Fortis Community Outreach Program
About 18 months ago, I shared my excitement about joining Fortis and the chance to build and drive community in a company that was committed to investing in it. It turns out that when you deploy an entirely new approach to community, you’ve got to take the time and effort to carefully place each block. Fortis is a company that believes in community and is fully integrating our thinking and vision into the games we make. To that end, we have been building the foundations to fully realize and implement community potential.
At Fortis, our team is called the Community Development Team (we go by CDT internally), and we’ve grown substantially since I’ve joined. We’ve had the unique opportunity to drive community perspective with leadership, technology, and most importantly — the game teams. I can say with confidence that it’s been one of the most challenging and rewarding roles that I’ve ever taken on — which isn’t surprising considering how aspirational our goals are.
As with most things… timing is everything. There is always the risk of being too early and sometimes being too late. Without striking the right balance, timing can put you so far behind it’s difficult to catch up! Over the past few months, we’ve hit a pivotal point in which we can start engaging with and developing the community the way Fortis has always intended. I’m excited to tell you a bit about the Fortis Community Outreach Program, but before I dive in, let me talk about how we got here.
If you’ve read any of the Fortis blogs, you know that we want to do things differently, and community being integrated early is a huge differentiator for us. As the development of our games progresses, a big challenge that we face is that you cannot define community without a community. One of the biggest mistakes a game company can make is assuming they fully understand the needs and wants of the players and community.
Assuming you understand the needs of your users can lead to disastrous results that often end with you reactively trying to fix a problem that could have been avoided through feedback and conversation. I’m sure you wouldn’t be surprised to learn that this was one of the biggest takeaways from my 11 years working at Twitch. In the 2010–2014 era of Twitch, we lived and died by the conversations with Creators, Moderators, and Chatters. Those conversations led to the Subscription & Partner programs that every Creator relies on today, the robust moderation tools that continue to evolve and protect users, and the creation of TwitchCon in 2015. Unfortunately, there was a point in which these conversations got deprioritized and that resulted in several products, services, and site-wide changes that created more harm than it did good. It was those moments when the Community didn’t feel heard or valued. These important conversations and interactions aren’t optional… they are a commitment, and that’s what I love about working at Fortis.
By being committed to programs that encourage feedback and open conversation, we can validate our assumptions — in a perfect world we learn from these conversations and bring proof of these assumptions (or we completely throw them out because, *shocked Pikachu face*, sometimes our assumptions are wrong). Community-led development isn’t a new concept, but it’s still a fairly unexplored area in the industry… and we want to take it to the next level.
This doesn’t just apply to game development and community needs — it also applies to things like Creator Programs. Our team came to another logical conclusion, “how can we build the best Creator Program if we aren’t talking directly with Creators?” How can we build the best game (or include the best features) if we’re not talking directly to our players? This all seems very straightforward, but in reality, most of these conversations start AFTER a game is released or a program has started. This is our way of putting our foot down and saying, why wait?
To take action on these conclusions, the team needed a plan. I met with Liz George, who is Head of Player Community and part of the CDT leadership team, to tackle the challenge. Our conversations are what led to the Fortis Community Outreach Program. She believes we should elevate community members to the level of stakeholder, which completely aligns with the vision I aspire to uphold (and why I hired her).
The Fortis Community Outreach Program is designed to open new lanes and build stronger connections between passionate players and our game teams. By signing up, we want to offer the opportunity to test early versions of our games, speak directly to the developers on our game teams about the games we’re building, participate in online (and, in the future, offline) events, get access to early concepts and designs, and much more. It doesn’t matter if you main PC/console or love mobile games, if you min/max a game religiously or just play with friends because it’s fun… it just matters that you want your voice to be heard. Our games span a number of different genres and you may love one of them, all of them, or none of them — but your voice as a player, a creator, or a community member brings unique knowledge and experience to any world or systems we might be building. We do want to match your game expertise and experience with the right conversations (which is why we ask the questions that we do), but everyone has something to offer that can help us build better experiences, better games, and a better community.
If you’ve ever thought to yourself, “I wish I could have a stronger relationship and deeper discussions with a developer, game team, or community team,” you are exactly who we want to work with. If that’s you, let’s have a conversation, if that’s not you, sign up anyway and give us a chance to show you the value of stronger connections between players and a game company. Visit our Fortis Community Outreach page, share some information about you as a Player or Creator, and we’ll be in touch.
I’m just a guy with a grand vision, but I have an incredible team who has rallied behind me to help shape this vision and push community to the next level within Fortis. I’m eager for you to hear from them, so expect to see posts from them in our next Fortis Community updates.
