Hello FAF,
I am a hobbyist indie game dev with the dream of one day producing my own successful game. I have already invested about 2500 hours towards this goal, learning many new skills such as game development and design, and the production of tutorials, videos, trailers, green screening and audio. If you would like you can
buy see
my Early Access VR game on Steam. One of the next steps in my journey is to develop the skills to promote games. So, for me, investing a large amount of time and effort into FAF promotions would be investing in my own dream.
My focus as Promotions Councilor would be to
increase new players and
increase the retention of new players. Growing the player base will increase the lifetime and diversity of our community. My draft plan to achieve this is:
Primary Goal #1: Increase players- Formal paid advertising campaign – produce advertisement graphics and videos. Research our target demographic and the cheapest way of targeting them. This will probably end up being youtube or twitch ads.
- Reddit campaign – Posting content to reddit is an effective way of increasing awareness. Posts will be animated gifs of cool FAF things with personal titles such as “Very happy with the way my new unit walk cycle turned out” or “Nearly wet my pants when that laser com teleported in”. Then I would call on our FAF redditors to go out there on reddit and comment on our posts to get some momentum.
- Reach out to Square Enix to see if they wish to collaborate on a mutually beneficial project. Our community raises the value of their IP so helping us helps them. I would reach out to them not as “Anihilnine” but as the Promotions Councilor of the world’s biggest Forged Alliance community with 11,000,000 games played. I would love to see Square post about FAF on the FA Steam Page. I would love to see them email their player base about us. I have no idea what the chances of this happening are but I will put forward a formal proposal to them. If all we can get is a heads up before they launch a sale, I'll take it.
- Introduce analytics to track the benefit of each marketing step
- Get baseline statistics for current New Players & Retained Players, so that we can measure the effect of our efforts
Primary Goal #2: Increase Player RetentionMy understanding is that we actually do get quite a lot of new players but that there may be ways to increase the number of players that we retain. I will develop a plan for increasing player retention, which might look like:
- Sending new FAF players a starter kit including information suitable to a beginner, it would probably focus on them having fun so might explain how to PD creep. It would link to particularly exciting casts. The trick would be to make it fun straight away, not overload them with information, and gradually increase the knowledge. Maybe there would be some animated gifs in emails.
- Work with the trainers to see if they can actively approach new players. We could say something like “each new players should be contacted by PM within the first 10 days of playing”.
- Work with trainers to organize scheduled noob matches and explicitly invite new players to join.
- Email players who stop playing regularly with enticing information. A survey to find out why players are leaving.
- Plug social channels like FB / Twitter / Reddit with amusing content. It could just be a 5 second clip of a nuke getting blocked by as plane. Players who leave will be reminded of us.
I haven’t thought about the retention plan much yet but I think it’s important and we should have it in place before we launch the plan to increase players. Makes sense to wait until you can keep them.
Secondary Goal #1: Internal PromotionFor years now I have thought that we need to have a red-hot news feed curating the most interesting FAF content. It would be a mix of everything: trending forum posts, featured casts, featured casters, highlighted replays, new maps, new mods, nomads, interviews. As an avid reader of the forums I am always seeing new cool things but I always think they don’t get the attention they deserve. Like the mapping competitions are a really unique and interesting idea but I don’t think they get in front of people. Like the upcoming balance patches which are released for ages but don’t seem to get looked at except by a select few. We need a news hub that is in your face and full of quality content. I would like to talk to the devs about if we could do something like that.
Secondary Goal #2: Increasing Pro Player ParticipationIf we had a news platform we should be able to use it to showcase the top end pro players, which would encourage the Pros to play. I would love to see more Pro action, perhaps with scheduled or organized games, and would like to work with other Councilors to see what we can do to increase that.
How will we achieve any of this?I would love to achieve all of these goals but I cannot do it alone. My hope is that others will share my vision that increasing players and retention will make FAF a better place, and help me on a journey to make that a reality.
We will need to produce a lot of copy, graphics and video content. I think I’ve spent about 7 years on FAF forums and it’s not hard to think of people to go to. FAF have so many talented, creative and dedicated people. I’m thinking about screenshots of the week by lilSidlil, those awesome creative works to promote the new maps, graphic designs by Blackster, videos by people like Medicraze, the ridiculous amount of effort put in by speed2 and ExoticRetard for the wiki, the new website by Blodir. The slick patch notes we have been putting out lately. The list goes on – new maps, new client, new units.
Some of these goals would require money, which I can contribute some of. I would also ask the community for assistance, certain cashed up players I know of, and perhaps there are FAF donations that might be tapped.
Some of the goals would require dev time. Hopefully we will be able to find someone who thinks this is worth the time.
When I look around, I see all of the parts we need to level up in growth. If we all got behind these goals - we can do it!
My Contributions to the FAF Community:I made UI Party and a bunch of other UI mods. I fixed the minimap which used to be a black square. I am slightly addicted to the forum and I’ve read it a
lot. I’m a forum mod which means I delete spam posts and report abuse. You don’t see it but I’ve put many people in touch with each other, introducing new contributors to the devs on slack/zulip. For example, this week I introduced a guy who wants to donate a relay server that might improve pings between continents.
About Me:38 year old, Australian. Software developer for 18 years. Employed as software architect / team lead for multi million dollar software projects. FAF player.
Inspirational Close:As Promotions Councilor I will try and rally members of the community to fulfill these goals. I’ve got some big ideas about stepping up the FAF game, but I need to plan it out more and I’ll need buy in from many other people. Its ambitious but I have the motivation. I
don’t know if this will work, but I’d love to have a crack ... who’s with me?