A game’s player base is pivotal to its success, and a thriving community can provide studios with helpful feedback, valuable insights, and word-of-mouth promotion. Player communities can also drive engagement and retention. When players feel a sense of belonging within a community, they are more likely to continue playing and investing their time and money.
Creating and maintaining player bases can be challenging. An added complexity to growing a community is ensuring that it is a safe and healthy place to be. Creators had a lot to say about building and maintaining healthy communities in their games. From Andres Tallos, Cofounder and CEO at Everguild:
“One of the biggest challenges is keeping a community healthy. In addition to having an active, growing, and engaged player base, it’s important to keep the community free of toxicity as much as possible. To me, a healthy community is one where any new player can come into the game, feel welcome, make friends, and share their experiences.”
Lauren Frazier also talks about Ramen VR’s approach to positive reinforcement of healthy player behavior:
“We incentivize people in the community who do the right thing. We lift them up, point them out. We give them titles, we give them stuff so there’s a reason you get rewarded for behaving well, and you don’t get anything besides kicked out for behaving poorly, right? So that kind of leads people to correct other people. I think it’s important to empower the community to moderate itself in a good way to keep it safe and fun.”
And Matt Wyble speaks about the responsibility he feels in creating a positive and diverse community for Second Dinner’s players:
“Healthy communities are diverse communities where people feel safe and welcome. It’s not easy, but it’s important for us to try with all of our might to improve and make a dent in the universe and make it better. However we can do this for our relationship to our players, and where we can, the players’ relationships to one another.”
| Takeaway: A good place to start when building healthy player communities is to create clear communication channels (Discord, Twitch, social media) and encourage your players to get involved. Next, set some community guidelines that outline acceptable behavior in the game and its communication channels. You may also want to learn more about how toxicity in games can impact your player community and what you can do about it. Stay tuned for more features to connect players, including Friends and Leaderboards, coming soon as part of Unity Gaming Services. |
Source: Unity Technologies Blog