🧙♂️Community
The fellowship of community management
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Introduction
Community management encompasses more than forum post and press releases. Successful game developers treat community management as a core function of the company and critical component to every game's design. Aside from the obvious building of a fan base, community development can and generally should inform game design and development both before and after release.
Resources like Game Community Management can further expand on the importance of this topic
Community management is particularly hard to do well for small studios and near impossible for "solo developers". Building and managing your community is a time consuming process that requires a specific skill set and diverse cultural understanding. In short Community Management requires scale, hence the need of smaller studios to partner with dedicated groups that can help.
What to expect
Heathen can be contracted to provide Managed Services, this means we can help you research, select and manage professional partnerships like Community Management groups. You can of course manage this on your own.
Pricing will obviously vary from place to place, project to project and month to month so any figures given here are simply to paint a picture of the costs involved and what you might get for it.
As with any partner engagement, discovery and strategy are the first steps. Before you jump in, look for a partner who is willing to work with you throughout your journey. This is very important, shop around and don't be afraid to say "no thanks"
Discovery
This is just that initial meeting and the result of filling out any of those "contact us forms" for any given consultant. The first contact you're likely to be chatting with is a salesman first and foremost, so keep that in mind. Firms that deal with partnerships like this want your business so they are likely to say "yes" a lot even though they probably don't fully understand the question, or have the skills to deliver on it if they did.
During this initial meeting you should be leading the conversation. Your objective is to "vet" the prospective partner, that means getting a feel for rather or not this company can even meet your needs. Next you need to understand if this partner can meet your budget and timeline, they will be resistant to answering this line of questioning understandably since they cant really "quote" work they haven't designed, let them know your looking for an understanding on the "order of magnitude" this will cost you in both time and money to make sure it suits your budget and project.
Strategy
The initial engagement will typically include a meeting with the partner to help them understand you, your product and your goals. This will be followed up by research and planning on the partners part resulting in a plan or "strategy" that they can execute on to move you toward your goals. Any such "strategy" will include Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) or some other means by which you can measure the success or failure of the strategy in terms that are significant to you.
This sort of engagement typically costs between €3,000 and €7,000 and can take from a few weeks to a month+
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