Your silent audience and your community are very different groups that require their own approach and considerations. How they interact with the game, how they are communicated to, and what they get out of the game/studio's community-building efforts are going to differ.

Then there's the target audience which too often is used as something Community Managers are measured against, and yet just as often these lists of Player Personae and target demographics are old, static things that never get updated.

Target audience isn't even a group, but it's relevant for later examples. They are an early-stage planning tool to start building when you have nothing else, but it should not become your be-all-end-all for the rest of time. We build the desired Player Persona, sometimes 3-4 of them with some broad nuances between each, and we define how to market the game around those profiles, and then build a community strategy around it.

Now what!?

Preface​

There are so many, many layers to this topic so for now I'm going to touch on the surface level. First we need to have an established nomenclature for this article. For simplicity's sake, the following will be how I speak about the groups:

For my fellow Community Managers out there, you will know that audience and community is often used interchangeably. I will try to be strict in using the above table and its nomenclature to avoid confusion!

Audience vs. Community​

These are the two that are important to focus on because they're the people that actually showed up. When the initial marketing happens (announcement, trailer release, news) and your game is out there, the community will start to congregate. You want to start having a place for them to congregate as soon as a project is announced.

I like to refer to this act as "showing up" like in any social setting, and I think that it's the best way to view these groups. How have they shown up? Why?

Your community—the engaged people—are here to form connections and be part of something. Even if it's for a brief time, they intend to form a connection with you, your game, studio, or other like-minds. While this group is often split into sub-groups, we're not going to do that here today.

Why Mention Target Audience, Then?​

Well, this one is tricky. I may ruffle a couple of feathers, but please hear me out.

It isn't super useful for Community Management. WAIT. Waaaait. Wait. Listen! I get it, we paid a lot for this research and it informed the early design and marketing of the game. I'm not saying that it was useless. I'm saying that it's not much good for Community Management, because ours is the job of serving those who showed up! It's a starting point.

User Research and building your Player Personae is part of a picture formed from targeting broad demographic groupings. That's the idea of them, to give you an approximate foundation to build from. That foundation is based on wants, hopes, general interest data, and overlaps. Heck, sometimes even spending behavior, but I really don't like those.

Is it useless? No. Is it reliable? Yes, when you are intentional in your research. Is it the sole source of truth? Heck no.

It is useful, but it is not based on your audience. Its accuracy and validity will change when your audience and community starts to show up. The target audience research allows you to start building a plan when you have nothing else.

The mistake I've seen some studios make with this kind of data is that it doesn't just inform the initial development and marketing phases. Some places I've worked continued to use it unchanged, and it informs continued marketing/development even after a community has shown up. Unless you've been really good at distilling the core pillars of your game, the research you did is going to differ from the people you ended up attracting.

So We Change Everything?​

No. This is where my words become vague, because there isn't a single solution. There are layers to what should be done that will depend on your specific goals.

Joakim Achrén (Co-Founder of Next Games) talked on this topic regarding his first studio IronStar Helsinki and their game MoiPal. Joakim writes the following in this article back in 2022:

The theme and the style skewed it towards pre-teens. You’d look at it, and it looked like Habbo Hotel or Club Penguin. The failure was not to build for the audience that showed up and stayed. Even when we knew it was a young audience playing the game, socializing in the in-game chats and forums, we didn’t change our assumptions about who we wanted to target and their player needs.

Lesson from failure: not reading the signals of who is retained, staying, and playing. We kept making the game for a mature audience who didn’t want our game. In the midst of it all, I didn’t look at what people wanted to do in online games in the mid-2000s. Maple Story was a massive hit in Korea, but I didn’t try it out and didn’t try to learn from games that felt uncomfortable to pick up.

If we work on the assumption that our Player Persona research is our source of truth even while the actual data is showing you otherwise, it's going to make all of this more difficult. We're going to be creating a game for people that have not shown up, while those who did will feel like they're not being served; not being respected for their valuable time and investment in your game (there's another article you can read in the credits about that).

Everyone loses.

Changing Course Isn't All-Or-Nothing​

Back in 2016, Yakuza's director Toshihiro Nagoshi talked about how 20% of the players for their series was female; a gradual increase across the iterations of the game.

While that is something to be happy for, Yakuza is something that is made for male players, so we will be careful not to be too conscious of the female users and derail from what we want to make. Lately, there’s been a lot more players from Asia as well. That means we need to appeal more to Asia, but not focus too much on that, too.

—Translated from Famitsu by SiliconEra

This is a sensible take. Celebrate that the game is reaching wider audiences than intended. Build with care and attention, keeping to the core of what the game is while being mindful that these demographics are showing up and taking interest. There's a difference between appealing to and making for. The Yakuza team knew who was consistently showing up over the course of the franchise (at least back then), so they're the primary audience. You can cater to different demographic without completely changing course. People came for the game that was given to them, and as long as time is taken to understand who those people are, it's much easier to keep building for them.

Verify The Feedback​

Now we get onto the part of what Community Management brings to this equation. They are the first filter. Feedback comes from a whole range of sources, from people who interact with your game in different ways. There is a lot of information, much of it articulated without the game design/development vocabulary required to explain the root cause of the friction. It is why a good CM will be a huge asset to your team. They are the interpreters of player feedback into actionable, developer language; then translate the developer language back to the players.

A common one, and something that a good designer friend of mine tackled on one of his previous games was related to economy. In a game that was set up like a MMORPG, different types of currency exists for different parts of the itemization and progression loop. Players had felt, and complained often, that it was unbalanced. The economy was "broken" and needed fixing.

At the same time, my designer friend's Lead was taking the issue at face value. Fix the economy. Rebalance it. That's what people were asking for, so give it to them.

What the CM on the project did was ask questions of the community, needling for more context to get to the heart of the issue. The issue went deeper, but vocabulary was doing a disservice to the players. They did not know how to give the correct context to the design teams, so the problem sat in confusion or dismissive hand-waving for a while. The CM needling for information and context, and my friend being a data-driven designer meant that the solution wasn't as simple as "economy bad". Rather, it was a combination of unsatisfying itemization mixed with a lack of meaningful things to use rewards on... which makes them less like rewards and more like junk that you just put to one side and forgot about.

These investigations may turn up nothing new, but due diligence will mean you're sure. Sometimes you will disappoint players with actions or inaction, but sitting in the belief that your players "know nothing" or that they just need to "get good" is a disservice to them and to your craft. The CM's role is to make sure you're equipped with that feedback and dig for more context to make the best possible decision, while it is your (the development team's) role to find the root cause to resolve.

You succeed by making something your audience wants to play and continues to play. You don't do that by dismissing feedback as entitled, assuming the work is infallible, or not taking the time to go deeper on a discussion to find out what is actually at play. Community Management folks should be there to do that for you. We're here to make sure everyone understands what matters most to the people that are engaged in what we do.

If we're not building games for the people that invest their valuable and limited time, money, and passions… who are we making it for?

So Players Are Entitled?​

No. Stop that, you gremlin.

Go read Bex's article (below) for more on that topic.

Credits & Acknowledgements​

Want to dig deeper into players' time investment and "entitlement"? My article is inspired by and, in a small way, a supporting piece to Bex who wrote You're Right, Gamers Are Entitled. Read it on LinkedIn or bexsayswords.substack