EIA 2015 Empowering Communities
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Catherine Seys – Ubisoft Strategic Innovation Lab, Ubisoft Anne Blondel – Game as a Service & Free To Play Live Operations Director, Ubisoft
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EIA 2015 Empowering Communities
- 1. EMPOWERING Taking players’ engagement to the next level
- 3. CONSUM ER
- 28. BACK TO THE ROOTS THE TDU COMMUNITY
- 29. AMBASSA CREATE
- 30. TEST &
Editor's Notes
- Good afternoon everyone, The theme of today is consumer engagement, and I am going to talk to you about how Ubisoft empowers communities to take players’ engagement to the next level.
- First, what is at stake with consumer engagement? Well, it is such a trendy topic these days, in all industries, because of what we could call peer power: disintermediation, social and mobile technologies are some of the key words here.
- Consumers like you and me have grown used to traditional Marketing techniques, and these are starting to lose their impact. We are empowered now by social and mobile technologies, which in some cases allow us to skip traditional distribution channels. This is the ground on which great successes like AirBnB or Kickstarter were built, fostering the ability of their consumers to switch and compare.
- This is why a lot of companies are trying new and innovative ways to engage with their consumers, to connect with them. For instance, this funny campaign idea for Meat Pack in Guatemala: Meat Pack is a sports shoes retailers, and they used geolocalisation in their campaign to organise kind of reverse bids: they first identified where were the competitors around their shop, then they would identify when a potential customer was about to enter in a shop from the competition, and would then send them personalised text messages offering a 99% discount in the Meat Pack shop. And on top of that: the discount would vanish of 1% at each second, so the customers had to run the the Meat Pack shop in order to get the higher rate.
- Or, in a very different sector, this very useful Australian app which changes the house hunting experience: you walk in the street and see a house for sale. Just take a picture to get prices and taxes, and connect with your own financial data in order to let you know instantly whether you can be pre-approved for a mortgage, and for what amount. These are but a few examples illustrating how the balance of power is changing between companies and consumers.
- Now you might wonder why consumer engagement is important at Ubisoft, since we all know what engaging experiences video games can be, and how they create dedicated fans. Sure, they do. But our industry has also been changing a lot during the past few years, and we are facing some new challenges: The first one, concerning mainly our premium segment, our AAA games, is what we call the “blockbusterisation” phenomena, which means that gamers tend to spend their gaming time on fewer games than before, so instead of buying 25 games a year, they tend to buy only 15 even though they spend the same total amount of time playing. The second challenge that we face is the fast growing web and mobile gaming segment, which brings many new gamers to the market but also a lot of new competitors and offers. So you can imagine that our players’ retention and loyalty, to our franchises and to our corporate brand, are very important to us.
- So, given all this, how do we actually foster players’ engagement at Ubisoft and deserve their loyalty? Well, of course, our primary focus is the content that we create for them: we constantly try to improve our contents, to make our players feel deep and memorable emotions: this is our core business, and it also means that we try to understand our gamers’ needs in great depth, to embrace them in a 360 perspective in particular by leveraging data, as it has been already explained to in the previous presentation. And, as you saw in our introductory video, we also take the opinions of our communities of fans, be they positive or negative, very seriously. This is what I want to talk to you about in more detail now.
- First, what is a community? Community usually refers to a social unit that shares common values. It is a group in which members are helping each other, and, very importantly, in which members are conscious of being part of: one needs to acknowledge that he / she belongs to a community to be an actual member; and the community needs that its members acknowledge their belonging to it to exist. So, a community is made of a shared interest, some infrastructure, physical or virtual, so that its members can gather together, and protocols or norms to rule the members’ relationships. Video games are diverse in nature and genre and a lot of communities have naturally emerged around them that reflect this. These communities have various levels of engagement.
- First, what is a community? Community usually refers to a social unit that shares common values. It is a group in which members are helping each other, and, very importantly, in which members are conscious of being part of: one needs to acknowledge that he / she belongs to a community to be an actual member; and the community needs that its members acknowledge their belonging to it to exist. So, a community is made of a shared interest, some infrastructure, physical or virtual, so that its members can gather together, and protocols or norms to rule the members’ relationships. Video games are diverse in nature and genre and a lot of communities have naturally emerged around them that reflect this. These communities have various levels of engagement.
- One way to categorize communities is by using classical organization management theories, looking at them following their internal strengths and their openness to the outside. This gives us 4 main types of communities.
- First, the mechanical communities, with a rather low level of internal engagement and a low openness to the outside. A typical example of such an organization outside the video game industry is often said to be the armies, because of their very clear chain of command which is very useful in case of a crisis. In our industry, we could put in this category the communities gathered around Facebook games, because players interactions are mechanically defined by the gameplay;
- Second, what we could call the individualist communities, because they are more attracted by the outside that bonded together by their inner strength. For instance, most of sales forces in consumer goods industry can be considered as individualist organizations, and I think we could include here shooters players communities, because they tend to be naturally very competitive, but also tend to form a community of players with specific behaviors and expectations in terms of gameplay.
