How Developers Should Treat Broadcasting

Intro

Digital Marketing has been drastically changing over the past few years. As consumers tune out traditional advertising, companies need to adapt their strategies to generate an effective reach. This especially rings true for game developers.

Video game broadcasting is quickly on its way to being a mammoth of an industry (Superdata Here). As it grows, game publishers and developers have been taking advantage of the direct connection to their community in a variety of different ways.

Below are four strategies used by developers to engage their community through broadcasting.

Influencer Marketing

Today, information is spread primarily through community leaders, particularly in the gaming industry. Tapping into these early adopters is key if you want to truly achieve organic market reach.

Broadcasting is an excellent way to engage these early adopters. Knowing this, Studio Wild Card, creators of Ark, produced an impressive marketing event that involved the top tier Twitch.tv influencers called “Survival Of The Fittest”.

A month after the launch of Ark, Studio Wildcard in partnership with Twitch.tv had 60+ top tier broadcasters join one game server and start streaming. The point? Survival of the Fittest, Hunger Games style.

The broadcasters paired up and survived in the virtual environment for as long as they could. Facing large dinosaurs, environmental hazards, and other players, the event lasted all day until finally a winning pair was crowned.

Overall, the event was extremely well received by the community. With 60+ top tier streamers all broadcasting, the organic reach of the event was MASSIVE, creating a hype not often seen. Through this influencer campaign, Ark was able to engage multiple communities at a time and reach an audience size that would have taken several months through traditional advertising to reach. With viewers rooting for their favorite broadcasters, the event effectively created an emotional connection to the game, something otherwise impossible to do using traditional advertising methods.

Community Watering Hole

Creating a consistent place for your community to interact with each other and developers instills a sense of loyalty that cannot be bought. For a studio, this will keep your player base around long-term.

Ubisoft and Massive, creators of The Division, have done an excellent job of providing a community hangout spot for their player base immediately after the game’s launch.

Through their “State of the Game” streams, developers and community managers discuss the latest hotfixes and patches, new content on its way, and highlight certain members of the community doing cool things with their games. This is great supplemental content for their community as they converse about their thoughts in the chat, much like hosts and guests in a standard podcast.

Doing this on a consistent schedule is important to the community because it gives them something to look forward to and expect each week. Additionally, it provides incentives for players to produce great content to then be showcased to the entire community. It also allows for developers to speak directly to the community about why certain product decisions were made.

Content Showcase

58% of gamers watch a video or a stream of a game before they purchase that game. This means that it is incredibly important you provide as much of this content as possible. Electronic Arts is a prime example of this technique.

In their latest DLC showcase the Star Wars Battlefront team took advantage of community leaders to showcase what content would be available. A variety of Battlefront staff joined these influencers on their own channels to talk about the new content, and some of the reasoning behind certain tweaks and additions to the game.

This really humanized the team behind the game. Joining the community on their own channels, they were able to answer questions and garner feedback from a variety of different audiences. Using this casual approach resulted in amassing a larger dialogue and reach regarding content as opposed to a less casual high production stream in one place.

Esports

Finally, the elephant in the room: Riot Games. Riot has pioneered game broadcasting with their esports department. With a production setup not unlike what can be seen on ESPN, Riot brings a whole new level of professionalism and scope to video game competitions.

While esports were around before Riot entered the scene, the game developer is largely responsible for pioneering esports into its current form today.

Emulating traditional sports systems, Riot has created an entire hierarchy around competitions. At the top is the League of Legends Championship Series (LCS), with a minor league called the Challenger Series. They have even gone as far as to create a collegiate league called the North America Collegiate Championship (NACC) aimed at giving college scholarships to players.

Riot still does not make money from their esports department. Largely driven by fan interest, the developer isn't necessarily concerned with making it profitable. The major focus on esports comes from the massive interest from their player base and can be written off within their marketing budget.

While not every esports program is a flushed out as theirs, their broadcasting strategy does highlight the true nature of esports as a player retention strategy. The more events you organize, the more reasons players have to keep playing your game for longer. The longer they play your game, the more opportunity the developer has to monetize on that player through in game transactions.

These are just a few examples of marketing strategies for the gaming industry, but of course there are many others. If you want to talk about broadcasting and esports feel free to reach me here.

Background on Hubtag

Hubtag is an esport technology company providing resources and broadcast solutions to video gamers. Our current product is the Hubtag Caster, a livestream production suite that provides powerful production elements for gamers in an easy-to-manage way, such as live Twitter display, on-stream polling, and custom scene transitions. In addition to our software, we also run the Hubtag Academy, a free knowledge resource for online gamers, streamers, and event organizers.