User Generated Content
Ahoy internet! Sorry for the long silence, I’ve been running around the world a lot lately! So let’s get back to another detour on a very hot topic: User Generated Content. As I started getting more familiar with branding related topics, I stumbled over UGC pretty quickly. There is a lot of discussion on how to get a UGC campaign running: often collections of best practices and showcases of bright ideas. What they all had in common? It wasn’t really what I knew as User Generated Content! In this post, I’d like to introduce what I’d call UGC in game development and draw some analogies for brand development.
Let me first say a few words on how I encountered UGC in brand development. In general, a UGC campaign seems to focus on engaging the user of a product or brand to produce material on their own — and let others know about it. This often takes the form of sharing photos or videos to tell an exciting, funny or otherwise engaging story. This, obviously, requires a brand personality that is strong enough to support association while still leaving enough creative room for users to participate. At the end of the day, UGC focuses on letting users tell the story — instead of telling it yourself — as that’s more authentic. Further, you’ll aim to generate traffic under your brand on the platform of your choice: #UGCCampaign. This can greatly bolster the reach, character and authenticity of your brand and there are many powerful examples out there that worked really well.
Now, let me take you into the realm of games. Here, UGC is as old as the 90s and is actually quite different! Although it’s rarely actually called UGC, it’s a well-established anchor in game development, often called modding. Here, users take an existing game and start modifying and extending it, sharing their work to other users as a mod (as in “modification”). A mod can take the shape of adding some new maps, power-ups or weapons — or it could go up to a completely altered game experience. DotA, for instance, is a popular team-based game (that later on established its own genre now called MOBA) and is a major anchor of eSport — and it actually started out as a mod for Warcraft III in 2003 (yes, there was a predecessor version for StarCraft, but I’d say the DotA as we know it started with the Warcraft III mod). Today, DOTA2 as a standalone game produces a revenue of at least 400M$ per year. With such success stories in their neighborhood, many game development studios embrace the modding community and offer level editors, special interfaces or whole development kits for their games.
So, what’s actually different? In both scenarios, users take an existing product and produce original content with it. However, in game development, the users are not just telling or augmenting the story of the original brand identity — they create their own! A mod is essential a game itself, meaning that the outcome of UGC in game development can be a whole brand on its own. Instead of fostering communication about a brand in social media, a game development UGC campaign aims to let the users participate in the brand creation itself: by creating a product that will always be tied to the original, just as how DotA is always tied to WarCraft III, even though its now run as a standalone game by an entirely different company. From a brand development perspective, this seems like a very bold move!
UGC in Gaming
As this might be new to you, I’d like to take a paragraph or two and dive a bit deeper into UGC as it appears in games. There are other concepts I’d sort into UGC within game development besides modding, it’s just the most apparent one. Many games, such as StarCraft II, come with a full-fledged editor that allows you to create your own game modes — even up to whole new games. In many gaming brands, such mods are crucial parts of the game’s experience. And that’s quite surprising, given that there is no real control over what players will contribute. Thus, building up and managing a community is a particularly important task in such UGC-driven game brands.
Depending on the actual game and genre, there might be further approaches for gaming UGC. There are whole fan bases out there dedicated to improving the visual quality of a game, without actually changing it any way further. Skyrim saw quite some mods adding new shaders and textures. This may also include a lot of artistic changes, such as altering colors and moods of game scenes — touching the essentials of how the game is perceived by a player. Similarly, in MMORPGs, such as World of Warcraft, there are huge communities crafting their own user interfaces for the game, often replacing all action buttons, inventory screens and health bars to give more information, better control, focus on one aspect of the game such as PvP, or just change the aesthetics. As the mood and user interaction is one of the key influences to the actual experience of playing the game, this is another bold move in respect to preserving a brand.
If you want to dig deeper, there is a awesome GDC’15 talk by Joel Burgess on the impact of modding on Bethesda and their development. Find it here.
Brands and UGC
So why does the gaming industry actually do that? First off, particularly in the 2000s, we can see a clear shift from brands driven by key values (usually focused on publishers or individual studios) towards game developers acting more as a service provider than a producer. With “onlization” and the sudden influx of online multiplayer and MMOs everywhere, being a game developer meant rather providing the service of an awesome game experience, rather than producing a good title to start with. This didn’t happen for all genres in the same way, but I’d say that you can observe a clear increase in “maintenance efforts”, such as patching and providing content post-launch, compared to the 1990s. Playing World of Warcraft is a service you do even pay for!
Nowadays (yes I’m jumping over a decade here! We should definitely talk about the history of game development at some point!), I see game development moving more and more from the service provider model on to a community model. Developers and publishers try to offer a platform for communities, rather than providing a as-is game experience. And modding — UGC — is one of the main culprits here, just take a look at the Steam Workshop.
And how is all this relevant for other brands? Well: take a look at the car industry, for instance. Aren’t we just moving over from a brand built on strong values (such as awesome cars) towards being service providers (such as mobility-passes and rent-a-car)? To me, that’s just what happened in game development two decades ago. If so, could the development of many brands follow this route, ultimately leading towards communities centered around UGC that actually ALTERS the brand, instead of just generating some footage?
Real World UGC
What happened in game development is definitely not a blueprint and there is no guarantee that all industries will follow a similar course. On the contrary: game development had the huge advantage of being entirely digital to begin with! Well okay, there still were those ancient CDs on which you got your games, but you get my point. A digital domain comes with an interesting premise: reproduction is cheap. If you got a nice picture, it costs nothing to send a copy to 1000 friends (well ok, some fractions of a cent for power). If you got a nice car, on the other hand…
In a digital domain, the individual — the user — has about the same reproduction capability as the brand they interact with. And that’s quite a shift in power you can either try to fight, or embrace. Most of the gaming industry learned to embrace their users as being content providers, publishers and — essential — part of their development team and brand experience architects. It didn’t work for everybody, but taking a look at game development as a whole, UGC is now deeply rooted in many business models centered around studios that act rather as community hot-spots offering a canvas for players to draw their contributions onto.
Ok, so much for digital markets. But my car still stays my car, powered by legendary brands, right? Well. Isn’t there a clear shift towards empowering the production capability of the individual, even for physical goods? Take a look at all the “DIY” sites out there! And if that doesn’t convince you, watch some footage of 3D printing. These printers are yet to arrive in the average household, but they are becoming less and less tinkering and more and more plug-and-play. In my view, it’s only a matter of time! So rather start adopting “real” UGC now and think about how it changes brands, publishing and community interaction!
Things change fast these days!