- Third, the communities with a very intense inner strength can be referred to as tribal communities. May be the Apple fans could be considered as such, and in our industry, World of WarCraft is an archetypal example,
- And at last, the “auto organized” communities, which offer a balance between a strong engagement and a great openness: Airbnb community might be a good example of this category, and in the video game sector we could mention a game : its community was built around the initial game and for 10 years now players have been creating their content, sharing it, testing it, translating it, etc. they do not need the publisher anymore and are autonomous.
- Of course, these various types of communities may lead to various community management style, if I were to go on with the parallel with management science, but more importantly they allow us to go deeper into the qualitative knowledge we can have about our players communities and their expectations.
- Then, going one more step inside the communities, it is important also to keep in mind that all communities’ members are not equal: they have various stories, profiles, and expectations from the community, and thus they play various roles, and we as a developer and as community managers have to understand their specific needs. For instance, community novices need immediate feedback when they contribute, both to reassure them on the fact that they posted something of interest, and because they need to see immediately the influence they have on the community – unless, the risk is that they will quit the group; and leaders’ need of influence are key to be listened to: they must not be ignored. They generally are less interested in creating content for the community than in having impact on the governance, policies, and day-to-day practices.
- I just gave you some insight on how we analyse communities at Ubisoft and how we try to adjust to our communities members needs, but then, how do we empower them to grow our players retention and increase loyalty? Well, we try to benefit from our fans all along the classical consumer decision journey: before the game experience, we tend to leverage viral marketing mechanisms to foster awareness and purchase decision, and of course this can be very powerful because players very often want to play with their friends, so they will naturally help us to market our games to their friends – in our industry, more than half of players first hear about a game through friends and family, so viral mechanisms are quite important during the game experience itself we foster social sharing through competitive mechanisms for instance, reinforced by ladder boards or rankings, also by using Twitch for live streaming, etc. and after the game experience we tend to pursue the discussion with our players on our forums, and through our consumer service experts – and we create special relationships with our greatest fans, by inviting them at E3 for instance, the annual video game show in Los Angeles, by inviting them to be the first to discover our new games at our VIP lounge, etc. And of course, this intends to create a loop, where our fans become our best advocates and help us again from the beginning at the next release.
- On top of empowering our communities all along the player’s decision journey, we also tend to leverage their passion to adjust and even create the very content of our games: we invite fans and expert guilds to test our games in close and open betas so that they can give us feedback, for some games, we even create before the betas what we call a shadow council: for instance, on Heroes 7, we have a group of 30.000 thirty thousand fans with which we engage on a regular basis during the creation process itself and players’ creation is also sometimes at the core of the gaming experience when the game is live, like in Trackmania for instance where players create their own track on which they want to compete.
- So to wrap up briefly, empowering communities requires to know in detail what are our players communities, and what roles their members are playing inside them, to be able to listen to them and to understand their needs, so that we can engage with them long lasting relationships. We need to think first about what to give to our communities, and they in return will also help us to take our players’ engagement to the next level. And on top of a good understanding of communities’ mechanisms, this also requires to switch from a gameplay centric design approach to a player centric design approach, and this makes me the perfect transition to introduce Anne to you, as she has been among many other responsibilities at Ubisoft, the executive producer of The Crew, and she will be able to explain you with more detailed examples how she managed to face this challenge with her team.
- So to wrap up briefly, empowering communities requires to know in detail what are our players communities, and what roles their members are playing inside them, to be able to listen to them and to understand their needs, so that we can engage with them long lasting relationships. We need to think first about what to give to our communities, and they in return will also help us to take our players’ engagement to the next level. And on top of a good understanding of communities’ mechanisms, this also requires to switch from a gameplay centric design approach to a player centric design approach, and this makes me the perfect transition to introduce Anne to you, as she has been among many other responsibilities at Ubisoft, the executive producer of The Crew, and she will be able to explain you with more detailed examples how she managed to face this challenge with her team.
- Thank you Catherine and good afternoon everyone. I'm here to share with you how my team and I, along with our internal partners in marketing and business teams, we empowered various communities to take gamers engagement to the next level. Before doing so, let me show you a short video about THE CREW
- This game is all about allowing gamers from all over the world to drive around the USA in what we now call a MMO CARPG. So leveraging communities might sound like a no brainer to you But let me take back on a journey lasting 18 months that ended with the community becoming the strongest feature of the game.
- It all started in February 14 when I was asked by Ubisoft Top Management to join forces with the dev team of Ivory Tower as Executive Producer on the game to help them ship it on time for Xmas 2014. This wasn’t just any team as they had already shipped a quite successful racing game (TDU)... 10 years ago!
