INTRODUCTION
Communities, the life blood of each and every game. They're a measure of whether what you've created is actually any good. Right?
A big community that talks and shares information about your games far and wide across the internet and among their friends and beyond are what can make or break your game. So why do so many developers wait until after launch before starting to grow theirs?
The following guide came out of a number of conversations I had with other developers that had either failed to build a community for their games pre-launch.
They wanted tips on how to go about doing so and is based on our own experiences of growing a community.
We are developing a competitive online cyberpunk real time strategy game, Failure: NeuroSlicers and we started building our community pre-release and before we had anything playable.
We were / are an unknown studio, developing our first game, as a studio, though we've all worked on a mixture of AAA and Indie projects outside of this studio.
The Importance of Gathering Feedback Early and Often
Gathering feedback from other developers as well as normal players is super important and should be done as early as possible. The moment you have a playable build you should be seeking to get feedback from people.
Organic marketing should be happening as early as possible too, especially if this is your first title from your studios. I'm talking at minimum a year or more before launch you should be building your communities through all forms of social media and especially Discord, twitch, YouTube and elsewhere.
Get talking with influencers that play your type of game (they don't need to be massive ones, sometimes it's better to partner with smaller / medium sized ones who can grow their audience at the same time as you and they're more likely to give special treatment to your title.
What Are You Building A Community Around If Your Game Isn't Ready To Play?
The anticipation of playing the game!
By sharing exclusive looks at in development elements of your game, bugs, concept art and more you can help build that anticipation.
Its also important to get the community involved in the decision making; this helps build consumer trust and get's them to "buy in" to the concept even before they've had a chance to play the game. though, you'll likely see your biggest surges of new community members come from when you take your game to events and get people to sign up to your discord or newsletter on the spot after getting hands on with something playable.
But the main point is that its about building a community around the journey to final release and getting this community involved isn as many ways as possible - you want to be creating "Ambassadors" for your brand that will help spread information about your games.
Its a slow process that takes a lot of time and effort to do but has been proven to be worthwhile and, dare I say it, essential to the success of indie games in the current climate. It needs to be started early and you need to commit a considerable amount of time to it.
I'm Sold, I Want To Build A Community In Preparation For Launch.....But Where Do I Start?
Here are a few things to get started, in no particular order:
Discord
I've mentioned plenty in regards to Discord already, but it really should be your main community hub where you interact with your fans on a daily basis and share timed exclusive content (before tweeting this content or including it in a newsletter); ultimately you want people to be funneled here from all other places.
Twitter
You should be tweeting on a daily basis and preferably with images, gifs and videos. Always make use of hashtags, but never more than 2 or 3 max and one of them should be a custom one for your game, ie for us we have #FailureNeuroSlicers.
The other hashtag should be either #gamedev #indiedev or on Wednesday at 6PM BST #indiedevhour, on Friday's (if your using Unity) #madewithunity and on Saturday's #screenshotsaturday.
Always try to link to your Discord and / or Newsletter within every tweet to push people to your main community hub. Track engagement on the Twitter analytics page and work out why certain tweets maybe work better than others (time, visual content, word content, hashtag use, etc). Also. make sure you get other team members, or your other accounts to retweet using a different set of 2 hashtags and try to retweet your own posts every 3 - 4 hours in order to hit other timezones with your content.
Blog
This can be hosted directly on your site or somewhere like Tumblr if your doing it in a written form, however we've personally started doing video dev blogs instead as they're faster to produce and allows you to put a face to the game that I believe people appreciate.
Blogs should be done on a monthly or bi-weekly basis as well as part of your newsletter send outs. Repost these blogs across other sites such as IndieDB, Brightlocker, Facebook and also be sure to tweet about them.
Try to find a single topic to cover in a blog in detail while also giving a general update on the progress of development. Once again, always remember to include a link to your Discord, funnel readers there by saying something like "If you'd like to discuss any of the topics covered in this months blog then head over to blah blah blah......"
Newsletter
This should be a bi-weekly / monthly thing where you summarize all the marketing content you've created that month and where you link to this content.
Keep newsletters short and sweet with interesting headlines and a paragraph or two for each section before linking to the bulk of the content held on your Blog, YouTube, Twitch, etc - once again, push people to your Discord so they can discuss the topics.
Mailchimp is a good product for this and has pretty good analytics that allow you to track opens, location of people opening your newsletter and more including A/B testing Newsletter headers, splitting send outs with different content to check for the responses, etc.
YouTube
On your YouTube channel you should be posting your video dev blogs, gameplay snippets, trailers, interviews with your team where they discuss their role on the project, videos of your time at events, recordings of livestreams, game feature deep dives and anything else you can think of.
Make sure you organize your YouTube channel into categories so it's easy for people to find the content they're most interested in. Make new video uploads unlisted and share them first via your Discord so your Community gets a first look, then maybe a week later make them public and tweet about them.
Make sure you emphasize that your Discord community is getting a first look at everything you create on here.
Twitch
Try to livestream at least once or twice a month, ideally more. You can hold special livestream events where you giveaway other games (Its super handy having a Humble Monthly subscription and also buying some of the Humble Bundles to have a big catalog of game keys to give away for competitions).
You can livestream your team programming, your artists doing art, new gameplay features, an internal competition, anything really. Try to livestream at a variety of different hours throughout the week and weekend so that you can be sure that people from accross the globe can attend at least some of them. Once a stream is over, upload the video to your Youtube Channel for those members of your community that couldn't attend the livestream.
Its just important to do it often and to a schedule. Be sure to create some good visual assets for your channel and Streaming overlay.
Always be sure to promote your Discord throughout your stream.
Brightlocker
This is a relatively new platform that launched at the end of last year and is a mix between Patreon and IndieGoGo - you setup a page, can offer rewards that can be purchased for cash or the platforms own currency Gold. Gold is earned through interactions on the platform and has a monetary value. Players can subscribe to your pages for a monthly fee and the split is massively in favor of the developer.
Due to how new the platform is there's and the fact they've partnered with some big name game studios there's been a really good surge of new users to the platform which can easily be converted to new community members for you.
You can also post updates on the site and even livestream directly within the platform.
Rewards can be physical / digital or even things called Guided choices, where users pay gold to have a say on a creative direction for an element of the game. Once again, you should be trying to push all followers from here to your Discord.
