Hi, I'm Victoria! Join my Community Dev Newsletter for insight into games marketing, social, and community management. Get actionable tips, a skill testing question, and a roundup of resources straight to your inbox every month.
Making social work as a team ✨ Community Dev Newsletter #28
Published 3 months ago • 10 min read
Community Dev Newsletter
Hello from Japan!
I'm currently out on holiday, but as we know, content waits for ✨no one.✨ Big welcome to our new subscribers too!! This is the Community Dev newsletter where we talk anything games community and marketing related. Usually actionable tips and tricks or insight from my brain or cool folks. And speaking of cool folks, this month features a very special crab friend's insights... so read on!
This month's newsletter dives into:
How you can work WITH your team to make good social content
New discussion question all about misunderstandings
I've long admired her humor and how extremely multi-talented she is. The Aggro Crab folks are some of my favs, and if you ever meet them, they're often bringing the good vibes and quick insight. Paige agreed to talk about something I've heard a lot of community managers struggle with: getting buy in from their teams when it comes to content creation, and clearing the mystery on how it works.
Working With Your Studio (And Not Against!)
Paige: HIIII thank you Victoria for inviting me!! I’m foaming at the mouth to talk about marketing our indie game for the past 3+ years. When I say ✨WE✨ I need to emphasize that!
Our marketing efforts could not have been done without the help from EVERY. SINGLE. MEMBER. OF. OUR. TEAM. I think a lot of devs have the impression that they can hire a Community Manager to make similar scaled content to what we’ve done all on their own. It’s not possible! I've almost never done it alone here. Community Managers are powerful, but you gotta help them out a little.
I've had people ask "how can I get my Community Manager to do what you do??" And I'll say sorry bro… but you also need to invest dev time for this scale of content… I’m taking you with me… It’s a team effort!
I made a thread on Twitter breaking down marketing beats that included our team efforts, but let me expand (yell about it more) here!
Balancing
For April Fools, we said we added a “Dark SoulsLike Mode” to our bright and colorful souls game. We got occasional comments in the past saying it’s too happy to be a soulslike game, so we thought ok FINE you want a dark soulslike?? You’ve aggro’d the crab. Let’s do it.
(Important context: I’ve been creating content for almost 10 years, so don't be discouraged if you take longer to do any of my listed tasks - it’s a learned skill!)
This took about 8-10 hours of work over the course of a week:
1-2 hours brainstorming and workshopping ideas with the team
5ish hours of me capturing footage, editing and recording VO
2ish hours of devs helping me add Anor Londo + Poison Swamp.
The MAIN secret behind it only taking this amount of time is… we already had about 80% of the assets in the game! No one REALLY needed to make anything new. The material, character mood, and costumes were already in the game - we just downloaded the Anor Londo 3D asset from an asset store.
But none of this would have been possible without the help from our team. I produced the video, edited, recorded and did the voice over, BUT our Studio Head Nick took time out of his day to put Anor Londo in and showed me how to add gunk into the level.
We often sit in calls where I share my screen and our devs try to tell me where the buttons are in the project to make it all work - it often turns into the scene in Spongebob where he’s like “The Lid. No the lid-the PATRICK THE LID- NO. THE. LID-”.
The time used by our devs to help me is an investment our team knows is worth it, because it upped the quality of our marketing beat by a landslide.
Ideas like this don't come from one person. Everyone’s input provides new and refreshing ideas that I alone couldn’t think of - and I LOVE IT. It saves me from psychic damage over time. (Okay it’s too late for that).
Getting Buy In
I will say I’m very lucky with how “unprofessional” our studio can be with our audience. So my advice when approaching your dev team who might not want or be able to invest as much of their own time into marketing and content, is to try a couple ideas:
EFFICIENCY!! I WILL BUG YOU LESS IF YOU DO THIS!! Dev debug tools will save both the CM and devs time. Our programmer Storm let me know early on that they can create dev tools if I asked for it, allowing me to unlock abilities or obtain all costumes easily. I didn’t have to spend time trying to find the asset in Unity, and the devs didn’t have to spend time on a call grabbing the asset and answering my 5 million questions. It’s a win-win! Yes, it still takes a moment of the devs time, but it pays off instantly and over time.
Show them the NUMBERS‼️ I find showing the team the numbers from other social posts are a great way to “prove” or provide evidence that investing this dev time is worth it. It’s hard to say something isn’t worth it when the statistics are there! If you need some examples to jingle in front of your team, I’ve collected a few:
The “I broke into the game and changed something hehe”: Makes the community feel they are in on a secret, even though all I did (or a dev could) was change the color of the lobster to blue (700k Views).
The “Dev Team Reports Patch Update”: Markets the games features, the direct report from the devs makes the audience feel trusting in the updates (1M Views).
I think the main point to get across is that it's all about experimentation, and investing time on this form of content will help you find your voice!
Coordinating Ideas
Most of the time, they’re usually very informal ideas we have just spitballed in our team slack and going “haha ok but how long would it take for us to actually do this.” There’s a lot of ideas that we’ve scrapped due to the team being locked in for more important deadlines. It’s a balance!
Jobo (https://x.com/jobofish), our producer on the daily
Additions like costumes and assets were more likely to be added, as it usually just landed on our Artists tasklist and one other person to implement it if they were both available.
