The Power of Community Management and How it can Affect a Games Development
What is Effective Community Managing?
Effective Community Management is super important within the gaming industry. Whether that is surrounding an outsourcing studio or a games development as a whole. Ensuring people feel welcomed into a communal environment is focused on the socialist skills of a good community manager. But in terms of ‘good community management’ what does that really mean?
Adaptability in community management is the understanding of being able to talk to each individual differently to ensure they feel welcomed within the community. Tailoring your communication methods to fit another person's communicative style is immensely important. Everyone has a different taste in humour, levels of sarcasm, professionalism etc. However, being adaptable ensures you can make any conversation malleable.
You have to make sure people feel valued and motivated to engage within a community. Making the environment friendly and kind, can depend on someone feeling out of place or not. Readability of someone's communication style is key. Make them feel welcomed by acknowledging them.
Sometimes, especially in some game development scenarios you can have shy awkwardness, a bit of apprehensiveness or a disagreement. Which can all be swerved by a proactive community manager.
Who does Community Managing Target Specifically?
Community management doesn’t target everyone equally. If it’s done well. Every circumstance of community management intentionally targets who it serves and why. You have to target the individuals who directly influence, use, support or grow your business. In the Outsourcing field this means several overlapping groups or studios.
However please understand community management isn't just for promotional use or connections externally. Within a studio, you have a team. Having a strong leader internally who understands the dynamic of your team is extremely positive.
Having strong community presence internally and externally ensures motivation thrives and provides strength to the product or service behind it. The brand or service then has a support system. Client facing; this is amazing. Providing a client with a strong sense of community along with a strong sense of communication ensures security within product management.
How does it Affect Game Development?
Communicating in any capacity of game development is absolutely essential. Even when working remotely or independently, you’re still communicating whether that's with tools, documenting, or collaborating with your team.
Without clear communication in game development the different disciplines of different departments do not align. Each role in a studio plays and has completely different perspectives of tasks, so having clear communication allows for high quality work ; ensuring all collaboration of ideas flows smoothly to create beautiful work.
At Vertpaint our community manager Chanel Brown explained that she doesn't just focus on the external community management she also focuses on the internal community management, ensuring her team is collaborating efficiently. Working with Vertpaint is working with a strong bonded team who are easily adaptable in any scenario.
Team syncs are more enjoyable to work with, as the staff at Vertpaint have full acknowledgement that all of their ideas, points and feedback are taken with full consideration. Feedback is quite a large factor when it comes to communication.
However, we ensure that all feedback is taken onboard and fulfilled to the best of our ability. Having a team of veterans comes with the knowledge of years of experience behind that. So partnering with Vertpaint as your chosen outsourcing studio
The Power of a Healthy Community.
A healthy community means a healthy internal team. Success within an outsourcing team is often only measured on deliverables, quality benchmarks and timelines. However behind all of this lies a critical factor; a healthy, thriving community.
At Vertpaint we ensure that when joining an external team our team brings alongside themselves positive attitude and motivation. Working with another studio can sometimes be daunting for a team however this can all be changed simply by the way communication is handled.
We ensure our tracking system is well managed, open and accessible and all the team members have somewhere to socialise. Especially being a remote studio you tend to find that socialisation within a remote company is quite nil void. So avoiding this is essential. Building a powerhouse is ineffective if communication isn't constructive.
Overall as an outsourcing studio, we at Vertpaint ensure that community management is held to such a high standard. Both within our internal and external partners. Choose the right outsourcing studio that can provide you support without having to be worried about communication.
