Developer Perspectives: Making Fansites More Awesome
In this week's column, Sanya Weathers hands out tips to potential fansite operators on how to get noticed within the industry.
Column By Sanya Weathers on August 14, 2009
I was talking with one of my favorite people the other day. She runs a pretty well known MMO site, with commentary, reviews, guides, maps, humor, and more. But it's not MMORPG.com, or Ten Ton Hammer, or IGN - sites that are big enough to count as "sort of media" as opposed to fan media. I say sort of media because even powerful websites with millions of readers still wind up holding a bag of wind if someone inside the dev studio gets attention from a - gasp - print magazine.
Lest you think I'm kidding, I briefly wrote for a print magazine that never even got half of its issues to the printer, let alone sold. Somehow, I got my emails and calls returned from every studio with same day service if I was reaching out on behalf of the magazine.
Writing for the web, I only get that kind of love from a very few PR teams. Does that matter when I'm reviewing a game? No. Does it matter when I'm choosing my words during news announcements? No. Am I going to do things like edit unflattering screenshots and offer interview blooper do-overs when I'm talking to the PR people who treat web writers with decency? Hell, yes.
Anyway, back to my friend. She's not automatically on the development team's mailing list when it comes to invitations, press events, previews, or swag.
Two reasons for that. One, MMO studios are insufficiently visionary, and two, because she doesn't want to push. She's by no means alone. For every fan site that hits it big and becomes too big to ignore, there are dozens of sites adding tremendous value to the games they support and doing it without recognition. To take a fan/amateur site to the next level, there needs to be more and better collaboration between studios and players.
What does the studio have to do?
Answer emails.
I know, crazy, right?
Okay, to be a little more clear: Someone needs to be responsible for interacting with fansites. That person needs to have a key to the swag closet, the ability to designate a player's account as a press account, and the authority to answer simple questions without first getting permission from fifty people in legal, marketing, and production. If this person can also be involved in development to the extent that they have a clue, great, but just being responsive is a good start.
There are lots of other things the studio can do, such as integrating fansites into the overall media strategy, planning local events, doing outreach, and working with fansites to create web content that reinforces the game. But it all starts with one person owning the contact with fan and amateur sites.
These days, almost every MMO has someone assigned to be That Guy for the fan media people. That Guy has a short list of things he needs from fansites, blogs, and up and coming websites in order for them to be taken seriously.
What do the fansites/blogs need to do?
If all you want is a pat on the back, the studio should be handing out that kind of love in wheelbarrows. It's FREE, for heaven's sake. Any studio who fails to acknowledge that you're alive doesn't deserve you. Unless you're doing it for love, or unless you have a definite plan to bring in enough readers that you can make money from either a product, your content, or ads, screw any studio that doesn't say thanks once a year. The minute you fall out of love or out of money, quit.
But if you want to be treated as a valuable partner, there are a couple of things to do:
Know Thy Readers. Want to sell ads? Want to sell yourself as an asset to the developers? You need to know your reader demographics. Age, gender, marital status, income level, average length of visit, and number of internal clicks a visit.
How many readers you have does count, don't get me wrong, but it's not everything - especially if your readers are a niche that's difficult to capture.
Side note: No offense, average single male gamers between 18 and 34, but you people are easy lays as marketing efforts go. The stuff you do for mere t-shirts is embarrassing. And visually, you're cheap. If it's got boobs or guns on it, you'll give it a try. But you're fickle. You're not ready to settle down. And that's okay. You're just not long term relationship material yet. Call us when you have a job. And incidentally, you should vary your play style while you're still young. If you get too used to death grip style gaming, you really do become unable to fully appreciate more subtle variations.
Fansite editors, bloggers, if you don't have millions of readers, find out what you do have. Do your readers skew heavily female? That's a tough group to reach with traditional marketing efforts. Are your readers older? Older almost always means more money and fewer ways to waste time on weekends thanks to family and work commitments. Do you have a following among guild leaders - people who influence the MMO buying decisions of hundreds of other people? You see what I'm saying - you may have a niche that is incredibly valuable to a studio trying to grow their numbers after their first wave of hype has come and gone.