The gun mode was a slow development over a few months. It originally was just a joke, with no intention of adding it to the game.
It developed into “what if there is one gun you can find in the game somewhere and it one hits EVERYTHING”. Another month or so later, we came to the conclusion that it would make a great assist option. Accessibility advocates LOVED the idea and it came to a very wholesome end. Sometimes these ideas just develop as we cook over time, because that’s the environment we created!
Splitting Time
I really wish I could say I have an organized and strict schedule of when I create content compared to all my other community work - but I’m sure as a lot of you know, CM work is like a rollercoaster of weekly tasks where we’re all screaming.
If I was to lay it all out, it’d roughly be about 60% content marketing, 40% everything else. BUT this is because our studio prioritizes content marketing. I think there’s a blurry line between the two with the ever growing evolution to social media and marketing strategies too. My other tasks include trailer production, player support, and all the other community marketing tasks that fall on us!
I personally aim for us to have one or two big marketing/content beats a month. My definition of “big marketing beat” are our collaborative pieces that also take more than a day to make. This can range from something like a trailer announcement to a silly joke we got really invested in.
A good example is when we made an outtake video for Michael Reeves acting as Firth. Our animator Matt animated and co-ordinated the scene for me. Sure, I could have tried to make something similar alone, but it wouldn't have been as nice and likely would have taken way longer. Matt invested his time to assist in content creation and it looks SO GOOD. It took about 2-3 days total.
Learning
They had to teach me a LOT. I also constantly forget a LOT. That’s totally okay! Since I already know the basics of moving around a project, most of my time with the team was for more specific tasks.
(pictured: me, all the time)
I would hit up a team member and let them know what I needed help with in editor - then we’d just have a call within the same day when we both had a moment to spare! Most calls where I needed assistance would only take about 5-15 minutes.
Top Tip: With your team's permission, record your calls so you can check back in case you forget a few steps in their tutorial!
The basics I recommend Community Managers learn for project editors (if interested) are:
Importing assets into scenes
Navigating scenes and project files
Adjusting asset settings (eg. adjusting enemy health or movement speed)
I recommend watching a few beginner tutorials (on company time) just so you know your way around! It’s never too late to learn. It helps that we all love helping each other.
I understand for some, the time investment is not possible to collaborate as much as we at Aggro Crab do. But starting small, collaborating with your team and explaining how letting a Community Manager run a little rabid can be incredibly worth it.
It's also important to acknowledge that all Community Managers skills and strategies vary - some community managers might work totally different to how I do and what we prioritize! We all have different skill sets and strategies, and that’s what makes community marketing so exciting!
As much as I rant and rave about how all of this work couldn't be done without our entire team's effort, this is not to discredit my own work either! I know I've also worked my butt off on this project, but having the support from others too can co-exist. We're a team, and they're the best. They're what makes our brand what it is 💖
I could go on and on, but I’m just so proud of our team. Everyone worked so hard on Another Crab’s Treasure, and our brand wouldn’t be the same with every single one of them. Thank you for reading, stay crabby. Or else.
Community Activity 📝
Every month we do a skill testing exercise or discussion question together.
The question:
What do you feel studios misunderstand the most about working with community managers?
Feel free to email me back with your answer - I always respond to them. Normally my answer would be in the next newsletter, but for next month I'm giving myself a bit of a break from answering since I'm trying to actually focus on my vacation this month haha. But the activity persists!
Last week's activity:
Think of the 3Es you just learned! (Enticing, Engaging, Entertaining.) Similar to Cindy's A/B/C Testing Exercise for “The Baked Croissant-icles”, create your own A/B/C content ideas using each of the 3Es for your own game. Or if you don't have one, pick your favorite game!
If you missed last week's newsletter, we learned how to optimize our social media stragy using the 3E method. Let's try it! I'm going to be using Among Us as my little activity, of course.
ENTICING | Birthday Patch – ≤1 minute video showing off the most exciting parts of our birthday patch, first about the free limited time cosmetic drop, and then doing a fun little "tour" of the decorated map of The Skeld.
ENGAGING | What's your Among Us OC? – ≥30 second video of asking the audience what their favorite cosmetics combos are, and showing off some of the team's classic outfits.
ENTERTAINING | Among Us Survivability Rates – ≤30 second video joking about how poorly an Among Us Crewmate would survive in the wild with real game facts (e.g. that the beans are a mere 3'6") meshed with weird scenarioes (e.g. they would be eaten by a tiger, probably.)
I always love doing little brain exercises like this because it makes me think of my content and if I'm actually doing something that is of value to the players in some way!
Community Chatter 💬
Here are the interesting and helpful things I've seen this past month.
TikTok released it's report on how compelling content drives business results. In a nutshell, it speaks about the value of creating empathetic content (which aligns with needs and values), resonance (relatable storytelling), and diverse content types.
That's all for now! It's currently midnight in Kyoto as I'm finishing this up so I'm off to bed to sleeeeeeeeeeep. I've bought so much cute stuff (particulary of Snoopy...) and I'm proud to say I managed to fit everything into my suitcase heheheh.
Success through shenanigans with community management.
Hi, I'm Victoria! Join my Community Dev Newsletter for insight into games marketing, social, and community management. Get actionable tips, a skill testing question, and a roundup of resources straight to your inbox every month.
