obviously a huge drop in active players if you don't long to engage with them. And I think studios should close the loop. If the community raises something important, eventually

tell them what you learn and what you're doing about it. Even if the answer is, "We're not building it." Don't be afraid to say so because players today will respect you all the more for it. You lose more respect if you leave them in silence and they lose respect for you. So it's really important to make sure that you communicate something even if it's not what they probably want to hear.
Right. And to that point, sometimes in the community you you could have like a very loud vocal minority that may or may not be telling you the right thing to do, but it's just something that they want. And so, how do you distinguish between different kinds of signals that you're getting that might be, you know, actually really good insights and signals that you should implement or you should consider versus others that that you shouldn't. Is Is it about ranking specific metrics or how do you think about that?
So, if we were to rank them, I would say that, you know, if if we

were to look at things like server count, retention, mod downloads, Discord sizes, YouTube comments, mentions, uploads, you know, that kind of stuff, as well as obviously Steam reviews if you're if you're doing your game through Steam, I would probably put retention first. A thousand servers appearing for 3 days is interesting, but 500 servers still running months months later is a lot more interesting. And this is something that we kept in mind when I was at MCProHosting. We looked at churn, you know, as from a high-level business perspective, most people can say, "Oh, well, we want to look at churn. We want to make sure our customers are are using things as long as possible." We went one step further and we created churn by game type, and then we went into specific titles. So, we looked at churn around Rust. We looked at how long those servers were up and running. We looked at churn in Minecraft. We looked at

churn in Ark. And we took some of that information and we shared it with the game studios because they don't have access to that kind of detail when it comes to communities as well as initiatives. If you have a a community that's been running around for a long time, the question as a game studio should be like, "Why? What are they doing that is helping our North Star KPI, number of active players, you know, continue to play our game, continue to enjoy it, even if it's outside of the vanilla box, and going more in this like modded route?" So, retention is super important. After that, I'd look at active server count, right? So, then actual mod usage. Downloads matter, but downloads can be misleading because downloading something once costs essentially nothing. When you're talking about reviews on Steam, as I mentioned, they're very useful for understanding overall sentiment as well as like repeated requests. But YouTube can tell you something is breaking and the broader culture around

the game rather than than a dedicated Steam review. Discord size is probably the metric I trust least since joining a Discord, you join the first thing most people do is mute the channel until I turn it back on. Uh that's very second nature at this point. So, my thing is I I always go with signals more than noise. As the player has has to invest more into them, time, effort, money, and repeated use. We talked about those friction points earlier. So, honestly, if I had to choose between 100,000 people saying they want something and 5,000 people repeatedly doing something, I'd start looking at the 5,000.
I'd like to talk about this framework. So, I know you've come up with something called the community validation loop. So, if you could explain it for the audience and to me, I I'd love to better understand this community validation loop framework that you have.
Yeah. So, the community validation loop is is the way that I think, in my experience, how studios should look at,

you know, decisions, especially around multiplayers. So, once a game studio decides that multiplayer is a core feature, you're potentially committing engineering resources and people, which is always the most expensive part in game development. I remember at at MC Pro, my my P&L was always hardware, people, marketing. It was always those three, and it was almost 33%, you know, across the board. Hardware was expensive, people were the most expensive, and marketing, depending on what you were working on, was equally kind of balanced between the two. So, so you have to put spending into resources and people, but also, you know, networking itself. You have to hire sysadmins. You have to get into matchmaking. You have to get into orchestration, moderation, security, compliance issues, live ops, right?

Like, as soon as if you were to mention the word live ops to a small indie developer, like say, Schedule One, they were working on their amazing passion project, and you said, "Oh, this needs to be a We need to talk about live ops." They would absolutely just fall over thinking of the fact that they would have to have something to support that. As well as ongoing support. So, you know, those aren't just launch costs either. Those are like ongoing things. You don't just flip it on for like 30 days and then and then that's it. It's a continuous expense that you have to keep in mind. And so, what interests me the most is whether we can move you know, some of that validation earlier so that if the community is already experimenting with multiplayer or dedicated servers or whatever other behavior, why not learn from that before making such a huge investment. And I think at the end of the day infrastructure should follow validated player demand

rather than being the thing you use to discover that player demand exists.
So, um just to make things a little bit more concrete for the audience then, could you maybe give us a specific example or a use case of this community validation loop and maybe walk us through, you know, each of the phases of of how this would work and and what what the game studio would do, what they would see and then how they react at each of these phases.
Right. So, the validation loop is really a way of reducing the risk of building something purely based on what people say they want. We talked about saying versus doing and etc. So, instead of making a huge product decision up front as you're building the game and you're even putting your story together, uh you progressively validate demand. So, the first thing you want to do is find the signal. What are players repeatedly asking for or are they creating themselves? The second thing is it may well be an experiment. Give the community enough access to test the