- but THE CREW had been in dev for 5 years already and for various reasons everybody was starting to lose faith in its potential. Marketing and sales teams were worried as many other competitor games were to be released before or at the same time (the game was so late compared to the former release planning). And the dev team felt that development would never end. So here I was in charge of shipping a game that everybody was doubting and I had 2 weeks to present the Ubisoft CEO with a marketing plan the dev team would have previously bought in
- The first thing first I decided was to come back to the roots of the project : a 100 talented dev people had spent 5 years of their lives building it and Ubisoft had spent a lot of money financing it... there must have been a reason for this... and guess what it was quite easy for me to find it right away : playing the game and spending 3 hours with the Game Director who s the vision stakeholder was enough to convince me THE CREW was a fantastic game which deserved to succeed. the only question left for me was how do I personally convince all of those people who've been working on it for so long and obviously know it better than I do that it was true and that they needed to trust its potential again.
- again I came back to the game vision roots : it was to be a service oriented community powered racing game so let it be that way and align not only the game design but also the marketing, pr and sales tactics around this vision. This is how I decided gamers would become the center of everything we do from now on (we were at the end of February) till the launch and that if they liked what we were doing they would be much more powerful than myself to prove to everyone else the tremendous potential of the game. so on one hand I had a fantastic game delivering a community experience and on the other hand I did not have (yet) a community to leverage and experience it
- remember I told you IT had alredy developed a racing game 10 years ago? well I decided we would contact those who were the most active by then and the ones who were still active. Our Community Developer digged into every single TDU forums, fb pages, twitter accounts of racing games fans and extracted 10 of them from all over the world. We invited them asap to the studio in France to show them the game in its current dev state (not even alpha) and get their feedback. They spent a week or so with the dev team asking them tons of questions, being asked tons of questions, suggesting tremendous ideas for us to go to the next level with a larger community. it was a tremendous help both on the dev team morale (what? you're really telling me you like my WIP game so much already?) and on the community feedback construction : those guys became our privileged ambassadors. It was not a question of money, it was a question of mutual trust and respect.
- stronger thanks to their feedback, we pushed the community envelope further by putting in place an ww event (still at alpha stage) in 8 internet cafes so that they can organize a racing contest with players in their cafes + against each other. It lasted a month and it was a tremendous success locally and also within the racing community. More than 60 K speactators linked into our twich program the first night we announced the competition. so there we were : a fantastic game, vibrant dedicated ambassadors, a first competition showing how much we trust the quality of our game + how true we were and would keep to our promise of being there for the community
- it was time for us to test the game at beta stage in real playing conditions. At the e3 conference, we took a deep breath and we announced the opening of our very first closed beta on pc. In less than 2 hours we reached the amazing number of a quarter of a millions of people who wanted to join and play the game. We did so in July then again in August. The quality of the feedback was so impactful on the game that we decided to go for 2 more on consoles this time. We made quite a lof of changes not only technical (the basic reasons of why we do a closed beta in the first place) but also game play wise (our ai was too strong in the beginning) and even marketing wise (we realized that the promise of cruising the USA with no constraints whatsoever was even more appealing than we thought in the first place). It has also given us the opportunity to increase our pre order numbers which led to very strong confidence in the game potential both from retailers but also from our internal partners from marketing and business. finally, we were back on everybody's radar thanks to the community dedication
- then came december, time for release... time of my life I have to say, time of the dev team’s life also I know for a fact. Our servers were immediatly flooded with happy players praising the game they had seen growing in front of their eyes for 10 months now - even participating in its development for the most active of them... And this is when the story becomes a fairy tale... as a matter of fact traditonnal journalists who did not have the opportunity to play the game on a community level despised the game, the rankings they gave the game were awful (below 70%) but while those rankings should have meant the end of the sales for a traditional game the fact that players had experienced it thouroughly helped as they took the stand in front all of the journalists telling the communities that they should trust them those who had played the game and love it so much already rather than the journalists... and it worked, it's been the best selling racing game ip last year and still is this year. being able to empower the communities so early and so transparently tremendously changed our relationship with our customers and therefore our way of developing and also doing business.
- - on the dev team front, it was not anymore about game designers delivering their own perspective on what the game should be. it was them listening to the players feedback to make the experience even better - on the business front, knowing the players so well, what they like, what they look for, what they enjoy helped us tailor a much more adaptative addtionnal revenues approach which did not lead to any backlash as players realized the extra items we were selling them were not pay to win, nor paying walls but were really bringing something extra to their own specific experience - on the community front, it has become a matter of giving the tools and instruments to the players / the communities so that they can make the game their games and not ours anymore
- since we released last December, the game is still in the top 10 sellling charts ww, we have doubled our forecasts reaching mid June 3 million players with a steady 250K DAU having generated more money via in game transactions compared to full game sales. It has not been a peaceful journey to say the least, being so close to the players is tough as they speak their mind all the time whether they like what you do or not (which means in the end that they do care) and trying to do so within a company which is so talented / successful with other development / marketing and sales approach. But having been in the industry for the past 20 years and having launched other very successful games and brands such as BROTHERS IN ARMS and FAR CRY, I can tell you this has been the most exciting and rewarding way of doing my job.
- So if I might summarize this story with a little piece of advice for the project you're about to go back to, make sure to ask yourself about what you're offering to the community so that they see enough value into it to make it their own and become your best developer / marketer / sales person / you name it. Leveraging communities is not about trying to Find out what communities can do for you, it is about what you can do for the communities by empowering them as much as you can.