The role of community management in gaming has never been more critical. In this episode, our host Alexanda Takei, Director at Ruckus Games, hosts Andrew Beegle, founder of Beegle Productions and Gravity Gang, and Tim Smith, co-founder of Cohesion AI, to discuss the evolving discipline of community management. Together, they explore the transformation of community roles over the past decade, from the decline of forums to the rise of Discord and influencer-driven strategies. The discussion highlights best practices for engaging communities early in development, balancing transparency with managing expectations, and leveraging tools like AI to scale engagement. They also address the nuanced dynamics of working with influencers and measuring community health pre and post-launch. If you’re navigating the challenges of building a loyal player base in a saturated market, this conversation provides actionable insights and strategies to thrive in 2025, including the groups must-have software tools for community development and predictions for headwinds community organizations will face heading into a content saturated market. 

We’d also like to thank Overwolf for making this episode possible! Whether you're a gamer, creator, or game studio, Overwolf is the ultimate destination for integrating UGC in games! You can check out all Overwolf has to offer at https://www.overwolf.com/.

This transcript is machine-generated, and we apologize for any errors.

Alexandra: Hello, what's up everyone, and welcome to the Naavik Gaming Podcast. I'm your host, Alex, and this is the Interview and Insight segment. In our second show in our 2025 show slate, we'll be talking about one of the most important topics in modern gaming distribution, architecting, curating, and growing your game's community.

More than ever, and following a pattern of a litany of things, politics, consumer, news, etc., people take their thought leadership from individual evangelists, grassroots supporters, or micro influencers. Brand as is said in marketing speak is hitting below its usual weight and an emphasis on building alongside a group of consumers and actively taking their input in the product development process has become the de facto and default way of building in game in the modern 2020 gaming era, especially as gaming content becomes so saturated, having a dedicated fan base pre launch and sometimes for many, many years before launch is basically critical to a game's ability to survive in the market.

So today we'll be talking about modern community and engagement strategies in the 2025 gaming market, best practices, approaches, and how community management has changed over the past decade, and even more specifically, how the role of a community manager has changed over time. Gaming is a young industry, but As one of my guests will remind me, community management, even within games, is a relatively new discipline.

We'll talk about what community managers do and how a community org is set up. And with that, it's time to dive in. As always, I've got some homies joining me on air. My first guest is Andrew Beegle. Andrew has background at Riot in the very early stages of Riot's community management. And comms orgs and was a lead community manager for the NA and EU.

He is currently the founder of Beegle Productions was offers community building, consulting to a variety of industries, not only exclusive to games. It's awesome to have him on air. Welcome to the pod, Andrew.

Andrew: Yeah, thanks for having me. I'm excited to chat.

Alexandra: Awesome. And my second guest is Timothy Smith, co-founder at Cohezion.ai.

Cohezion is a multifaceted community management tool with the primary use case of helping teams manage feedback given through Discord and to understand what the members of that games Discord community are truly talking about. I'll obviously have Tim tell us a lot more about it in his own words, but Tim, welcome to the pod.

Tim: Yeah, nice to be here. Thank you.

Alexandra: Awesome. So it's really good to see you guys again in 2025. Before we start, you have to tell me, how did you guys ring in the new year?

Andrew: I run in the new year. Taking my, my four year old son and trying to get him to watch fireworks, while he had 101 fever and wanted to go home.

So, we were all sick during the pandemic, during the New Year's, and he was the last one to get it, so he was unfortunately under the weather the most when we were watching the fireworks, but we, we managed to watch the very beginning and then, and then take him home to give him some, some medication.

Alexandra: Okay. Tim, you got anything more optimistic?

Tim: Not really, you know, being a startup founder, I spent my time coding away. That's about it.

Alexandra: So, all right, great, great. Okay. Much better. Much better. Okay, all right. Awesome. All right. So I gave you guys some minor intros, but I'd like for us to take the time for you to introduce yourselves to the audience.

Tim, I'd love for you to kick us off, tell us a little bit about yourself, how you came to found Cohezion, what Cohezion is. Take it away.

Tim: Yeah. So I'm Tim Smith. I am the technical co-founder and chief product officer for Cohezion and some quick background about me. I started programming decades ago.

Actually started making game mods back in 1997 for games like total annihilation and command to conquer and been addicted to video games ever since about a free fast forward to 2018. I was playing a very popular game. I'm not going to call it out, but I think you might be able to figure it out. And I had 200 hours saved in a hardcore run through and the game glitched.

I lost my character and I went to go report this bug to the studio. And. Nothing ever came of that. It kind of went into a black hole and that left a really sour taste in my mouth. And I, and I got thinking about this problem, reaching out to contacts that I had in the gaming world and really understand how studios work with this data that's coming in from their communities and how they make it actionable.

And what I uncovered with that is that for the most part, it's very manual. It's very tedious. Everything's kind of solid across all these different social distribution platforms. And in a lot of cases, someone like Andrew spends a lot of his time trying to corral this data so they can make these arguments on behalf of the community and the direction they want to go.

And there's just not enough hard data there to make. That's successful. And what ends up happening is studios go to influencers and those become the default for everything instead of here in the community at home. Fast forward to 2023 is when we released our first version of Cohezion. And we went through many iterations of it, but we started taking a more agentic approach to how we solve these problems.

And that really allowed us to take all this. Unstructured data that existed and turn it into actual insights for studios. So Bell reports, community feedback, conversations that were happening just so that they could really understand what these communities at scale wanted and needed it so they could better solve these pain points that existed.

And as we look to the future, what. My vision for Cohezion is, is more of a, the agentic platform for game studios. And what does that mean? That's a very broad term, right? The way we were thinking about this is as we look to the next five or 10 years, the advances in AI are coming rapidly. Every year we're seeing huge growth, but we're also seeing that a lot of these agentic tools are super siloed to focus on very small pieces of this bigger problem that exists, and they're not tapping into those greater data points that exist.

So for us, we really want to. Have deep connections with the studios so that we can pull all this data from bug reports, players, feedback, and suggestions, play testing, combine all this together so that we can help streamline those workflows and help them deliver higher quality games that their player base enjoys.

Awesome.

Alexandra: Yeah, terrific. Well, thank you for the for the intro, and as someone who is uh, At least kind of seeing your software I guess for a little bit from the outside, it definitely seems to combine a lot of those things and that you were talking about that are you know siloed often Um and kind of unite them in under one hood.

