Who is the most important person in the studio?
If for some reason you didn’t answer “the player”, you may want to take a moment and ask yourself why, before reading on.
The founder of Amazon, Jeff Bezos, famously has an empty chair in his meetings at Amazon. This empty chair is to represent the customer. In order to help steer the conversation and decision making into a customer centric direction, or at the very least keep the customer in mind.
There is however a way to fill that empty chair with someone who does speak for and represent the customer. Who spends their days doing nothing but to better understand the player, their wants, their needs, and their desires. That person is your community manager.
I believe that the true value in community, does not live within social media posts, or Reddit management, or even in managing of crisis and difficulties within the community, they are all part of community management of course, but the real value lives in having an expert who understands the dynamics and emotional drivers of the player. To truly understand your customer or your target audience and crucially what drives them.
Video game studio sometimes face a rather interesting challenge, where they spend years in development cycles in order to produce their game. Very often they operate under an AGILE mindset. But are handicapped by the fact that without the ability to have actual players playing their game. The reality is they are anything but AGILE. As the most crucial component to AGILE development, the player feedback, is missing. This often comes to a head when the game first reaches players hands either during the first user testing, live phases, or at the very latest at launch. Because as soon as the player arrives, the entire ball game changes. If the player has issues with something, and tracking data backs up that there is indeed an issue, the conversation about keeping it is over. It doesn’t matter who you are in the studio, or how much you worked on it, or who came up with it, if the player says it sucks, and the data agrees, the conversation is over: it needs changing.
This is often a difficult time for a studio as it adjusts to a new dynamic. The new king is the player, and oddly enough, they’re not even in the studio, but out there. This entire shift can be made smoother when community is well established within the studio, and fills that empty seat early on. Making player centric decisions and design choices early on, pays dividends later down the line. From the moment a potential player is aware of the game, to signing up on the website, making an account, or wish listing it on steam, over downloading the game, and the first moments within the game, all the way to hours after game play and providing feedback, the entirety of the player journey is a community touch point. And the more community and player centric the design and decisions were made to build that journey, the better for the player, the game, and ultimately for the studio’s success.
The key for this is twofold. On the one hand having a community person early on that can help raise a player centric voice, and guide player focused decision making. On the other, it also needs a community person that understands how to research, and understanding group dynamics, emotional and behavioural drivers, and how all these fit together in the context of the game and brand that the studio is building.
Com-Unity Consulting can help you in building that understanding. We can facilitate the early representation, train the community team to use social research methodology to become true expert of the customer by quantifying emotions. We help with the design of player journeys, feedback loops, or even build a brand, community tone of voice, and channel strategy to reach the player you’re looking to get, provoking the behaviour we’re looking to see.
Ultimately, we unify what is critical for a player centric operation. Because the most important person in the studio, is the player.