Once you get this data together, communicate it to the studio. I don't know why people forget that part, but there it is.
If You Don't Ask, You Don't Get. It is not the developer's job to reach out to you with story ideas, interview requests, contest promotion, or other kinds of content. That's your job.
Oh, and hint - everyone wants an interview with Mr. Flashy Pants. Be creative. Ask who the oldest guy at the company is and ask if you can interview him. The oldest guy at the company did Infocom games, or coded one of the first MUDDs, or wrote some of the original D&D modules. He is a damn sight more interesting than the darling of the E3 press tour, and because no one realizes he exists, your article will be reprinted everywhere.
Reach Out. One of my all time favorite MMO blogs is Kill Ten Rats. They always have great perspectives and interesting writing. They've got a passion for the genre, and the writers are experienced without being too cynical. (And I know from cynical, from my dirty mind to my blackened heart.) If you look up "MMO influencer" in the dictionary, there's a picture of the KTR masthead. One of the guys, Zach (AKA Ravious), is doing a survey right now asking what studios want and need from bloggers. (If you work for a studio as a community weenie and didn't get his email, consider asking him for it.) Basically, KTR is doing one of the things I wish more sites would: If you don't know what a studio wants... ASK.
Take It Seriously. Update regularly. Identify your target audience and serve it. Make sure that you're building something you're proud of, for a game you're proud to play. Make a plan. Keep contact lists. Don't shy away from asking real questions, but don't get confrontational or insulting in your interviews just because a couple of your regular trolls think anything less than a pronging with a cattle prod is asskissing. In other words, don't act small time unless you're content to be small time.
In short: Unless the studio has a budget for television ads and saturation coverage in every major daily and weekly, and unless the fansite is being run by someone who made a killing back in the early days of internet advertising, both sides need each other. It's a relationship, not a war, and the savvy players have already caught on.
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Bravo on an excellent article. Thank you for a good read.
"Side note: No offense, average single male gamers between 18 and 34, but you people are easy lays as marketing efforts go. The stuff you do for mere t-shirts is embarrassing. And visually, you're cheap. If it's got boobs or guns on it, you'll give it a try. But you're fickle. You're not ready to settle down. And that's okay. You're just not long term relationship material yet. Call us when you have a job. And incidentally, you should vary your play style while you're still young. If you get too used to death grip style gaming, you really do become unable to fully appreciate more subtle variations. "
i'm a 21 year old male and i don't fit this stereotype. besides, its relation to the article was tangential at best. if you want to go on a sexist rant, do it in another article. i enjoyed this one and it would have been way better without this cliché bullshit paragraph. that aside, good stuff.
Marketing is all stereotypes, man. You think this is only her opinion? I thought it was funny and I fall within the demographic; although I would much rather prefer realistic boobs in games than torpedoes.
That was very informitive and understandable.
Thanks Sanya
This is a good article. The only group of developers I have ever seen really get in touch with their community is the team at Runic Games (formerly the Seattle team for Flagship Studios, who worked on Mythos). If you go by Runic Games Fansite and click the Forum Comments tag (or just click here) you can see the probably hundreds of times they have answered questions for the fans on various fansites and their own official forums, and that doesn't even include their playful banter that isn't related to their projects. They were answering questions even before Torchlight was announced, which I think shows a lot of dedication on both the parts of the devs and the fans.
I hope they make it big with their games, so other companies can loosen up a little and follow their advantage.
I enjoyed reading this article quite a bit. You have many many good points. There's a couple of companies which are trying hard to communicate with fansites, and I'm noticing a trend where other companies are improving lately.
Sanya, I enjoyed your article on making fansites more awesome, but I wonder when some game publishers will embrace the fansites that already *are* awesome?