idea, whether that's mod support, you know, through like mod.io or whatever, dedicated server binaries, APIs, or just not stonewall things and create and make things really difficult for your community to explore new things. So, the third thing is also measure behavior. Are people actually using it? Are communities forming because of this? Are servers kind of popping up left and right? Are players returning? How is your How is your North Star metric? Fourth, you want to validate persistence. So, does that behavior survive beyond the initial hype? Are people investing meaningful time or money into it? And then finally decide whether to build it in game. And you know, at that point the studio has substantial more evidence to decide whether it should become an official thing or keep it community led. And I think, you know, those are important or the third one is to just

leave it alone. If they're doing something that's helping you drive more sales as a studio, maintain visibility, and continue to grow, and you don't have to touch it, but you've provided them with the tools and resources, just let them. I think one great example of that is uh uh you know, Minecraft is is a fantastic title, especially on the Java side. They don't really They don't really touch that side of the business. Um they let the community drive more players. They let the community drive more more things to explore, which means more players are going to see it, and that drives the the revenue for the game sales as a whole.
And so, when we look at games like Raft, which kind of tested the core concept with a free prototype, Stardew used demonstrated kind of player demand to prioritize co-op, and you know, schedule ones modder I'm I'm wondering if you could talk a little bit more about how should a studio decide what it kind of needs, you know, in

terms of a pro- prototype or structured player research, just looking more at the data, or you know, some kind of community built experiment, you know, how should a studio think about this?
Yeah, so when you're talking about Raft or Stardew or Schedule One, those are all various different use cases and the way they developed additional products within that game. Um that's why I don't necessarily think there's like one validation method because sometimes the demand is overwhelming enough that direct community feedback is useful. Sometimes players can prototype the feature through mods and sometimes the developer itself can cheaply prototype the idea. I think my preference is always around economics and effort. So what is the cheapest credible experiment that gets us closer to observing that behavior instead of just opinions. Um if you can test something for weeks or months before committing years of

development and live ops resources, we talked about some of that earlier, then that's going to be incredibly valuable.
Okay. And so maybe like one of these like Schedule One, obviously a huge success story, one developer Tyler, 8 million copies, uh you know, four player peer-to-peer, no official server. And then can can you walk us through like how did this kind of shift to dedicated servers happen? May- maybe walk us through exactly what the community signal was and and what happened.
Uh so Schedule One, one amazing developer, fantastic game. I'm a big I'm a big player in this title. You know, the big thing that communities wanted to do is support that initiative and make it a uh persistent idea, something that they could enjoy 24/7 literally without having to rely on that one person who's hosting it for for the rest of them. And so uh the high-tech mod definitely did make that happen. And so with these servers, you know, we want to look at occupancy. We want to look at the data

behind all of that. So, unique players, how long were the sessions in terms of like when someone was around, retention of those servers, was it 7 days, 30 days, 90 days, or is it still ongoing for some? So, you know, in terms of what I would tell the studio, instead of like as a community, I wouldn't say, "Hey, you need to build more dedicated servers." I would say, "Is there enough evidence so that you should investigate this further?" If you see this mod, uh and you see that what it's doing to your players, and and it's impacting your metrics in a positive way, that's an opportunity to take that signal and and look into it further.
And when you think about features that should be built by the studio versus having a third-party productize something, um how should a studio think about that? Um and you know, as specific examples, I think RimWorld Together community mod, um I think you guys are the official host. Ludeon never built multiplayer. Like,

what what should the thinking be from a studio in in terms of like, um you know, the studio internal development versus, you know, third parties?
So, deciding one over the other is is a big question. And so, the the big thing about my framework is it's it it's important to consider whether the community creates something players love. And if that's the case, then it may be perfectly rational for the studio to leave it community run. If it's if it's humming and everything everyone's happy, as they say, then then you should leave it as is. The studio could officially support it. They could say like, "Oh, yeah, we support it." It could expose maybe some additional APIs. It could work directly with the modder. It could hire them. Uh it could partner with them, et cetera. Or it could just simply leave the door open. Hey, you're doing great things. We appreciate it. If there's anything you need from us, we're just a click away. You know, and build that