Andrew, I'd love to pass it to you. Tell me a little bit about yourself and how you came to kind of be involved in community and games.

Andrew: Yeah, sure. So I am currently gone the entrepreneur route and have two companies that I'm working, that I'm building. First one is Beegle Productions.

Our DBA is actually called Gravity Gang. We're a community marketing agency that specializes in Yeah. You're welcome. Anything from a community strategy to, building out a website to setting up a discord configuration to actually just doing web content or, you know, helping, working with, creators to create that content for the companies and then the other companies is, is brand new. I've only been working on it a couple months, the game studio called MidGames, we haven't even announced ourselves yet, we're still in stealth, on LinkedIn, and we're building browser games, web games every, every two months for web gaming ecosystems, sort of our, our, our approaches more or less try something out on the web and see, see how it goes and then, and then try it out on PC, iOS and, uh, and, and Android.

But my background is, as you said, community management. Sort of got my start writing about games and doing community management for enthusiasts, my websites. And then have the opportunity to jump over into game development and work on games like Aion and League of Legends and, and PUBG and a whole swath of games that you've never heard of because they got cancelled or, or sort of died before, before the filming of this podcast.

But rooted in, in my background has always been community management, sort of enthusiast marketing and really sort of, it's all highlighted around the player.

Alexandra: Great. Well, I'm really excited to have you specifically. And then Tim, you know, from more from the software side for this conversation today, as I think, you know, it'd be great to kind of you unite, I think, both of your perspectives, you know, to, to, to Tim on the side of using software to optimize this and Andrew, your deep rooted experience in community.

And I think that's kind of like where I want to start the show, you know, how community is different today than it was five years ago. So Andrew, you're at Riot. Describe community management to me in 2014, 2015, which is crazy to say, but is a decade ago.

Andrew: It is crazy to see. I feel like this is a moment where I should be opening up like a dusty leather bound home and going over the history of the last decade.

I guess I'll start with, you know, one of the most interesting aspects of the community discipline is how widely varied it's practiced from company to company and even really industry to industry. A lot of what I'm going to represent today, I think, will probably, you know, be More or less my preferred flavor of community management, but there's, you know, there's a bunch of different ways to do it for depending on your industry or the or the product that you're that you're making it and there's probably going to be some people out there or Pulling their hair because this is just radically different than the way that they've done things and there's no right or wrong way unfortunately a lot of the consistency That has been rooted in the community discipline and like How communities practice is a lot more of some of the rudimentary work, namely moderation and things like the facilitation of patch notes and content creation.

Over the past decade, the community discipline has more or less evolved because of a, because of a couple different changes. The death of the forums, as, as I kind of talk about is the, the, the first, you know, it used to be if you had a game or, you know, this is mostly, I'm going to represent mostly it, You know, the, the, the aspect of games, get a game, you had an official forums and that was like where everyone went, that was where the developers were.

So that was where the players were, but now it's more, that's far less common, very, very rare. In fact, it's mostly sort of communities sort of gather around the official subreddit, or, official discord channel. So that's been a major change over the last decade from, you know, what had been traditionally practiced, I think steam having become a more of a singular publishing platform for, for most has been, has been a big change, you know, it used to be that. I was publishing, if I'm publishing a game, I'm going to do it officially, but then I'm also going to have it on steam and maybe somewhere else. And now a lot of games that publish, they only publish on steam and a lot of those only use, you know, steam, community tools.

So, you know, steam's grown more than seven, seven X over the past decade. So it's steam has really become this monster and learning steam and having that become part of your, your main tool belt has been really important. And then influencers going from, you know, it used to be a group that you would take care of with white gloves, make sure they're heard, take, you know, have a direct relationship, to more of a vital part of your game gratitude, uh, game growth strategy.

It's, you know, it's changed so much over a really short period of time. Going from it used to be sort of something you would do in addition to and now it's, it's, it's really important to grow game is to make sure you've got a robust community of creators who care about the game and want to create content around the game and are, you know, sort of are aligned with how the game is evolving.

Alexandra: Yeah, we're definitely going to talk a lot about the influencer strategy and the, or the micro creator or the mini creator or whatever the words are nowadays, at some point in this episode. And I think what you're speaking to is super similar to, I read this piece called like the strange evolution of the sponsored stream.

It's on a blog called push to talk. And it was about how the relationship between developers and creators. Has kind of changed over the past 10 years, and I really like this because I actually kind of remember living it, but it was never like I never really kind of thought about it until it was broken down this way.

And it was kind of like 2014 to 2018 is the era of like random partnerships, like big random stuff. 2019, 2023 is like big money lottery ticket era. Like I pay ninja 1 million and then now in 2024 now 2025, everything is just like another marketing channel and a lot of the cause and effect relationships have kind of shattered.

You can't just pay your influencers to play your game and make it appealing anymore. That's an old strategy that it's low key, no longer working. And so I think you were speaking and alluding to that. Well, there's even some nuance within there and, I guess, are there any between reactions to that piece?

Tim or Andrew, how do you guys see that evolution?

Andrew: I, I will just say, I haven't read that, that specific entry on push to talk, but Ryan Rigney is a man. He's, I haven't worked with him before in the past. He has a good beat on things, so I'm sure it's fascinating. It's I just bookmarked it as something to read after that episode.

Tim: Yeah, I would completely agree with that sentiment. If we look at games, even, you know, five years ago, the impact that influencers had on game purchases. Was very significant, you know, if you had a favorite streamer or they, you know, whoever that was playing some game and it looked enticing It was pretty much an instant buy And now what we're seeing at least from my perspective Is communities are starting to vote with their wallets more , they they really are looking for games that they resonate with and not just an echo chamber of Yeah, Hey, the streamer did it.

I'm going to go play it because some streamer did it and it, you know, we're really seeing this with AAA studios. You know, they're trying to push so many games out so quickly to hit all these different demographics and they're not really listening to what their communities, their bloodline is wanting from them and that's really starting to impact their bottom dollar.

