Thanks for the article! To build a community you need to have at least announce your game. Do you think the first announcement of a game should be an announcement trailer or do you think about other strategy?
The issue regarding this for me is the difficulty of having virality with a trailer when nobody knows your studio.
I think the first announcement of the game coming with an announcement trailer is the best way to do it, personally. Even if the trailer is shorter - but it should have good looking gameplay footage in it.
How important is it to "have a steady hand with the community throughout a longer period"? Do you have stats how much difference it makes? Or generally, what makes you think that it is important, other than intuition?
Also, for the people who discover this article less than 3 months before the release and haven't started nurturing by that time, what would you recommend? Do more intensive community building and still release when planned, or push back the release date to give the audience more time to accumulate?
It's definitely possible to have a hit without this 'direct' community stuff. But if your game's page is up on Steam already, you can probably tell how many wishlists it has. Its first year's sales (in copies) might be between 1.5x and 3x the number of launch wishlists.
If that's good enough, fine! If not, maybe try to spark community a little more. But ideally this is done as a holistic package...
Thanks for the article! To build a community you need to have at least announce your game. Do you think the first announcement of a game should be an announcement trailer or do you think about other strategy?
The issue regarding this for me is the difficulty of having virality with a trailer when nobody knows your studio.
I think the first announcement of the game coming with an announcement trailer is the best way to do it, personally. Even if the trailer is shorter - but it should have good looking gameplay footage in it.
How important is it to "have a steady hand with the community throughout a longer period"? Do you have stats how much difference it makes? Or generally, what makes you think that it is important, other than intuition?
Also, for the people who discover this article less than 3 months before the release and haven't started nurturing by that time, what would you recommend? Do more intensive community building and still release when planned, or push back the release date to give the audience more time to accumulate?
It's definitely possible to have a hit without this 'direct' community stuff. But if your game's page is up on Steam already, you can probably tell how many wishlists it has. Its first year's sales (in copies) might be between 1.5x and 3x the number of launch wishlists.
If that's good enough, fine! If not, maybe try to spark community a little more. But ideally this is done as a holistic package...