I began my career building communities in the late ‘90s at Mplayer.com, an online, PC-game matchmaking service. Our primary games were hard core titles like Quake 2, Rainbow 6, and Total Annihilation. The community around these PC games came together on the web primarily to build and discuss modifications of their favorite games. Another, smaller contingency of community members were clan members who got together to talk smack with other clans and discuss strategy.
As core games have matured and moved toward the console, these communities have moved away from the web and into the walled communities offered by the Xbox Live and Sony Online networks. These closed systems offer many of the same features of the early community websites, including chatting, scheduling matches, and downloading game modifications (though now at a price—and without allowing the community to create its own modifications).
Almost without exception, casual game publishers and their websites owners have never developed large communities dedicated to their games or websites—or to the industry in general, for that matter. And that’s a missed opportunity. Even though building a community costs money and is a headache, the benefits far outweigh the costs. The benefits of an engaged community include:
- More Revenue – Engaged community members spend more time on your site chatting, viewing ads, and downloading your games.
- Lower Re-engagement Costs – Casual gamers tend to flock to their favorite franchises and game brands. If there is a dry period between releases of their favorite game, marketing dollars must be spent to re-engage consumers and bring them back to your site.
Cementing this population to your site with strong community features does away with this need. Fans will visit your site more often to view message board announcements and to find out about new products.
- Higher Retention – Once a user has created a profile, built a network of friends, and made his home on your site, migrating to another site has a high switching cost. The user becomes part of a family on the site and will tend to stick with it through dry periods of content or other issues.
With that, allow me to share with you three easy, inexpensive steps to building a casual game community.
Step 1: Build Message Boards
People aren’t a community until they can talk to each other. Many casual game publishers talk about the size of their “community,” but people playing one-hour game trials with no way to talk to each other isn’t a community.
The number one way to engage and get a community talking is through message boards. Message boards (sometimes called forums) are also the cheapest community-building tool available.
Typically free or very low cost, message boards offer a number of benefits:
A Gathering Place: Without a central location for like-minded people to meet and chat, a community will never grow. Message boards offer your community a gathering place for discussions in an asynchronous manner. They eliminate time zone problems and allow users to chat about issues important to them over a period of time.
A Feedback Channel: Forums enable people to tell you what they think about your site and the games you offer: This is probably the most forbidding aspect of message boards: exposing yourself and your company to criticism in a public forum. My argument against this fear is that people will always find a way to complain about you—even if it means posting their gripes on your competitors’ message boards. By hosting and moderating your own boards, you can answer complaints instantly and moderate the threads to ensure the conversation stays on topic. Users typically like to vent and will move on when answered by a company rep (even if it isn’t the answer they were looking for). When complaints happen on an outside board and aren’t controlled, they can quickly spiral out of control and create a PR nightmare.
A Customer Support Mechanism: Who doesn’t like free customer support? While not a replacement for customer support, message boards can cut way down on CS tickets by creating a forum on which users can post inquiries. Other community members who have run into these same issues can often help solve the problem. There is typically a small group of people on all message boards who love helping others (see Community Leaders later in the article).
A Cheap, Accurate Marketing Research Supplier: Anyone who has ever conducted a research study knows how expensive and inaccurate such studies can be. Market research companies charge thousands of dollars to ask the same questions that you can ask on your message boards. When you launch a game, posting a simple thread asking users what they think can provide valuable feedback (especially when designing the next iteration of a title). Trusted players who give consistent feedback become great candidates to participate in beta programs—they might even develop into Community Leaders. These are typically the members who are somewhat computer adept and understand the differences between game bugs and game features.
A Way to Get the Word Out: Having a two-hour downtime on your network is not fun for your users, especially when they are unaware it is coming. A forum allows you to give them fair warning. Other announcements like game launches, contests, and company changes are perfect for the message boards.
There are several free or inexpensive message board solutions out there. Here are a couple to consider:
- phpBB (www.phpbb.com) – The number one and most widely used open source (free) forum software. It is continually updated and more feature-rich than most message board software.
