Managing a community for your gamers requires a lot of extra time in addition to your development work. The results won’t show up immediately, or even soon. Persevere and keep active, even in quieter times: answer questions, release new content, repeat, and eventually users will notice. In the long run, a healthy gamer community can provide invaluable feedback, lots of ongoing attention for your games, and connections to fellow devs that can drive your creative process. Try these tips for setting up and managing your community efficiently.

Before you build, line up your strategy

1 Why are you doing this?

Is it to get your game in front of as many players as possible? Do you hope to reach and influence a specific group, such as journalists, critics, or publishers? Do you hope to build up your team via your community, for example, as a way to find collaborators or by providing revenue?

2 Know your users.

This of course depends largely on the type of game you’re creating, for example:

• Are you designing a game that’s largely based on having a communities, such as the modding community?
• Will the players mostly be of a particular age or gender?
• How will they play your game: at home on their desktop or sofa? In transit, or during breaks?
• Overall, get a picture of your users’ lifestyle and playing preferences.

3 Set up your content pillars.

Channels:

• Which channels does your target audience already hang out on? How do they talk amongst each other, i.e., what is the tone they use? Do they communicate in different languages?
• Do some research to what channels similar games use.
• What forums and sites do they hang out on, and can you utilize these as well?
• Check in with other social media channels and accounts that you admire. Get inspiration from them and what they are posting! Are they using .gifs? Do they use hashtags that are relevant for your community too? Use what is already out there to revive your accounts.
• Check in the timezones of the regions you are targeting, what their most active hours on social are. Do not automatically limit yourself to one or a couple of time zones. Figure out what’s best: to put all of your efforts and have a full force on a certain region, or spreading out your efforts across several.
• Avoid the graveyard: Start with a few channels that you know you can maintain without impacting your development roadmap. This helps you avoid having channels that are left unattended for an indefinite amount of time.

Resources:

• Who will produce your content? Can you do it yourself? If not, then at least at the start, ask friends, family, colleagues to help out. If you have some money, use it to hire a competent freelancer who can create high-quality content. This will have a bigger impact than advertising.
• Think about what kind of content is possible with the resources you have. Start as early as you can, and create some habits, like using standardised hashtags that other users follow.
• Make sure to give updates and news an interesting angle or hook that’s relevant to your players and that makes your game stick out from the competition.
• Reach out to the journalists and critics that you respect and don’t be shy about asking for advice on running a community.
• Divide your time equally on social media between:
  • Promotional content
  • Sharing news
  • Talking and paying attention to your users: replying to questions and comments, following up with users you’ve met at events, and thanking people who have have spread positive reviews and comments about your game.

Analytics:

• Find the right analytical tools. For example, use analytics.twitter.com, then go to tweets and see their reach. For Facebook go to Facebook.com/yourpage, then go to Insights > Posts. You’ll see when you’re followers are online.
• Keep your eye on the metrics that most align with your goals. For example:
  • Do you want to them to share pictures, leave comments, send you feedback, spread the word?
  • Did engagement increase after the latest release?
  • Is player retention higher in specific areas of the game that you’ve optimized?

Keep the conversation positive

1Who will be the community manager? Ideally, you’ll have resources for hiring one, but whoever takes the role, they need to be:

• A good listener.
• Someone who loves to help others.
• Friendly and outgoing.
• Tough, cool and calm, because there will always be people who get mean and personal.

2Set clear rules for the behavior and tone that is permitted, and make sure to post the rules where anyone can find them. A few sub-points on behavior:

• If someone posts inappropriate content on your channels, take it with them in private rather than calling them out publicly.
• If people start harassing each other on your channels, make sure to step in and stop it.
• If somebody’s being abusive to other players or downright trolling, feel free to ban them from your forums or posting Facebook comments on your page. It’s your space, so cultivate civil debate.

3Be honest in tough times: If a release is delayed or there are performance issues, don’t beat around the bush about it. Be honest about your mistakes, you’re human, and in the long run honesty with your users will make them respect and trust you.

4Provide sneak peeks and previews that will pique players’ interest and raise the fandom. Followers usually love to speculate, so give them mysterious hints about new updates.

5Grant users’ wishes for new content where you can: include their suggestions, it shows you’re listening and appreciative.

6Give added attention to long-time, dedicated fans: if it’s appropriate, make them community moderators and ask them for feedback directly.

The more you share, the more they’ll care

1Share content early on, including information about your dev process. The earlier and more thoroughly you invite users into your creative process, the greater the possibility for establishing a friendly and supportive tone from the get-go.

2Provide frequent updates, even small ones. Not only will this keep your audience captivated, it gets you into a routine of logging your activities, so you can pinpoint better what’s working in your dev process and what can be improved.

3Run live events, such as competitions.

4Build demos that you can share with alpha testers, and make sure what you send them is complete enough to get proof-of-concept.

5Get offline! Demo your games at events, so you can meet players and get their feedback in person.

6Tailor your demos for the specific event you’re attending:

• Research the venue
• Consider space limitations, level of noise and the time you’ll be able to allot to each user.
• Who will be at this event? End-users and consumers? Other developers and artists? Journalists?
• Think about how to get attention: For example, if you’re demoing VR content, find out if there’s space for additional monitors, so passersby can see the content.
• How will you collect users’ feedback?
• Create and give away other kinds of content based on your game: posters, postcards, comic books, swag, etc.

7If you’re making a fairly complex game, for example, one that includes modding tools, choose the appropriate channels for feedback and discussion. A forum is probably more useful in this case than Twitter, because you can give and receive long and complex feedback, and it’s more straight-forward to document history. It also makes it possible for you and your users to search by topic, author, and so on.

8Finally, do a presskit, it’s standard now.