The Power Of Pre-Launch Communities For Indie Games
By: Dream Harvest Games
Tags: Gaming, Community Building, Marketing Strategies, Community Engagement, Discord

Communication Strategy Plan

Many of us don’t have dedicated social media managers, community managers or marketing people on the team, so it’s essential that the whole team works together to help grow your community. It’s especially helpful if you have team members that speak more than one language and can translate your social media and community hub posts.

However, one very very important note — You’ll want to try and keep the place where you have meaningful conversations to a single place. Based on conversations I’ve had with community managers and senior marketing people, It becomes very very hard to manage a community split across multiple locations, i.e. Steam Forums, your Forums and Discord. Pick one, syphon people there and stick with it, at least until you have a dedicated community person on the team.

Also, get into automating your social media; use tools like Crowdfire or Hootsuite, it makes things much much easier to manage and means you’ll be spending more time building your game and content and less time managing the social media side of things.

Anyway, here are a few sites to get started:

Discord

This is a great place to have the central community hub where you interact with your fans daily and share timed exclusive content before tweeting this content or including it in a newsletter; ultimately you want people to be funnelled here from all other places. With the recent changes to the Discord store, there are also some cool new features you can make use of which I’ll talk about a bit later.

Twitter

You should be tweeting daily 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, i.e. for us we have #NeuroSlicers.

The other hashtag should be either #gamedev, #indiedev or on Wednesday at 6 PM BST #indiedevhour, on Friday’s (if you’re using Unity) #madewithunity and on Saturday’s #screenshotsaturday. It’s essential you research the best hashtags to use for your particular genre and theme. We make use of #cyberpunk quite a bit for instance.

Always try to link to your Discord and/or Newsletter within every tweet to push people to your central community hub. Track engagement on the Twitter analytics page and work out why specific 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 posts every 3–4 hours to hit other time zones with your content. Content with images are good, Gifs and videos are even better, and you’ll see much more engagement with these.

Instagram

We’ve seen some of the highest engagement over on Instagram compared to other social platforms. It’s a great place to share photos of your working environment, the team and your day to day experience as developers and offers a great way to share the personality of your studio and game. The only downside to Instagram is that links don’t work on regular posts, only paid posts. We tried posting one image a day for a few weeks and saw good growth and engagement over that time.

On Instagram its essential you make use of as many hashtags as possible (Up to 30) to reach as many different topic based feeds — research the most popular hashtags for your genre and use all of them — though do be careful, there is a character limit on Instagram (2200), but they don’t show this on the app…instead you’ll just find that half your text has been cut-off when you post.

Blog

This can be hosted directly on your site or somewhere like Tumblr if you are doing it in a written form; however, we’ve personally started doing video dev blogs instead as they’re faster to produce and allow 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. Repost these blogs across other sites such as IndieDB, Facebook, Medium or anywhere else where you think might be worthwhile 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 month’s blog then head over to blah blah blah……”

Newsletter

This should be a bi-weekly/monthly thing where you summarise all the marketing content you’ve created that month and where you link to this content. Keep newsletters short and sweet with compelling 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 allows you to track opens, the 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 live streams, game feature deep dives and anything else you can think of.

Make sure you organise 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 emphasise that your Discord community is getting a first look at everything you create on here.

Twitch

Try to live stream at least once or twice a month, ideally more. You can hold special live stream events where you giveaway other games (It’s super handy having a Humble Monthly subscription and also buying some of the Humble Bundles to have an extensive catalogue of game keys to give away for competitions).

You can live stream your team programming, your artists doing art, new gameplay features, an internal competition, anything. Try to live stream at a variety of different hours throughout the week and weekend so that you can be sure that people from across 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 participate in the live stream.

Be sure to create some good visual assets for your channel and Streaming overlay.

Always be sure to promote your Discord throughout your stream.

IndieDB

Personally not a big fan of IndieDB, I think the interface and UX needs a massive overhaul as it’s incredibly archaic, but it’s still a good place to re-post your blogs and get them featured on the IndieDB homepage.

You need to make sure you stick to their rules when posting content on your pages here though (something like at least five new images or a video) otherwise they’ll archive the post, and it will only be visible on your game page.

Facebook

There are a lot of game dev and gaming community Facebook groups out there; join as many of them and feel free to spam posts to your other content; you’ll get a few hits this way — though, Facebook has become less business-friendly over the past year or so and less effective for marketing efforts due to changes in their algorithms.

Studios with existing large communities have fewer issues, but it’s harder now than ever to build a community on Facebook due to how the algorithm only shares your posts to a small segment of your followers initially and then based on engagement it might share it with more people.

VK Communities

VK is a platform similar to Facebook predominantly used by Russian and Eastern European users. We only began using this during our Closed Pre-Alpha and saw lots of interest. It’s probably worthwhile having a translated version of your Facebook page on here and cross-posting stuff you post on Facebook to your official game page here.

Steam Store Page

This is something you should have set up around 6–8 months before release, but only if you have all your key art and a solid video and screenshots ready. At this point, it’s recommended that you make your store page live with the tag “Coming Soon” so people can start Wish Listing your game. This is much better than allowing pre-orders in order to get as many day 1 sales as possible. In addition, making your store page live will open up your steam community pages to the public, here you’ll want to pin a post that tries to push people to your Discord.

The Content Plan

Now that you have a list of key places to post your content you’ll want to put your actual plan together. In a new document, put together a couple of tables that outline the following:

Objectives For Each Phase Of Development

Your phases might be

Phase 1: Pre-Alpha / Alpha / Development

Phase 2: Beta Testing

Phase 3: Launch

Under each heading, you’ll want to list the key talking points and content that you want to focus on during that phase. For instance:

Phase 1:

1. Share the Development Journey — Showing the evolution of the game

2. Spotlight Features on the team and their backgrounds

3. Story Introduction/Tease

4. Community Foundations — Start building the community

Phase 2:

1. Mechanics — Locking down gameplay mechanics

2. Building world narrative — Feature focus

3. The background story for the season launch

4. Community excitement — Build up to launch. Game Feature lockdown

Phase 3:

1. Product, features and content lockdown — Price points and versions

2. Story Reveal

3. Key Character Profiles

4. Community profiling — Identifying and rewarding early adopters

Here’s what the table will look like once built: