Promoting games in Crayta: an update

Crayta: collaborative game creation for everyone.

Having moved through our launch phase we are now in a position to update everyone on our current process for featuring games.

First, here are the various ways that we are promoting games:

• The “Featured Games” rail on the Play menu
• Hub billboards
• Community Highlights videos that celebrate the creations of the past week with the wider world
• Resharing posts from community members showing off their creations on social media

Kickstarting the games

For a newly-published game within Crayta, the immediate challenge is for it to receive a healthy number of players, and that’s where we can come in to help. We see our current role as having two main goals:

1. When we feature or promote games we give them a strong boost, encouraging players to play them. This in turn makes these games become ‘active’ and start to appear on the other automatic shelves on Crayta’s Play menu. From here on the game needs to stand on its own two feet: if the audience enjoys it then it will retain players and stay on the Popular and Active shelves.
2. We also want to ensure that returning players easily discover fresh new games that have been made in Crayta, which means that we need to regularly rotate the featured content.

The evaluation process

To that end we have therefore created the framework below, a set of criteria that we use to review newly-published games that ensures each game can be fairly evaluated by us. By sharing this with the community we can also provide guidance on what we are looking for, so that our creators can see what to do with their games to maximise the chances of them being featured.

The criteria that we are currently applying when evaluating the games are as follows:

1. Is the game fun to play and likely to have longevity?
2. Is the game something refreshing and different?
3. How accessible is the game? Are the objectives easily understood, and the controls simple to understand?
4. Does the game work with low numbers of players as well as high? (With so many games being published we ideally want to feature some games that can work well even with just one or two players on a particular server.)
5. Is the game stable, relatively bug free, and does it run at a consistent high framerate?
6. Does it appear to infringe on someone else’s intellectual property rights?

We then total up the scores for the new games and, depending on throughput, will feature the top scoring 3–10 games each day. We will also use those games to populate up to 4 of the billboards in the hub. These billboards are frequently used by new players, so we want to ensure that some of our “classics” such as Prop Hunt are still easily accessible to them.

Of the games that are featured each week, we will take the 12–14 games that have been played the longest for our weekly community highlights video.

Let’s keep learning

That summarises our current system for selecting and promoting the games in Crayta. Hopefully it helps to add some transparency around what we are trying to achieve, and what creators can do to increase the likelihood of being featured. As before, we see this as an ever-evolving process as we learn more and Crayta grows, but we aim to continue to keep you all informed when changes are made.

As always, If you have comments or questions feel free to ask them in either Discord or on our forum.