Alexandra: Yeah. Yeah. Okay. So we've been talking about this kind of like from the player perspective, right. And I think, you know, over the past decade, you described some of the changes we've described some of the big shifts, but are there any differences and attitudes and behaviors that are more split between two components, one being community. The employees of that are employed in the community function towards players, so not necessarily influencers, but towards players and also community inwards. So developers and community interacting together have any, are there any observed differences in attitudes there than they were maybe 5, 10 years ago?

Andrew: Yeah, that's a great question. I think, I think this is probably best broken up into, you know, sort of how. Community is practiced internally, within, within a company with an organization and then externally, when I was first getting started in, in community management, it was a lot more common for community professionals to be treated like a bit of a burden by, like the product team, developers, product managers, et cetera.

And someone more or less to be task mastered by marketing and business teams. Alot of that is just most people didn't understand how to utilize community, but I think a lot of that was also when a community is on fire and you've got one person listening to, you know, what, what is actual, the actual sentimental reality of a community that person can be very annoying and representing like, ah, the world is on fire.

So, it, it used to be, that, you know, working in communities, it'd be a, like, a bombardment of here are all the things that the community dislike without a, You know, a clear hero, the things that they love, but here are all the things that they dislike, and it wasn't until sort of much, much later in my career where was able to successfully get developers and different people working on the actual game involved in the process and interacting with players directly and taking on a lot of that.

Emotional burden, but, but also like that sort of being in the contextual soup and understanding, you know, what, what was, what players actually wanted and why they felt that the way that they, the way that they felt.

Alexandra: Yeah, I definitely feel that it's like there's at least to the first point of community outwards towards players.

It's like a, a bigger and keener interest to hear what they have to say versus 10 years ago might have been you happen to be here. That's great, but we know what we're building and we. I don't really care what your opinion is.

Andrew: Ten years ago, it was really challenging to get a designer to read a community sentiment and feedback report, you know, that was curated from you know, opinions in the community forums.

Or even take seriously the importance of making sure that you know, Changes that were made were being documented and explained with context. I feel like that's a lot more common now that, I don't know if it's just virtue of seeing that being a, a differentiator, a key differentiator in games and going, okay, we need to do that too.

Or just, the, the web is so much more accessible now than it used to be by virtue of everyone's better at it. I don't know what, what the big, you know, the difference is. But I certainly feel like it's more common now as a community manager to not necessarily be, you know, alone in the darkness trying to communicate to the product team what is actually going on and what and what people want and more of a, you know, sort of being a false multiplayer multiplayer in that exercise.

By virtue of enabling developers to sort of have have better processes for for getting that information or for, you know, keeping an eye out for tools like Cohezion and onboarding those tools and ultimately having better tools and a tool belt to be able to make those arguments that aren't emotion driven but data driven.

Tim: Yeah, I think it's really interesting to, to look at what's been going on in the past four years. There's a really big, a huge industry shift, outside of the AAA games where we are seeing a lot of studios that are coming out in they have it in their, their bloodline. We're community driven.

We're thinking about the community first, their core to our game development, we're bringing them in early. We want to hear their thoughts, how we make this game better. Some of the studios that we're working with, you know, it was early as like, pre alpha like friends and family testing, they're leveraging our tool to be able to collect that information so they can make more data driven decisions to appeal to the masses and get their product to market sooner.

 It's been really interesting to watch. Player perspective as, as well with, with part of our system, we, we have these feedback built in. So when you submit a bug report or player feedback, you know, we keep getting the loop, let you know what's going on, but the response to that is players have really enjoyed knowing that, Hey, my voice is being heard.

Something's being done about this. And even, even if the studio chooses not to go that route, because it doesn't align with their vision necessarily. They have some closure on that thing, and they feel like their effort was rewarded just for having that streamlined communication piece. And I think that's where the whole entire industry is going, because without that, it's not going to stick around.

People don't want to buy games they don't like anymore. You know, we get a new Call of Duty every year and. Players are even starting to get tired of that a bit, right? It just because they don't feel heard. It's the same thing. They want something new. They want something engaging and to feel like they're contributing to those things.

There's so much that the community has to offer to make games better and appeal to the masses. And we want to give studios those tools to be able to do that, to consume that data, make it actionable and do something useful with it.

Alexandra: Awesome. Yeah. And I think it's so interesting that you mentioned this is happening so much earlier and earlier and earlier, basically in a product lifecycle.

And I think that brings us to our next topic of building the community, you know, like how, what, when, and who, , and so I have kind of like a, in order to kick this kind of topic off, you know, my perception is that one of the most asked questions is how do you balance showing off The game involving the community really, really early, as you mentioned, Tim, which a lot of the teams that you working with are doing and the risk that you run by turning people off from the product because it's just not ready to show, or it's unpleasant and it's unfun because that's just the way the game development is and it's not perfect.

Almost all the time. What are the tactics that at least you guys have seen in engaging with that kind of like skill and charborous problem?

Tim: Yeah. So this is really interesting because I've seen kind of the gamut of completely closed doors. Like we want to bring in a subset to begin with of like a huge friends and family.

But then on the other hand, we have studios like fantastic pixel castle with Greg street. And they're like, Hey. We're building this awesome game. Here's some previews about it. They have talks on Twitter or on Twitch every other week, and they're doing a lot though. They keep the community engagement going to stay part of that ecosystem and.

They are a year or two or more away from development. Probably further than that. Are interested in a lot further than that, like there's so much to do, but they are already bringing that community in and they're getting valuable feedback about these gameplay mechanics and what they should be doing. The, you know, it's really, for me, it's really exciting to see that.

You know, the community feels like they're, they're contributing in a meaningful way, but it also helps build a better relationship between the studio and the player base. It, you know, just thinking back to like, you know, 1997 when I started, you got a CD ROM, maybe a floppy drive with a game. Good luck.

That's all you're getting, you know, and it was up for us as the players to kind of build mob communities around that. And there was no developer integration at all. And to be where we're at now, it's, it's kind of mountain blowing, really exciting stuff.

Andrew: We're no more, we'll tell you when we're done.

Yeah. My, my, my, hot take on this is, his is fairly formulaic, but like have a thesis for who your audience is while you're building the game, the product, whatever it is, uh, that, uh, and then validate that the thesis is correct before you begin going to market. Once you understand who your, who your audience is, and you can make some assumptions around the different kind of people who will make up that community, and it's, it's a helpful exercise to do, like create like five to eight personas, that, that can be quite helpful.

