How can you use community events to build your online gaming community?

Every successful community event starts with a clear purpose. Whether it's to introduce a new game feature, celebrate an anniversary, or simply bring players together, understanding why you're hosting the event guides every decision you make. In my experience, events with a well-defined purpose not only attract more participants but also offer a more engaging and memorable experience, reinforcing the community's connection to the game.

Purpose holds significant meaning in the gaming industry, where a majority of employees are passionate and deeply engaged with their projects. Being an empathetic leader can facilitate smoother sprints, and the gaming industry has excelled in leveraging empowerment. Each project within the industry can have its unique purpose, and exploring this aspect can continually prove beneficial.

Creating purpose-driven community events is a strategic approach. If you aim to boost retention, organizing a themed in-game event with exclusive rewards can incentivize players to stay active. Suppose your goal is to encourage collaboration; hosting cooperative challenges or tournaments will increase teamwork among community members. Suppose your gaming community is rallying around the launch of a highly anticipated game, and your purpose is to enhance awareness and excitement, hosting a pre-launch livestream event, where developers share insights, engage with the community, and unveil exclusive gameplay footage. These are a few examples. Know your game and audience to find what suits better for your strategy.

Building an online gaming community through events is fundamentally about creating connections and fostering a sense of belonging. Defining the purpose of these events with authenticity and vulnerability, ensures that they resonate on a deeper level with your community. This purpose is not a superficial tagline but a reflection of the values and experiences that unite your members. It's about creating a space where players feel seen, heard, and valued, where they can share not just a gaming experience but a sense of identity and belonging. By centering events around a purpose that genuinely reflects the heart of your community, you cultivate an environment where meaningful connections thrive.

Above everything else, you should always consider highlighting the part that your community plays in the history of your game. Community events are not normally spearheaded by financial gain, but by building valuable relationships and emotional connections to your players. Things like tournaments, challenges, and live streams are still great for community health, but I've found that giving your community the chance to become part of the game development and have their voices heard is just as important! Consider adding wider visibility of your development to your audience. Give them the chance to ask the developers questions in Q&A sessions. Give them a platform to make a difference in the games that they love to play.

Understanding your community's preferences, gaming habits, and what they value in your game is crucial for tailoring an event that resonates with them. By analyzing community feedback and engagement patterns, I've been able to design events that cater specifically to my audience's interests, resulting in higher participation rates and more positive feedback, thereby strengthening the community bond.

Knowing your audience what kinds of things they want to see. what motivates them, what challenges them, and what rewards them. You also need to consider their time zones, languages, and platforms. You can use surveys, polls, analytics, and social media to gather insights about your audience and communicate with them.

This phase is about interaction to understand your players. Find out the intrinsic and extrinsic motivations they are interested in, seek out what kind of challenges frustrates them and the preferences of multiplayer experience they are looking for. If you have influencers or creators in the community, work with them to find out more about the player base. Make full usage of social and community listening to empathise with your player. Primitive working methods could be forums or discussion board too. Collect these data and construct something out of it, such as audience segmentation, and through this will you be able to know how targeted your community event needs to be.

The format of your event should align with both your purpose and your audience's preferences. From live-streamed tournaments and Q&A sessions with developers to in-game challenges and contests, selecting the right format is key to engagement. My approach involves mixing traditional formats with innovative ideas to keep the community excited and involved, ensuring that each event feels fresh and appealing.

With numerous platforms available for game placement, key players being Sony, Microsoft, and Nintendo, understanding the behavior of target audiences becomes crucial. Aligning your game with a specific market, considering the preferences of each platform's audience, can provide valuable guidance throughout the entire project, influencing decisions and strategies for the medium and long term.

This requires you to do research and understand your community's desires. Do they want a livestream? Do they prefer developers interaction? Do they enjoy discussion over Discord or Reddit or even TikTok? All these various formats are tagged with cost and resources, for each of these events you have to allocate sufficient budget to execute and more than enough to for any Murphy Law. Look back into your event plan, and carefully select the needed items that best cater to the kind of format the community prefer and strategize accordingly.

Effective promotion is essential to ensure your community is aware of and excited about your event. Utilizing social media, community forums, and in-game announcements has been a successful strategy for me. Crafting clear, enticing messages and leveraging community influencers can significantly boost your event's visibility and attendance.

Today, events can be conducted both online and offline, and Fortnite stands out as a prime example of community growth through event promotion. Publicizing and placing your events within the gaming community's radar can significantly elevate your project. However, caution is advised; promoting an event with an unfinished project could potentially result in negative marketing for your studio. Timing and ensuring a polished product are key considerations when leveraging events for promotion.

