How to build relationships with the gaming community correctly – Sara Cecilia Lempiainen, Lena Viitanen and Kristyna Paskova shared at Unite Europe 2016. All three work as community managers at Unity Technologies.
To begin with, you need to evaluate your resources and make a schedule. Lempiainen, Viitanen and Paskova offer a sober assessment of their capabilities. For example, if you are an indie developer and act as a human orchestra, that is, you support the game and promote it at the same time, you do not need to try to allocate 6 hours to communicate with the community every day. It’s unreal. It is enough to devote at least an hour to this three times a week. However, girls are advised to remember that one of the main principles in communicating with the community is regularity. That is, if you have taught your players that there are updates in the game group on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays, then try to stick to this schedule further.
The next tip is to evenly distribute the time allotted for communication with the community between information about updates, direct communication with players and the promotion of the game. You can’t always “feed” the audience with the advertising of the project – it will quickly get bored and leave. However, if you do not talk about what is happening in the game, but just chat with the players, then there will be no sense either.
Lempiainen, Viitanen and Paskova also advised to “make the players your fans.” This means that the fan activity of the audience should be encouraged. Has someone posted a song on YouTube about your favorite heroes of your game? Be sure to check this out. Arrange contests of fan letters, drawings, and so on.
If the project allows, let the players influence the content of the game. For example, if the community has been asking for a long time for the main character to be given an armor of acid colors, then perhaps it is worth meeting her halfway.
One more piece of advice – celebrity fans have not interfered with any project yet. It is worth trying to get a famous actor or letsplayer as a player (as they did Seriously with the Best Fiends game). Such a promo is guaranteed to affect the sale of the game.
Another important point is that from the very beginning you need to decide whether you want the community manager to have a personality, or that it should be some kind of impersonal character. Lempiainen believes that it is more interesting for players to communicate with real people. “But you’ll have to grow a thick hide,” she warns. Because with any conflict or dissatisfaction of the community, a certain percentage of people will attack not only the game, but also the developers and community managers themselves. And the transition to personality is inevitable.
The next piece of advice that follows from the previous one is to be honest with the community. The community manager himself must remain “true to himself”. Because, Lempiainen believes, if he tries to appear to be someone he is not, the community feels it. In other words, if you suddenly chose a gloomy introvert for the role of community manager, you do not need to force him to post funny pictures with ponies and put emoticons in the comments. The audience won’t appreciate it.
The point that must be mentioned is moderation. It is necessary to establish clear and strict rules. “Sooner or later they will start sending you obscenities. And you need to know what to do about it,” states Lempiainen.
Last in order, but not least, advice – it is necessary to provide the project, in addition to all of the above, good technical support. Because even the best community manager will look pale if the project has bugs that players report and that don’t get fixed for a long time.
You will be able to learn about the latest trends in the gaming industry first-hand, personally meet and discuss working issues with leading companies in the game development and publishing market at White Nights St. Petersburg 2016, which will be held on June 28-29.