Once you've done that, determine your primary platforms where you want to grow your community and identify the different bottlenecks that, that'll make it more different or difficult for your target audience to find you. And then develop. You know, content engagement strategies and, and, and chat, chat with players about the things that they care about while you're building the game.

You know, we talked about fantastic pixel castle and just. Sort of the, the long tail of, of talking to a, building a community for an MMO. It's going to be very different than like, like a card game or single player or a co op game, you know, every game is different. So you need to decide when it makes sense to start to both unveil your game in any capacity, and, and then also invite players in.

Because, you know, every, every game is different and that the development tale and how long you can keep people interested and excited and ultimately telling their friends and being part of the community is going to be different. But once you've determined who your audience is and have a good understanding for what you're building, how long it's going to take a lot of those, a lot of the, the, what comes into focus.

Tim: Andrew, I think you bring up a good point about keeping them, keeping players up to date and stuff. And I would say there's almost needs to be like a cadence to that, you know, going back to FPC, the fact that they're on schedule every other week. They're, they're talking about something, they're engaging the community.

They, they do a really good job of. Not letting the community go stale, I think is a good way to put it. They just keep that engagement piece going. And, you know, that's how they see Discord on, or activity on Discord. That's how they're seeing activity on all their social platforms. Is because they keep driving that engagement piece.

Alexandra: Yeah, I think, I think that that's interesting. I think your point around, especially like come up with a thesis for who you think your audience is. And there's like a, you know, similar parallel to that and kind of like product market fit and startup philosophies, you know, like in product launch, there's the phrase like job to be done, but oftentimes like the people that you expect.

Are like not always the people that show up and people use things in different and novel ways. Right? And so I'm wondering, like, from your guys' experiences, can you share a story of a team that was actually struggling to identify the people that or they basically got a bunch of people that they didn't expect or none of the people that they actually wanted.

You know, how did they reverse course? How did they adjust their community strategy to, to solve for that? Cause I would anticipate that's probably like a challenge for a lot of teams is that the people that arrive are not the people that they expected or the people that arrive are just not numerically high enough as what you would expect.

Andrew: I think. More of the second, not numerically high enough is probably more of the common, common situation. I, you know, people who arrive in your community care about your game. And if you've, if you've started to talk about the thing that you're building in the right way, the people who showed up will genuinely care about the game.

If you start talking about an MMO and then you build a, a card game, that's, you know, may or may not be the, be the case. But I think it's more or less common that you just don't have enough, enough people coming up. You know, this is, we're in a really interesting time now where there's just so much noise.

There are so many games coming out every day, every week, every month. It's really hard to capture anyone's attention. And so there are a lot of stories. That you hear of, you know, people who have, teams, product teams that have been making something for a while, and maybe they've even released something, and they have a small fledgling community, and then all of a sudden there's an inflection point, uh, the story that I think you hear the most often is the among us story where, you know, It's out for a while.

And then, and they were doing a lot of amazing things. They were, they were engaged with their community. They were making a fantastic game. And then the pandemic hit and it was just like the right time, right place. You hear a lot of those right place, right time, and you're already doing the right thing, kind of stories.

And then you hear stories like, Seth Sivack, the, the founder of a company called Proletariat. They made a game called Spell Break and they had got a really cool story about how they used imager. And this was probably, I don't know, 2008, 2019, 2018, 2019. I'm not sure what the year was, but they, they used imager to show off how cool their game was visually and how like a, a fantastic combo worked really well as a gift.

And that was actually a big part of. Of how they, they started to build their community, just, just on Imgur, but then you, then you have stories that are like, long time ago. And one, one that I guess I would tell is a story about a game that some people will remember and many people, People will be hearing about for the first time called City of Heroes.

And it was a fairly popular MMO, sort of in the MMO valley back in the mid 2000s before World of Warcraft had hit the scene. There were a lot of MMOs following EverQuest. They were all moderately successful. City of heroes was one of them after world of warcraft. It sort of had sort of its downhill, downhill March.

And after the game director who kind of started the whole project had left, the community was more or less in disarray and, and, and, and seeing the departure as a death nail and the whole studio, you know, really wasn't, wasn't talking with them. They hired a community manager, his name's Andy Beford. He, he came in and he was able to identify an opportunity to grow and regrow a, a part of that community that was emerging, the emergence of, of, of streaming, you know, with U Stream was the biggest, biggest streaming platform at the time. This was 2008 and started a weekly web show where he slowly introduced parts of, you know, different people within the studio and, and, and, and really took, took a game that was not being updated a whole lot.

And the updates that were coming out were coming out with patch notes and no real context or real, you know, promotion behind it to creating content around the future and what, what the company was doing and what the, the company's philosophies and what the company believed in. And it shipped this. You know, this game is going to die soon narrative to one that was very hopeful, optimistic, tell your, tell your friends, old players came back, new players came in.

And it, that is a story that I, I like because it, it, it kind of speaks to. You can, you can be on it, you know, sort of the, the, the downhill death march and come back if you re nurture and take care of the community and treat them like a vital part of the whole experience in the ecosystem. So that's a, that's a story I like to tell.

Alexandra: No, that's, and that's a great story because I think one of the questions that I was going to ask, you know, is what do you guys think is the recipe to building a community in a crowded market? Um, and I suppose the recipe is that there is no recipe and that it has everything to do with your game, the community, the time and everything.

Like you mentioned, Imgur, you mentioned a web series streaming show on Ustream, you know, I was going to ask even like what sort of art and assets and videos are necessary, right? And I think it sounds like, you know, I think all of that is kind of like strategically in the moment. But do you think that there are any kind of must have tactics? if you had to kind of like make a blanket general statement.

Andrew: Yeah, you just got to be lucky.

Alexandra: Great. Luck. No.

Andrew: Yeah, I think the answers are again rooted in an understanding of who your audience is. And then coming up with With unique ways to engage them in a way that's going to resonate if you're a startup or a company that is without first revenue generating success, you should also get comfortable and get the leaders comfortable with taking risks that you can capitalize on viral moments that happened in the world.

You know, the Internet every day is a new opportunity to market your way into success. And I mean, I, I am on the camp that like product first, if your product's not good, if your game is not good, if whatever is not good, it doesn't matter how, how big you grow because everyone's going to leave anyway.