You could count my fansite, BattleClinic, as being as close to "sort of media" as it gets. Our traffic and member count is as high as many of the 'mainstream' game media sites. We've been around for over 8 years building publisher-authorized tools and guides for fun sci-fi themed games that we enjoy. The stuff we build helps players improve their game, which extends subscription time and increases subscriptions through word-of-mouth. Both are good things for publishers.
Yet it seems that many game publishers don't recognize that fansites can be run just as professionally and just as effectively as "real" media -- and are often better places to reach out to players. The quality of some fansites is extraordinary - look at the Titan Network or Jordan's Town for City of Heroes, or Grismar's Wiki for EVE Online. These sites rival the publisher's own in terms of utility and value to the player base.
I recently met with a publisher. This MMO has been around awhile and has serious competition looming. I offered to partner with the studio and develop some proven strategies for driving new players to the game, but the marketing guy wasn't excited. Why not? Is it too hard to believe that some fansites can be professional? That they're a great additional channel to reach players? That players like them and use them? I'm not sure, but it seems obvious.
Don't get me wrong, some publishers are visionary. I'll throw props out to CCP, who have created a robust API that feeds some pretty impressive fansite functionality. It's a good investment--we've seen first-hand how much longer players stay in (and enjoy) the game thanks to the tools that fansite operators have built.
There are some oustanding fansites out there, run by truly talented people, that have earned the good will and trust of the player base. Those are hard things to get from an online community, and I think publishers should look again at what we fansite operators actually offer them. Embracing fansites is good for the game and good for the players!
Chris "SghnDubh" Condon
BattleClinic.com
I think you might be getting a bit wrapped up over nothing. The article was talking about demographics, not individuals. She wasn't talking about YOU, she was talking about the majority of people in your particular demographic. In the article, she was referring to what research has shown, someone in your category is likely to do, or think, or whatever. That's not sexist, that's statistics.
The insurance industry works in much the same way. Young, male drivers are statistically more likely to be in expensive accidents. Therefore, their insurance costs more. it's the demographics game, my friends. All businesses play it, including MMOs.
I always enjoy Sanya write ups. Hers are always on my must read list. I think mainly because she has a true inside vibe to game developers, coders,etc.
And once again she touched on demographics (which is why Im posting in the thread). You know I was gonna say I wonder if she ran across my post in her other write up (the one that lead to a slight derailment, not my intent btw), and post here again what she thought about doing an article like that.
But you know what maybe I should do like she suggests, If you want something, you have to ask (paraphrased of course).
You can't complain about market targetting the major demographic in games. That single male range you mocked at is also by far the largest spender on games and therefore the target of marketing. If women of that age range spent near as much as the guys then the marketting would be equally pushed at them. It's like complaining that movies target teenagers and 20 somethings because those groups spend the most money on movies.
I'm not sure exactly which game companies you're complaining about but several MMOs I've played pay close attention to the fan sites. I've seen many who even have fansite links on their official pages.
Being someone who has played AC for years, they always interact with fan sites but they also interact with the players on the forums a significant amount to, even when those players are attacking. They have a standard of sending each of the major AC fan sites a personal teaser image for the upcoming patch each month, and each site gets a different one so in order to see them all you have to visit each fan site. They've also hosted dev chats for fan sites before.
So I guess I'm most curious as to which game companies you're directly complaining about.
And one last comment, she is improving. Less mindless rant and only one sexist outburst this time around. If she keeps this trend up she'll be making it to the level of quality writing and not relying on using the sterotypical rants to get cheers (odd that she complains about stereotypes but uses every over-used stereotypical rant known to man).
I think you might be getting a bit wrapped up over nothing. The article was talking about demographics, not individuals. She wasn't talking about YOU, she was talking about the majority of people in your particular demographic. In the article, she was referring to what research has shown, someone in your category is likely to do, or think, or whatever. That's not sexist, that's statistics.
The insurance industry works in much the same way. Young, male drivers are statistically more likely to be in expensive accidents. Therefore, their insurance costs more. it's the demographics game, my friends. All businesses play it, including MMOs.
She didn't cite any statistics. She didn't cite the practices of marketers in the game industry in relation to that demographic. The focus is obviously on how marketers treat print journalists vs. web writers. As for this stereotype, I've been playing games all my life and I know very well how that all works, i'm not saying that trend isn't out there. I'm also not saying that big boobs etc don't sell (although who can be sure anymore.) I'm taking issue with how it was presented. I wasn't really worked up over it, but it sounded very shallow amidst the rest of the article. Look at what is written, it's in second person (you this, you that.) Point is, it's not so much offensive as it is lame. I'm merely voicing a legitimate criticism of the article, so no need to take issue with me either.
/discussion.
I wonder if in her next article we'll get a small snipet of how the internet has emasculated the new male generation.
I sort of fall into that "We're Easy" catagory, (and Im 37). But, its boobs and swords Shanya not guns, that catches my eye...sheesh.
LOL
"And one last comment, she is improving. Less mindless rant and only one sexist outburst this time around. If she keeps this trend up she'll be making it to the level of quality writing and not relying on using the sterotypical rants to get cheers (odd that she complains about stereotypes but uses every over-used stereotypical rant known to man)."
If she keeps going that way..I'll stop reading. I have always liked her style of writing and look forward to her posts on friday as much as the day itself. I'm sorry you don't like her writing, her type of humor is not for everyone. You do have four other writers that post here that you can read.
Thank you Sanya,
As always a good mix of information and humor. I personly never did care for the school approach to learning.
"NOW CLAAASSS", "SIT DOWN", "PENCILS OUT......."
I enjoyed the read and agree with much of it.
Thanks, Sanya, I enjoyed the article. :) The bit about 18-34 y/o males made me chuckle a bit and I sensed a small amount of sarcasm in it.
Sarcasm?! MOI????
/ducks
To the point that some studios are already doing this - yes. CCP is miles ahead of most, IMO, and there are definitely places that are doing good work. That's why I ended the article by mentioning that savvy players (industry wide, not just literal players) have caught on.
Sorry that wasn't more clear - behind the scenes, I get made fun of when I go on too long. And these are supposed to be editorial/opinion pieces, not fair and balanced examples of reporting. So in trying to cut the word count, and to state strong opinions, sometimes absolute clarity is lost.
And of course, sometimes I just screw up ;)
Bah your article was clear enough. Some people are just taking things a bit too serious :)
Way to insult the intelligence of the core demographic of these games. I have a job, and get laid. Thank you.
Great article. I'm creating first Polish D&D Online portal right now, so it's amazing timing from you...
ddopl.com
Thanks!
@Sanya
I try to read all the articles and columns posted on here; but I must say, I relate to and enjoy yours the most. You are very good at giving an in depth look at all aspects of the gaming industry.
lol, that was my favorite part of the article. Not sure what she means by "death grip style gaming", but the aside is well written and made fun of an issue from two sides at once without being condescending. It also says average... average doesn't mean everyone. We're all unique snow flakes, don't go melting on us.
Having run a major gaming site in the past (28 million views a month) I can say the thing that helped me the most was actually getting to know the people at the game companies. Treat them like people, not Gods or resources. Pay your way to E3 and shake their hands. Once they know your name, and especially your face and actually like you a bit, things open up a whole lot more.
And then live up to that and the trust they give you. If one of the devs drop something in conversation you don't ask for a quote... you note it and follow it up in official channels.
Basically treat them with the respect you want and remember that there are tons of aspiring web sites and fans that want information... don't be surprised when they don't single you out. You have to single them out.
That's how it works with every busy, well-known person. Also famous musicians, especially national. I've already, as a guitarist, made contacts with my "idols". I'm just letting them live, don't invade their privacy and ask only when I have something important to say (for me!).
That's absolutely the same. You really need to show you are discreet, can be trusted, won't exploit such relationships. And divide your knowlegde into your personal, and what you can say officially. It's worth knowing something you can't talk about in public, as you can make use of it without spoiling the secret. And that's perfectly right to do so, just mind your manners all the time.
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