Gaming community in terms of independent game developer

Hi, I have been sawing my browser with varying success for the second year now and I want to share the experience of forming and working with the gaming community when there is no time or resources for this. And also to tell about the benefits that it can bring.

The text will be primarily useful as an introductory text for individuals like me and small teams who are starting their project and are not able to hire an individual specialist.

Why do you need a gaming community

To begin with, we will determine what could be the benefits of people crowding in one place.

So, a healthy and active community of players gives us:
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1. Strong binding of users to the game (due to new social connections), and therefore a constant influx of money (if the game involves periodic payments).
2. Free advertising and a small stable growth of the user base (a rooted player will surely drag all his friends into it and tell about it on his favorite forum).
3. Free customer support for new players.
4. Free testing department.
5. Free monitoring of the performance of the game.
6. Any other free labor (if you create the conditions for this, for example, by allowing you to add custom content to the game).
7. Self-confidence (when you do something alone, it is important to know that the results of your work are used).
8. And of course new friends.

Not to be unsubstantiated:

Why work with the community

First of all, because without the effort, it may not appear at all.

The emergence of a community can be compared with a nuclear reaction - it is necessary to gain the minimum “critical” mass of active users so that the communication between them starts to support itself. If your game is not brilliant and it does not have a good advertising budget, then this is not so easy to do, which means that the “reaction” must be supported artificially.

If the community does appear on its own, it’s far from a fact that there will be a place for you in it. Players will communicate, go about their business, but most of the benefits will disappear. Moreover, you will not be able to influence it, and without adequate leaders (who most likely will not arise themselves), any community will fall into self-destruction, absorbing various trolls and unpleasant personalities. In this case, it can even harm, scaring newcomers.

Therefore, the community needs to grow, care for him and send him in the right direction.

How to work with the community

We will determine what we will form a community, where and by what methods we will work with it.

Around what

There are two options:

1. If this is your first project and nobody knows about you, then definitely around the game. I did just that.
2. If your account already has success (or you plan to release a series of small games), then you can collect players around yourself or your company.

In my opinion, there are not many differences, but there may be certain nuances, therefore it is better to decide on this immediately and in the future to stick to the chosen strategy.

Where

Players need a platform for communication. Traditionally, this role is claimed by social networks and forums.

If your game is developed specifically for social networks, it is naturally more convenient for users to communicate there. Otherwise, I recommend creating an official forum fully controlled by you. There are several reasons for this:

1. By sending people to social networks, you either cut off parts of the players access to the community (creating a group in one network) or shatter so a small community (creating several disjoint groups in different networks, each of which will have to work separately).
2. Communication on a separate resource will tie players to the game more strongly - in order to communicate, they will at least have to visit your site, which will become a separate unique place of communication.
3. The forum provides more opportunities for communication and moderation.
4. Your own forum will allow you to easily collect any necessary statistics: from simple user activity depending on time, to counting references to a game feature or problem.
5. The forum can be modified by adding the missing functionality (for example, making the conclusion some pleasant statistics for the player).
6. Forums are better indexed by search engines.

Separately, I note that the usual chat for this purpose is not enough, primarily because it does not store the history of communication, and without the history of any community we will not. But as a nice addition to the chat is not superfluous.

The classic “developer blog” is also not suitable for the role of the main site, since it assumes that the initiative to start communication is created only by developers.

how

Remember that you are a model of behavior for the players, so behave as you want the community to behave:

1. Always be polite.
2. Set the boundaries of the permissible and strictly follow them (and stick to them even more strictly), in particular, it is necessary to clearly define:
   
   1. attitude to trolls: whom, where, how and how much can you troll;
   2. attitude to the mat and insults (usually it is better to completely ban, but there may be exceptions, for example, when playing a role);
   3. What information can be disclosed to the players, and what can not;
   4. style of communication with the players: official / not official, on behalf of the “administration / developers” or on my own behalf (for myself I took a semi-official tone for news and discussion of mistakes, otherwise I communicate on my own behalf);
   5. forbidden topics, for example: politics, criticism of the administration, discussion of competitors (I decided to allow everything until there is a polite discussion).
3. Most of the conflicts arise because of misunderstanding, therefore, in dealing with players, always respond clearly and in detail, explaining even "elementary". In addition, this approach will show the players that you appreciate them.
4. Do not be afraid to make comments to players and explain the rules of behavior, many of them may simply not suspect that they are behaving badly.
5. Players who do not want to live by the rules, banish mercilessly. Better one lost to the game is rude than 10 frustrated players. In controversial cases, in my opinion, it is better to bend the stick than not to bend.
6. Follow these rules, even when you have a temperature of 39, neighbors top at one in the morning drown your apartment, neighbors below arrange a drunken brawl, a girl abandoned you, and the players are blunt and try to insult you.