Advertising to provide visibility helps to increase the awareness of your activity but do not over do it to the point of annoyance. Social media such as X and Facebook are the common ones. If it is geared towards corporate promotion, consider LinkedIn. Discuss with your communications team on a concise message and the design team for eye-catching assets. Your aim is to capture the attention of people scrolling through digital forms within 3-5 seconds. If you have more resources, you can consider physical media, but it is costly in budget and effort. Last but not least, consider having creators helping on the advocacy too since they are often the heart of the community.

So, you want to promote your event. You got this AWESOME game too. Spent a good few months developing it. The first thing you're going to do is post about it! LinkedIn, Twitter(X), Instagram, Discord. You name it, You gotta post about it. Then! Tell all your close friends who also use those platforms to post/share your content too! Fun fact, a lot of these platforms also have designated communities where people LOOKING to play games will be more likely to check something out. Don't be afraid to message people along the way and while being respectful of their time ask if they'd be willing to offer feedback on it as well. Also, if you're posting about something, be sure to engage with other people's posts as well. ????

Active engagement during the event is what turns a good community event into a great one. Providing opportunities for real-time interaction, encouraging participation, and offering rewards or incentives keeps the audience involved and invested. In my events, incorporating interactive elements like polls, live chats, and giveaways has led to higher engagement and post-event satisfaction.

Engaging your audience is a challenging task that demands consistent efforts in introducing new elements to enhance your project's longevity. Having a dedicated team specializing in community and engagement is crucial. Such a team ensures that your project consistently stands out in the medium and long term, fostering sustained interest and participation from your audience.

Some of the ways we've engaged our passionate fan bases historically: Art contests Short-fiction contests Twitch live streams Polls Ticket/event giveaways If you're working with an existing IP, vs an original one, you have a much broader scope of what you can solicit - Warhammer 40000, for example, already has a wealth of lore, art, and passionate fans, so everyone already has an idea of what to expect out of contests asking for in-world contributions. Doing some of these in Quebec can be a little trickier than elsewhere due to provincial laws surrounding gaming/lotteries/contests/giveaways, but it's still doable.

Audiences love to feel seen. Whatever you can do to engage with them and feel a part of your game and your story, do it. Reward loyal fans with Badges, emojies, and digital assets, it doesn't have to be much. Engage them across platforms! Too often I see a focus on one platform where you are competing with too many others. Go where your audience is and where you can build a true connection.

Interaction with the players, converse with them and find out the things that excites them. Your goal here is to make the event not just fun but engaging to participants. Apart from incentivizing them, make sure they are part of the event as well, within the event you can think about activities that enables them to join you, such as mini game booths, cosplay contests if your game has aspects that player are interested in doing dress ups and even giveaways. Make them feel they are part of the event and make them feel they are important.

Post-event evaluation is crucial for understanding what worked and what didn't. Gathering participant feedback through surveys, monitoring social media reactions, and analyzing attendance and engagement metrics has allowed me to continuously improve future events. This reflective practice not only enhances the quality of community events but also shows the community that their input is valued and acted upon.

Conducting such retrospective provides a chance for you to look back and think about what went well, what went wrong and what can be improved in the future. Consolidate participants' feedback and observe carefully on the topics and discussions they are surfacing to you. Identify the things they love and look for the things they dislike and finally show appreciation regardless of the success of the event. You'll then want to pick these things as learning factors and incorporate it into a strategy that can be used in the future.

Community events are a great tool to communicate with your audience. Based on my own experience listing a few points # Define your end goal/objective # Clarity on target segments and audience # Decide on format - My personal recommendation is to go for Phygital (a combination of digital + Physical ) # Promotion of your event, well in advance # Format which includes entertainment | competition | fun | Participation | Rewards # Duration of event # key announcements like Partnerships | Product launch | Sponsorship | future roadmap with Proper PR # Monetizing in such events is also a good idea # Last but not least reach out to the wider audience by using digital tools like live streaming | Social media streaming | and app streaming

Don't under estimate the value of a good Community Manager for your project. I've seen some studios really phone this in, tasking someone on their team with the additional responsibilities of Community Management - honestly, this feels like a mistake to me, because it's often the case that CM is a much larger scope than a "wear many hats" situation can handle. Also, don't be afraid to approach passionate fans about Community Management/engagement roles. Some of the most successful Community Managers I've ever met and/or worked with were passionate fans given a chance to share that passion. You can teach most people how to use tools, but you can't fake passion - especially to other existing fans.

A good example is the community day of Pokémon GO. During these community days, one type of Pokémon will typically spawn in increases numbers with a higher chance of finding a rare variant with different colours (shiny). Additionally, evolving your Pokémon during the community day makes your Pokémon learn a special move. As it all happens within a set time frame, this means that a lot of players will encounter eachother (in real life). This increases their personal community via the community event!