kind of passive partnership.
Right. And then what about Skyrim Together? You know, years of demand, hundreds of thousands of downloads. And Bethesda, I guess, didn't go through with it because of cost. What How do you interpret that? What would you have done?
You know, I I don't think the existence of like demand automatically means that Bethesda was wrong. I think a community can prove that players want something. It can't prove that the economics work for the studio. I think there's a lot of things that Bethesda has to, you know, consider. As I mentioned, engineering, QA, platform. And this is on a much bigger scale because you're talking about a reputable studio. Uh you have support, security, moderation, brand risk, and the opportunity cost of what those developers aren't working on instead. Um you know, that whole the the distraction that go into this. What is What's going to be impacted by this? What's going to be put aside while we focus on this? Bethesda, um you know, with Skyrim Together can simultaneously prove that

multiplayer demand exists. And Bethesda can rationally decide not to build multiplayer. It It's It's not the It's not the best example, but it is one that we have to keep in mind. Even if the signal's right and everything is saying yes, sometimes the economics or the red tape just isn't isn't allowing that to happen. Um those aren't necessarily contradictory conclusions, either.
So let let's say you run a small studio, 10 20 people, something like that. A small studio. You've got a hit, and your community starts building something that you you didn't ship, but you know, you've got some community enablement features, whether it's mod.io or whatever. And so what is the sequence? What do you Like what does that studio do? Like let's say on Monday next week, what should they do?
So the first thing I I wouldn't do is put it on the road map. Uh Monday morning, I would find the people building it and go talk to them. You know, understand what they've built,

why they've built it, who's all using it, you know, getting permission to look at those metrics, what limitations they're running into, and how I can help them. And and then start, you know, instrumenting that behavior. I want to know how many people are using it, how frequently they're using it, whether the usage is growing. You know, we talked about when something comes out and we have that honeymoon phase where everyone's on it, but now what's happening after that, whether they're bringing other players into the game, you know, is this impacting is this kind of having like a halo effect against my sales, uh my number of players, and most importantly whether they're still doing it 30, 60, or or 90 days later. Um I think from there I I'd make the smallest investment necessary to remove friction from the experiment, you know, that specific mod, and maybe that's documentation as I said, maybe it's an API.
Um you know, no mod support, no dedicated server option, no API means no signal. Like, what is the cheapest thing a studio can

do to like leave things open for the community?
I think leaving the door open, like you said, is probably the simplest way. I would pass this feedback over to the to the game studio, no matter the size. But I don't mean that like every game should on day one have, you know, Steam Workshop, complete SDK, dedicated servers, APIs, you know, full the the works, basically. Uh the cheapest door is simply designing the game so that experimentation isn't impossible. Um if dedicated servers make sense architecturally, you can consider exposing the server binary. That's usually the way that most uh of multiplayer servers usually allow servers to happen, and and usually game server owners want that control, and so if you're okay with them just having fun and and strengthening your community by creating stronger pillars on top of your game as a whole, then it's definitely something that I would do.

Um, if there's any configurations that can safely be exposed, you know, document those. Uh, don't unnecessarily encrypt or lock things down. Uh, the community, you know, wants to experiment and don't you don't need to do all of that. And then when someone builds something interesting, don't make your first reaction to send over a cease and desist. Reach out and and speak with them and as I mentioned, find out what they're doing and how is it working out for them. Cuz at the end of the day, you don't have to build the experiment. Sometimes you just got to make sure you haven't designed the game to prevent one.
When is the answer sometimes no? Just stay single player, don't consider multiplayer.
I mean, there's plenty of games that I would tell them to stay single player forever. Uh, multiplayer isn't automatically a feature upgrade. Uh, it can fundamentally change the product and and there are some uh, just like there are amazing mods like the ready amp crew, there are others who are making multiplayer mods for games just for the sake of having it without

realizing how the game mechanics change as soon as you add, you know, 20 people instead of four, for example. Um, it introduces network complexity, infrastructure, moderation, cheating, security and as I mentioned, the whole live ops dilemma. Uh, instead I'd ask whether multiplayer actually strengthens the the core experience because if the community signal is weak and retention is poor, the experience doesn't become meaningfully better with more players or supporting it, you know, takes away from that and and it makes the game special, I would say, I don't think you should do it. That doesn't mean you have to stop the community from experimenting by any means. There's a huge difference between we shouldn't build this and players shouldn't be allowed to build.
But with that, Pedro, thank you so much for your time and for our audience, we will catch you next time. Thanks, Pedro.
Thank Thank you, Joseph.
[music]

[music] [music] [music]