All players can be divided into 3 groups:

1. active - players who like to communicate and do this;
2. observers - watch what active players were there discussing;
3. invisible - just play and are not interested in near-game communication.

There are an order of magnitude more observers than active, and invisible - more than observers.

Our task is to ensure the transition of the invisible to the observers, the observers to the active, and not let the active players get bored.

For this we can do the following things:

• create infopovody, around which the communication of players can begin;
• maintain existing communication;
• encourage players to get to know the community.

Information can be any thing about which you can express at least some opinion:

• News - write them a lot and different, you can devote them to a lot of things:
  
  • The release (and announcements) of updates is by itself (one more reason to release them more often).
  • Interesting statistics: registered 1000th player? killed 1000000th monster? - report this to the players.
  • Holidays - all celebrate New Year, Victory Day, March 8 - common holidays unite us and give a reason to talk.
  • Any other important events in the game, community or team.
  • Important in-game events (for example, seizure of territory) or conflicts (supporters of elves against supporters of orcs), if any;
• Contests and other promotions;
• Polls: what race to enter next? What weapons are not enough for complete happiness? (even if you actually decided everything yourself a long time ago). People love to dream and dream, give them that opportunity.

At the same time, it is imperative to make sure that the players find out about these occasions (provide for the appropriate notification in the user interface).

The less communication between players, the more participation you need to take in it. Therefore, at first, every discussion should be closely monitored and stuck into it for the slightest reason. This has a significant advantage - on the platform of communication you will be “many”, which means you will set its character.

There are several ways to support communication:

• Communicating independently is the easiest and most essential way to get started.
• Encourage active players. A simple example would be assigning statuses in forums, depending on the number of posts, or access to unique emoticons.
• Detailed answer all questions and suggestions of players. If possible, leave in them the possibility of further discussion (for example, hints for the future of the game).
• Follow the "quality" of communication: stop flooding and insults, take frequently asked questions to the FAQ, improve the site structure (select new sections on the forum) depending on the popularity of certain topics.
• Contribute to the formation of "circles of interest":
  
  • if the game mechanics suggests the possibility of at least some kind of competition between groups of players, make guilds;
  • highlight the place where players can upload creativity in your game;
  • encourage any creative endeavors, whether it be collective poetry or writing a service to collect statistics from your game.
• Improve the usability of the communication platform.

Pushing people to communicate is the hardest. If a person does not want to socialize, he will not do it. But there are several ways:

• Put a list of "hot" discussions in a prominent place, some of them may be interested stealth.
• Try to hook players with various contests and promotions: someone loves comics, someone glues models, each original action can lead to new players being drawn into communication.
• Make communication part of the gameplay, a simple example of this may be clan disassembly. In my game, I allowed the players to pass laws affecting the game; every law is a reason for a good “hot” discussion.

How to benefit from the community

It is important to understand that the players try not for you (game developers), but for themselves or other players, and only as long as they are interested. Accordingly, the initiative usually comes from the bottom, our task is not to give it the abyss and send it in the right direction.

Therefore, the most important thing is to support all the undertakings of the players, to help them with advice and deed. At the same time, try to simplify their work: describe in detail where and how to report errors, make a list of ways they can help, and so on.

The main rule: any useful action should require a minimum of effort from the player.

In addition, try to encourage players to take the initiative:

• Thank you more often: the player found a bug - thanks, wrote a story - thanks. This is a very simple and effective way.
• Mention distinguished players, especially in the "official" texts, such as news. If Vasya drew a cool comic around the game world, or found interesting statistics - insert a line about it in the next news (or even write a separate one dedicated to this event). Most likely, Vasya will be delighted and will do something else useful, and a couple of people will want to be written about them too.
• Come up with any special rewards that will distinguish the most-most. In my game, I introduced the “power” parameter, which slightly strengthens the player and is changed manually by the developers for their special services (found error, winning the competition and any other creative work). Besides the fact that the rating on this parameter is very stimulating to the players, it also allows me to navigate in the community and see the most authoritative participants.

Finally

While I was writing, I realized that the topic was too voluminous so that it could be disclosed in detail in one article. About the organization of the same competitions, you can write a separate treatise. Therefore, I decided to dwell only on basic questions, I hope the usefulness of the material did not suffer from this.