In our video series Conversations, we ask developers and industry experts for their insights into the world of gaming. At this year’s Gamescom, games guru Christopher Bergstresser was very generous in giving up his time to speak with Audiencly’s Angelo Simon about a whole range of subjects.
In this part, Chris talks about positioning a game to drive UA by really understanding player communities.
As games cross genres and potential audiences get trickier to identify, an important stage is to find the audience that’s going to love your exact game.
“It’s always going to be cutting through the noise, right?” says Chris. “But I think it’s really about taking time, with the right kind of team, to think about how you’re positioning your game. It is about being very deliberate and understanding where these communities are, where there are overlapping.”
He points out that even a hardcore roll play game (RPG) user will play other games given the incentive. He cites the example of mobile game Empires and Puzzles from Helsinki developer Small Giants. This is a combination of RPG, world-builder and a match-three game.
“I would say, early on, Small Giants started looking at some of these [RPG] communities,” Chris explains, “and they found that some of these people like blended genres also. They’re still hardcore about RPGs but they’re able to blend city building with RPGs.”
But, he says, it is important to understand what about your game clicks with users. At its core, Empires and Puzzles is a match three. “The way they did the match three played right into [RPG players] love of how you have to think about your battle sequences… this kind of thing is more powerful against this or less powerful against that.”
Another example is the idle games launched on Kongregate. “You would never think in a million years that hardcore gamers would like these kinds of idle games. But when they launched, Kongregate saw them just skyrocket. And they couldn’t figure it out and they thought they were getting in a bunch of casual gamers. But no, it was all the hardcore gamers.”
You really do need to understand what communities are discussing, the kind of content they’re sharing.
“You’d be surprised how there are these strange overlaps,” Chris says. But once you have that understanding he says, “that’ll lead you down another path to look at what your secondary and tertiary targets are.”