But if your product's good and you could tap into a cultural zeitgeist. And, and seize that moment. Like you've got a real, real chance. I think the unfortunate reality is whenever you're making a game, a movie, nutrition supplement, beauty product, you know, all the, all the, all the noise that is out there right now, it's really hard to stand out.

And so I don't think, I think it's healthy to, to sort of shed the fear of, of trying different things to stand out and put a lot of shots on goal and then pray for a little bit of luck.

Tim: Yeah. The being. Our understanding your community or your ICP, is like super important. I don't think there's anything else that you could really start with that is going to help you accelerate without really understanding who your demographic is, what type of game you're building, who's going to purchase this, all that good stuff, because that's going to drive everything that you do.

And it's funny that you had brought up art earlier. Me and Andrea actually had a conversation earlier this week. And we saw cozy farm games and, you know, we were talking specifically about this, this topic here and what I came up with. And what, what we discussed was, you know, you don't want to make a cozy farm game that is like, photorealistic and to the extremes, because that completely misses the mark on what the community is looking for.

You could, that, that type of player is not looking for that type of experience. And there's a, a feeling to that. And there's other examples of that. That they just don't resonate well with the community. They don't, they don't feel like they belong together and without like, I know I'm gonna get a lot of backlash out.

Let's probably, you know, artists objective. I get that. That's fine. You can, we all have opinions, right? But there's also a bigger picture here. And if you're not able to resonate with FIFA, potentially want to play your game. It's not going to land. The first thing that anyone sees about your game is your art style.

That is the very first thing that has ever seen about your game. And if I see a photo realistic, uh, cozy farm game, I'm not sure I'm going to play it.

Alexandra: Yeah, this is some great points. I mean, I think that that's also like it's soliciting that feedback right immediately. Like if you bring your game with that art style, which is why you do art style resonance tests, you find out very quickly that, oh, you know, ages 11 through 14 are not registered are not resonating with sci fi or something like that.

You know, this is a This demographic is doing that better so we talked, I guess, a little bit about kind of the recipe and like what people should do to build your community. And I kind of want to talk about two other two other groups of people. The first being, um, actually the community manager themselves.

How important do you think the individual is, that's representing the game and the studio is? You know, I think a lot of times, sometimes these community managers grow to be almost micro influencers themselves, to some sort of scale how important do you think that that is, um, and especially in today's market that being maybe something being different than what was true in 2014 or 2015?

Andrew: Yeah, ideally the ideal state for a community manager is to be not invisible, but definitely not the rock star. It used to be where, you know, the community manager was the rock star because they were the one giving the good news and the bad news and all the news in between. And I think the best approach.

Now is for, uh, for community people to identify internal, you know, team members, that represent different areas of such subject matter expertise. And then, you know, these are the kinds of people that players want to hear from. These are designers. These are artists. These are audio engineers. These are producers.

These are, you know, League on League of Legends. We, we would frequently have, have our, have our, the main lawyer, the, the lawyer that we would use, Logan Margulies would, would come in, and sometimes in character as Berloff, and, and talk about the legal side of League of Legends. So, like, players care about your game, and they want to hear about it from a lot of different aspects.

So if you, I think doing it right, and this isn't necessarily like, if you don't do it this way, you fail because there's a whole lot of reasons that could prevent that. You could just have intolerance for anyone talking with the community except for the community manager and that's it. At the top down, you know, CEO led decision, but if you've got, you know, senior leadership at the very top who are comfortable with engagement with the community happening from all levels of the company, I think the success state looks like the community manager enabling a lot of different subject matter experts to come and talk with the community about areas of the, of the landscape that they can represent that players care about.

Yeah. And then of course, there's tons of opportunities for community, community managers to continue to be involved. You can be the host of the, of the podcast, right? You could be the, the host of the, of the show where you're interviewing the lead designer or the, the, the artist who just made the last, concept art for the, for the new character that's coming out.

There's a lot of ways for the community manager to continue to be involved as a figurehead, but I think it's important to disconnect from the only figurehead to a figurehead. I think that is what success looks like.

Alexandra: Notice I didn't hear you say anything about them representing and chatting with the monetization or the business people.

Andrew: If players care about it, they're going to let you know, and then you're going to have someone to go to.

Alexandra: Awesome. Tim, any thoughts here from you?

Tim: Yeah, so kind of a different perspective, but, but in an enlightening way, I think so today's player can be a bit volatile. I think it's a good way to put it, and I think there's a, like, you should have a good balance with your community management team.

I think having one single person kind of isolates them. They're always public facing. And while it's good to have someone that can kind of take on that more public figure, if you will, also comes back with a lot of drawbacks, you know, they're, they're prone to being attacked or smear campaigns because they didn't do something that somebody wanted.

Um, Yeah, so I think it's definitely a balancing act because it is a good way to help the community just have more than one focal point within who's the community management, who can they talk to within the community and Andrew's point about being able to like spread out like good news, the bad news, whatever it is, if you can, if you can spread that burden a bit, it makes the community A little bit less hostile sometimes.

Um, but that also depends on how bad the last, your last release was as well.

Andrew: Got it. Got it. It sounds like maybe it's time for debate if we have time. But, uh, like my, my retort to all this is like, you know, these games and I'm representing games here. Like, you know, it's like eat, sleep and games for, for, for a lot of people.

Right. Like they're, they're, they're in the top three to five most important things that you spend the most time with in, in your, in your day, in your week, in your month. And so I, as a community manager can talk about and represent a design balance change, infinitely less articulate or insightful than a lead designer can, or, or, or an artist can.

So I think that, yes, it is risky. Yes, it is challenging to wade in, especially in a community that is sort of mixed in terms of sentiment and health. But I think it's, it's really important to building trust and really important to the community understanding and resonating and respecting and loving, you know, sort of the team behind the thing that they love to talk with a bunch of different personalities.

And I think you can mitigate a lot of the risks and a lot of the downsides to that with good training and good processes and, and, and identifying the, the, the people who are naturally good at it, because like, I wasn't, I didn't go to college to be a community manager. It just so happened that like, I have a.

I have a, I have a gift to be able to, to, to do this stuff. People who are designers, artists, lawyers, accountants, they all have the same, a lot of them have the same gift. You just need to sort of harness, harness it and foster it and empower the right people to weigh in. And it's infinitely more valuable than having a sort of a single figurehead running around trying to get answers and represent a bunch of stuff that they don't have any idea about.