- Boards2go (www.boards2go.com) – Their free, hosted install shows ads unless you pay a small fee to get rid of them. A good, quick solution.
Other sites, like PlayFirst, have elected to build and maintain their own boards. This is a sound strategy if you have the engineering resources to update and maintain the boards. It gives you the ultimate control over your boards, especially if you are integrating your boards with other company applications like a profile system or account database.
Step 2: Develop a Community Leaders Program
Most well-run, community-rich sites have a small segment of the population that the rest of the community looks to for guidance and help. These Community Leaders are typically members who have been with the site for a long time and are trusted by the site owners and community to give advice or help with issues. These volunteers give hundreds of hours each year for very little or no pay. Why do Community Leaders do it? Typically for recognition and the feeling of ownership in the site or products they are representing.
To start a Community Leaders program, you must first define why you want Community Leaders. What are their duties? Will they be moderating message boards? Helping new players? Evaluating community-created content? You shouldn’t consider building a program until you can answer these questions and articulate exactly what you expect of Community Leaders.
A big note of caution here: While still legally murky, using volunteers can get a company in trouble if the distinction between a paid employee and a volunteer becomes blurred. EA was successfully sued by a group of Ultima Online volunteers who were being given strict hours to work and other employee-like guidelines. The lesson is to be careful of what you ask of your volunteers. If you are planning on giving your volunteers stringent hours to work and special powers reserved for employees, you should probably be paying them to avoid legal complications. Finally, avoid using terms like “hiring,” “work,” and “employee” when speaking with or about your volunteers. Those terms should be reserved for paid employees.
If you have message boards already launched, this is typically the best place to look for Community Leaders. These are the folks who have made many hundreds of posts, who own a lot of your games, and who help people on a regular basis.
If you don’t yet have message boards, I would suggest a promotion on your website asking for volunteers. Typically you will get a great response to this but will have to separate out the users who think they are signing up for free games from the ones who really want to help. The best way to ensure that you are signing up the right person is through a questionnaire that asks what their favorite games are, when they can be available to help, and what type of system and connection they have.
You also will need someone to coordinate the volunteers. Because this person typically works defined hours each week and reports to someone in the company, I suggest a contract Community Manager. This person works from home, manages your volunteer policies, and resolves disputes. Moving this grunt work off an in-house employee is the most cost-effective way to ensure that you have a smoothly-running program.
Step 3: Develop Player Profiles
Once you have a way for people to communicate and a set of leaders within your community, the next step is to help your community members maintain their unique identities through Player Profiles. A profile might merely be a simple list of info about a person (like name, age, and gender). Alternatively, you can build something more complex, including what games they are playing, when they play, and awards and ratings for each game. The user should be allowed to classify all of the profile data (except username) as Public or Private.
Regardless of the data presented, a player profile allows your community members to more easily develop relationships with others who have similar interests. It will be up to you to develop the tools to allow your members to make these connections. Some of the best tools for enabling community connections are:
- Friends Lists which allow users to add and remove friends they encounter on the site or in your games. Ensure that, as your community members are adding friends, there is reciprocation on the other side. People should not be able to add each other without agreement from both sides.
- A “Friend Finder” tool that allows users to put in certain criteria and have it spit out a list of compatible folks. Some of the criteria might be types of games played or where they live.
- “Show Random Profile” button. Becoming more popular on social network sites, this button allows users to randomly explore other users on the site—with the hope of finding others with similar interest.
Is That It?
No! The above steps only scratch the surface of building a community for your site and games. If you are thinking of building a community I would highly suggest spending a day exploring competitive sites in order to find some features that best meet your needs and budget.
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Nathan Fahrenthold is a seasoned game industry professional with 10+ years designing community and online game features. As Executive Producer at HearMe he ran a large game fan site network and managed the web properties for Mplayer.com, an early online game service. As Senior Community Manager at Electronic Arts, Nathan managed the community for the best-selling console game of all time, Madden NFL Football. Nathan is now a Senior Producer at iWin, building community features for their single and multiplayer games. He can be reached at nfahrenthold@iwin.com.
