Leveraging Community So People Care About Your Game: 4 ways to generate interest in your game outside of traditional news
by Kenny Johnston of Pocket Gems
Getting people excited about your mobile game is hard work. Whether it’s press, streamers or some unlucky bystander that you’ve cornered at a bus stop, people often just don’t care. This can be a sobering experience for someone who’s poured their blood, sweat and tears into a game only to see it fall on glazed eyes and deaf ears. This is also the main reason why so many developers you meet have that haunted sporadic eye twitch that’s usually reserved for DMV workers and bomb squads.
But you know what’s 100 times harder than getting someone to notice your game when it launches? Getting someone to care about your game after it launches. Even if you have a roadmap chalk full of updates, nerfs, buffs, new characters and customizable skins, pitching a game that’s already launched often feels like trying to get Miley Cyrus to go to prom with you (but with less press coverage). Without product updates, this gets even more challenging. Most PR will generally tell you to focus on momentum like revenue, downloads, and in-game metrics. However, in today’s landscape everyone outside of your competitors will still usually receive this with a symphony of yawns and eye rolls.
War Dragons was our first game with 3D graphics and a heavy emphasis on real-time multiplayer. We garnered a good amount of attention at launch and had a healthy roadmap of updates and news, but despite our early success it was still important for us to explore more ways to keep interest in the game strong.
With War Dragons, we found that an evergreen way to keep people interested in our game has been taking a unique approach to in-depth community involvement. At best, this will get you attention from the outside world. At worst, you will further endear your game to your existing players. Here’s a few ways we did this with War Dragons.
Put Your Community in the Game
War Dragons is very centered around multiplayer. While it does have story, there’s not a lot of opportunities in the game to flesh that out. When thinking of ways to get our players more excited with the game’s universe, we concluded that releasing a book about the game was a no-brainer.
While we didn’t end up being the first ones to do this, we were the first to actually put our players into the book. This got us a good amount of media attention.
We had an event in the game, The Great Contest, where the top six winning teams were written into the book. Our players loved it. The press mentions didn’t hurt either.
Your version of this doesn’t need be as comprehensive as ours. Need a model for a new NPC you’re designing? Ask your community to send in photos of themselves for a chance to be in the game. Name a new map after a particularly active player. Who wouldn’t want to battle on the high plains of Steve-ville?
Give Your Community Creative License
We have an amazing person on our marketing team, The Pixxel, who streams War Dragons on Twitch every week. Last month, we tried something new by having our Twitch channel actually design a dragon to put in the game (the result is pictured on the left). This was done by giving viewers a series of prompts (two arms vs. four arms etc..) to vote on. One of our artists, Kinman, used this feedback to draw the dragon in real-time. We’re currently implementing it as a playable dragon in the game.
Although this one didn’t actually get us any coverage, our community loved having a greater sense of ownership in the game and the event got over 3,000 views, making it one of our most popular streams ever.
Again, your version of this doesn’t have to be as involved as Twitch Draws a Dragon. Need a new name for a character in your game? Put out a Twitter poll and ask them to choose. Solicit concept art for a new logo. Even if you don’t use it, involving your community will keep them interested and possibly expose your game to someone who has never heard of it before.
Have Fun With It
I think that reporters (and everyone else) can tell how a developer gets along with its players. It’s not very hard to see if the developer-player relationship is more like a new friendship or a failing marriage. A lot of this comes down to how developers communicate with their players. If your messaging sounds like it was generated by a half-sentient Twitter bot, it’s probably not going great.
This is something a lot of games, War Dragons included, can struggle with. We’ve found that a good way to keep the community relationship positive is by taking opportunities to have fun with them. If done right, this can still get attention from the outside world. For example, War Dragons recently took part in the age-old game tradition of an April Fool’s announcement which ended up getting us some media coverage.
We made a fake announcement that we were releasing 100,000 balloons that were ‘crafted from durable clown-grade latex, making them highly resistant to popping and decomposition’ over the SF Bay. It’s worth noting that media didn’t really care about this until we showed them some of the funny reactions our followers had.
Well this is a very specific example, you’ll find that thinking of ways to goof around more with your audience can do a lot to garner attention for your game. This can range from making an effort to sounding more human on Twitter to playing your game against them on Twitch.
Community Doesn’t Have to Stop at the Game
Involving your community doesn’t have to stop at the game. There are tons of other places you can get players invested by giving them agency or just fleshing out your creatives.
For example, War Dragons recently produced its first TV commercial that was unveiled with our Android launch. In the ad, our dragons mercilessly destroy a cartoony group of dragons from a fictional show called Dragon Days. We thought this was something our players would enjoy so we took the chance to involve them more in our marketing.
Outside the commercial, we launched a fake website about Dragon Days, a fictional wiki where people could learn about the show’s demise, a parody Instagram channel and even a quiz asking players how long they would survive a similar dragon attack.
We also played around with the concept on our social channel with hypothetical fights between the Dragon Days characters and ours, asking players to vote on who would win. Lastly, we put one of the characters from the commercial, Pog, into the game as an Easter egg for players.
Doing all of this got us more press mentions and helped shine a light on the game’s Android launch. Plus, we honestly had a lot of fun doing this and I think that was evident.
These are just a few of the ways that we’ve been able to keep people talking about War Dragons outside of our major launches. If you’re ever in doubt, just ask yourself if your average player would find your idea funny, interesting or useful. If the answer is yes, then do it. Even if this doesn’t get you attention from the outside world, your players will probably appreciate it.
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