Alexandra: Hmm. Okay, well, sounds like this is actually a very contentious question. And maybe we could do a separate addendum episode or we debate. But, I want to talk about one more group before we talk a little bit about orgs and community management and also talk about scaling. There are some people here that are obviously not the average gamers.

First, you just described the eat, sleep, whomever. And a lot of these people are actually creators themselves. And I think that there is a challenge of how early and what time is the right time to bring in a heavy hitting creator to your project or at all. And I would think that to a lot of, to a lot of creators, they would care most about their viewers, right?

Not the developers, because they, if they're trying to build a business are trying to build a business. So as a community manager, I might have a very hard time controlling what those people say, because those content creators are constantly under kind of abatement from being not, not real or disingenuous.

But I could also see the challenge of trying to steer between an authentic creator and also them misrepresenting slash getting things wrong. And generally not what I paid for from a creator. How do you guys see the balance between bringing on those micro influencers who are theoretically supposed to support the community and their game, but also have their own personality, their own show, and their own goals?

Andrew: Yeah, I think it ultimately depends on what, what outcomes you're looking for if you are looking for early stage feedback about a kind of game and you go through the exercise of identifying creators that like these kinds of games, like I'll, I'll just throw out an extraction game. If I'm making an extraction game and I'm early in the process and I go and find, you know, 10 content creators that I love how they think about the extraction genre, I like how they critique the extraction genre.

And I want to bring them in as sort of a, a, someone who can help make sure and validate some of the decisions that the team has made about our extraction game months or years away from, from promoting it. I think that looks very different than bringing in a, a creator who's, who the outcome you're looking for from that creator is to sort of hype up a micro or macro, segment of the, the larger gaming community. So it's, I can probably talk about it for a long time, but I think it depends on the outcome that you're looking for. And then depending on that outcome your, your curation, methodologies are going to be very different.

Tim: Yeah. From my perspective, um, I have a love hate relationship with influencers.

Alexandra: Well, I think everyone does.

Tim: Well, so the way I look at this is. Influencers are great for having their, their microcosms within their communities. They are all very similar in the way that they think about the game they're playing.

And, you know, it's a good way to get feedback from a community very quickly. Where this turns into a problem is the over optimization for making your game specifically for influencers or making it where. You know, the gameplay doesn't necessarily fit in with the majority of your community anymore because you've tuned it to, to go with the, you know, 80 hours a week that a streamer might play.

I’m on, I'm gonna call a game out here and I know Andrew, you know, we'll have another day here in a second, but Escape from Tarkov, loved this game. I was one of the first earlier adopters paid way too much money for it. And. I don't have the time to play a game anymore. And we have so many streamers that have come on board and they're able to put hours and hours and hours and, you know, into the game every week.

And the BSG team has kind of over optimized the game for those that are able to put in that amount of time. So now when I go back and play it, it. It's not fun for me anymore. I don't enjoy, I don't enjoy the direction of the game is necessarily gone. They've kind of forgotten about the community as a whole and, you know, aim for what seems like to be mostly influencers at this point.

Andrew: I would, I would say that, you know, that That's less a result, and I'm not going to speak to Escape from Tarkov and that, that whole, that whole ball of wax.

Um, but generally speaking, over optimizing a game for, based on, you know, creator feedback is, is less, , responsible, or less a fault of creators and more, more, I think a failure in, in a decision tree that designers, game, game developers have, have made. I think, you know, we used, we used to talk about sort of the most popular, most loud, uh, people in our communities, the vocal minority.

And since we're talking about how the game, you know, community management and really game ecosystem is, is developed and evolved over the last 10 years, I think that that is the vocal minority now is. Yeah, still the people who are who are actually, you know, posting the two page thread in a discord thread in a discord post.

But then also, you know, creators who are we're talking about the latest patch for an hour and a half on a YouTube video or, or a stream, I think you should absolutely is creators or game creators ourselves, we should be listening to what to the essence of of the feedback that we're getting, but not necessarily make any decisions on the virtue that this is someone who's very influential with within a community because it doesn't always represent the larger community.

Sometimes it just represents the person who can play a game for 100 hours, but that doesn't mean it's not good feedback. It just means you should weigh it against the implications that it. Implementing it or making the change would have against the 90 percent of the other players who play anywhere from two to five hours a week.

Alexandra: Which is why you need a tool like Cohezion to analyze the discord sentiment to understand what the masses are really talking about, versus pandering to the individual.

See, Tim, I'm doing a good job here.

Andrew: Good tools and courage, courage to make hard choices when the most prolific creator is saying that your game is broken because of X, when it may not be the reason, you know? Yeah, yeah,

Tim: Yeah, sorry to interrupt. I do agree, like, influencers do have a lot of good feedback.

They are the players that are playing your game hundreds of hours a week. It's just finding the balance between the two is super important.

Alexandra: Yeah, yeah. Well, it sounds like I asked too many contentious questions. And so, I think I miscalculated a little bit about how our time management here. And so I think we're going to, we're going to skip one of our other topics, which was about kind of like the role in the org of community management.

I think, loosely summarized. Andrew, you had talked a little bit about the structures of moderation communities, driving marketing operators and SLA and tool management, as well as like social media and content creators and there's a bunch of stuff going on the community org and marketing like PR, et cetera.

But I think what would be more interesting would be just to skip ahead to kind of like scaling communities and how to know whether or not your community is healthy. You know, we just now talked about, you know, pandering to a specific influencer, you know, by, and to some extent, potentially ignoring, you know, the majority. I think, you know, Tim, this might be a question for you, but it's like, how, what signals should you be looking for, especially in the pre launch arena that to know that your community is healthy, you know, what activity shows that people are interested in your product and game and not just in each other, because I think that's kind of, I think one of the concerns is that sometimes you get the community together and the people are interested in each other, but they may not be interested in the product anymore.

Initially they were led to each other by the product, but now they're just.

Tim: Um, so this is a really interesting question because depending on where the game is at in its life cycle is really important to this. What we've seen with studios that are very early in their life cycle that are not doing play tests every other week.

They're, you know, typically longer spans of time. What you'll see is when they get ready for a new play test. They'll announce it. You'll see revitalization within discord. There's also conversation, lots of speculation. People are super excited about what's coming. And then, you know, after the playtest.

They'll continue talking for, you know, a few more days and then it'll slowly calm down and you'll see these, these peaks and valleys throughout the early duration. And, and as you're getting closer to release, what you'll start to see is these community members are proactively going out and they are, you know, posting your game videos or any type of media that you have all over the place.

They want other people to be involved in this thing that they've enjoyed. That's what we've seen from like the early side of things from the, we've released a game it's out what we kind of look for in that realm is a little bit different, And a lot of this has to do with. What type of game it is for, if you have a games as a service, you're, you're definitely want to keep them engaged as much as possible.

Keep them, you know, engaged in the game and you want to see those user numbers, the same active users over and over again, retention is very important and you just want to see like engagement. Players that come by and might say something once a day, that's still a piece of engagement. If you start to see that players are falling off and then they start falling off in droves Something isn't right there.

That's kind of a big virtue and discord is a really good Signifier of that from what I’ve seen because it is this asynchronous channel for communication with something like reddit. It's a bit harder to monitor in the same way because You One is Reddit, you know, anything can trigger them, but two, you know, it's, it's more a forum where players come and go all the time.

There's not this asynchronous thought process. Everything is broken up. So those are a few things that we look at. And then I would also say, like looking at. Things like Twitch, YouTube, how many live streamers do you have? What, what's the rampage on those? How, how quickly are they falling off? We, you know, we've seen some games where every time they release a patch, they see a huge spike in numbers and it'll be steady for two or three months and then players start to go off.

And then we've seen other games where players are really excited about it. They want to come back and you'll see this huge, massive spike. But then within a matter of days or weeks, if they're lucky, you'll see a huge fall off in that game, which is signaling something's not right here. Hmm.

Alexandra: Okay. So you kind of address those questions from two points pre launch and kind of post launch. And you know, some of the KPIs that I heard you say that measure long term community loyalty are kind of things like, you know, your classic retention things, retention being literally one of them. Obviously engagement down now, as well as what you said before, like the number of people streaming the game active on Twitch and how much content is being made about it.

Is there any data that is really pertinent to be collected in the pre launch era that you think shows that people are interested, or committed?

Tim: So, yes, and it's actually going to come from the people that are not directly in your community yet. And what I mean by this is when you release something like a game trailer, you're, what you're going to see on, on YouTube is.

People talking about aspects they like about that trailer and things they don't like about that trailer. And those things are going to be very important to your release, because if you see a lot of people that are super excited about this feature that was teased out in your trailer, you release your game with that one thing.

But the community was like, Oh, this is, this looks amazing. I want to do this. And they get into the game and that gameplay mechanic is far less than they expected. It's kind of an immediate sucker punch for them. You know, it's not a great experience. You know, flip side of that is if you have that information, you know, which we're building, you'll be able to look at that information, figure out like, Hey, these players are really excited about this thing.

We have all these videos across all these different social platforms where people have pulled, you know, cut up these different. Shorts for it. They're talking about X and, you know, you can start to optimize for those things that players are talking about that way at release. You know that there's gonna be some type of resonance that exists.

Andrew: Yeah, I, I, I generally agree that the thing that really gets me excited in a prelaunch game is, um, the number of, the percentage of players that are coming back to play in subsequent playtests. Like if I invite a hundred players to a playtest and 50 percent of those players come back the next week with, you know, an email reminder, I'm super excited about that.

I, I think this is, there's, there's no like science here, but I think if you have an idea for what you want conversion to look like, like if you acquire a hundred players or, or you, you have an impression with a hundred add impression with a hundred players and you get 20 of them.

If you're really excited about that. Then you should be really excited about 20 players coming back to a subsequent playtest after having playtested a game for the first time, assuming that these aren't friends and family, these are players that you've, sort of acquired even, even through a level removed from friends and family to come and play a game.

They come back a second, a third time in a percentage that's not. Pitiful. That that's something that gets me really excited and given the confidence that the game is going to do well.

Alexandra: Yeah. Okay. Got it. But so if in your mind, kind of like week over week play test attendance, which is, you know, to some extent, some sort of like self created form of retention is, is indicative to you.

Tim: Yeah.

Alexandra: Got it.

Tim: Sorry. I just had another idea. I apologize. One of the other things I would say is super. At least a good signal is if you have players that are already creating fan art. Oh yeah. I noticed that was crazy to like, like people that are creating fan art, especially like when you're like pre alpha, like those players, there's something there that they absolutely love and they are going to be the lifeblood of your whole entire community.

Andrew: Or guides or fan fiction or anything, really. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Any, anything that is a sort of. Associated with the game that is an amount of you know Is a creative effort in order to create that is that is really exciting in early stages.

Alexandra: Got it. And so okay before we move on to our conclusion I got one more question and and here, because we're moving up on time But let's just say all those things are actually going really really well You know, you've got your 50 retention week over week.

People are engaging people are active, right? How do you maintain engagement as the community grows? Without necessarily scaling to more employees, I think, there's always kind of like this ideal optimization headcount of like, you know, one X person to 50 people boarding the bus, right? You know, how do you guys see companies kind of moving and scaling their actual FTEs with the size of their community?

Tim: I go ahead. Good. Do you want to jump in? Well, I was just gonna say, yeah, so studios will never really be able to keep up with a. Decent scale of number of employees to X number of users, especially if they have a highly successful game. One of the studios that we were working with before they launched, they had nearly 200, 000 members in their discord a week after launch, they were over a million, just exponential growth.

Right. And. You can't hire enough bodies to help with that one, but then you also have the problem of all this information that they're trying to understand is all asynchronous. So they're all working over each other and you can't really collaborate on those data because you're just. You're in each other's way.

So this is where tools become really important and being able to leverage technology to make everyone's jobs easier and to make sure players feel like they are heard. There's just so much that communities generate, especially when you have a successful game, because it's not just one or two people that's creating whatever it is for your game.

You have hundreds, if not thousands of members that are doing this daily.

Andrew: Yeah. No, one's got a crystal ball. No one knows if your game is going to go game busters or grow moderately for the next year or so. So tools is a really good way to go about that in the perfect world. You have everyone that you need already in place for the growth that you're, that you're receiving.

But 10 times out of 10, 9. 9 times out of 10, that's not the case you're coming, successful games, successful products are coming from behind. And growing as fast as they can to keep up with demand because the, the inverse of that is growing too fast, not getting the people that you needed to show up to, To justify the people that you've hired, , and, and then that, that, that's how layoffs , and, and failures happen.

So tools, tools, tools, tools is a really good way to augment how big you should be or how, how big you would like to be when you have a hit on your hands.

Alexandra: Well, that's a perfect final, final statement to move it to our conclusion, because I've got a couple of conclusionary questions here. And one of them is, what do you think are the most important platforms for community building in 2025?

I'd love for you guys to tell me about two to three tools. Tim, you cannot say Cohezion. So outside of Okay. Yeah, you can say Cohezion. But Tim, you can't say that, what do you basically, what's like basically in, in a community manager's kind of like Batman belt. What's absolutely got to be there for you for 2025.

Tim: So yeah, well, on purpose, I think me and Andrew might have potentially different suggestions here and I think it's okay.

Alexandra: Oh, that's been not at all true so far. This entire podcast.

Tim: No, I found this really interesting when it comes to. The gaming industry as a whole, historically, and even true today, there haven't been a lot of purpose built tools specific for the gaming industry to solve these types of problems.

So studios are forced to use things that were never designed for that. You know, Zen desk, for example. Great customer support platform does a wonderful job of collecting that information, but when you're using that for something like bug reporting, it's, it's not the right tool. It's not, it's not purpose built for that.

You're missing out on a lot of really important information. And not to mention that if you. You know, how do you connect that to your intro pipeline? How do you get things working through there? It's a big challenge that exists, even outside of just having that software itself, and that's only one piece of the puzzle.

You still have to think about, okay, how do we listen to all these different social channels? How do we collect all this additional data? How do we understand our engagement? You know, they're so disconnected and trying to build those correlations is really complex. And there's not a really simple way to do it.

You know, someone like Andrew, he can't sit around all day and just try to look at databases to try and figure out how he wants to match people up for specific things. He's got 10 other fires to go put out because the latest patch was broken and no one's happy or, you know, someone's really excited about something and now Twitter and YouTube are blowing up because people are super excited about this thing.

So Andrew needs to go figure out like, what are they most excited about? What can we do with this information? How can we leapfrog off of this and continue that growth?

Andrew: Gotta get my dopamine somehow.

Alexandra: All right, so you're two to three tools.

Andrew: Two to three tools. So I've already got the pass to say Cohezion, but I'm a right tool, right time kind of person.

So like in the same way that you shouldn't, You know, on board Cendesk months before you're taking tickets, like as Cohezion is great, but only when you're at a place of active testing or operating, a live game as a service, I think, generally my answer to what kind of tools you should be incorporating question is like, where are you at in your life cycle, uh, of the product you're building or the community that you're, you're building, my answer is going to be, Radically changed being on that question.

So most of the things that I talk about right now aren't actually like platforms or tools, unless they're very, very specific. Like if you were to say discord, I've got. You know, five to 10 bots that you just got to have depending on what you're, what you're trying to do. Well, my answer is generally more I think teams should be doing things to augment, their capabilities in community by finding community fresh professionals to work with.

They're full time employees on a fractional basis. You know, you've got, , people, tons of people who have been around the block a bunch of times who have who've done had built the game that you're building or built a game at the same scale that you're building and they've got 5 to 5 to 10 hours a month to help you out on the contractual basis to help guide your team.

I think that is a good a good solution to bring in because the, the lessons that you learn from people who have already learned it the hard way are way cheaper. I'm going to cheat a little bit and sort of continue to go outside of platforms and say that Educate investing in education for your community people is more effective than, than, than a lot of the, a lot of the tools out there or a lot of the tools that I can recommend, I guess I should say, because.

You go to like a, like a CMX summit, which happens every year in, in California or, or any number of the, the, the different sort of unconferences that exist, that gather tens of hundreds, or in some cases, thousands of community professionals from a bunch of different industries. You're going to learn about a whole lot of different tools and services and tactics and strategies that you would have ever been able to do, by yourself in your own little vacuum.

So, investing in education and the opportunities for, for community people to be surrounded by their peers. Which is still a very, it, it's a discipline that's several decades old now, but it's still relatively new compared to most it's, very rare for me to bump into someone who else who has done the thing that I do, even in a different industry, whereas a marketing professional, you're going to, you know, go to an airport and you'll meet You know, five other marketers.

So those opportunities to surround the people that who are leading your community efforts with other people like minded people other peers in in their craft albeit in different industries is immensely valuable. Got it.

Tim: All right And real quick, I think you know editor you can move this you know just to kind of highlight like three tools or concepts that you know, I feel like you should use

Social listening is of course important. You definitely need to have something to understand what your community is talking about understanding your engagement in some capacity. Is discord considered a tool at this point? Do we want to consider that a tool? Yeah, I definitely have a discord and then who will be a good third one.

You know, I want to, I want to default to saying like good bots on discord, but I think you also need it to be able to think of the community that exists outside of discord as well. So having something like a note or feature upvote or something like that, where players who are not on discord can still have a way to contribute to the development process is super important.

Andrew: Yeah, isn't, isn't, doesn't Cohezion have like a web API?

Tim: Yeah, we have, we have a web portal.

Andrew: Yeah, yeah,

Alexandra: Convenient. All right. Perfect. And then last question. I would love for you guys to tell me what you think the biggest challenge community orgs will face in 2025. And both of you could give me a response to wrap us up.

Andrew: The biggest challenges community orgs will face in 2025. It's probably not too, too different than 2024 and, you know, basically all of 2020 so far find, find, what's that? Everything's on fire. That's always the case, depending on where you're at. But no, I mean, I think, there's, there's never a shortage of things that you can do.

If you've got, you know, a, a game that is successful and people are playing, there's, there's always value left on the table. So the more you can do the more tools you can incorporate or different processes that you can incorporate to take off some of the more tactical work or, or simplify some of the more tactical work.

So instead of spinning. 30 percent of your time on something, you're spending 5 percent of your time on something. The more of that, that value that's left on the table that you can, that you can tackle. I mean, there have been times in my career where like, I want to spend five hours in the forums, reading everything and commenting on things.

But I just, since I spent a 16 hour day trying to catch up on other things that aren't related to that trying to put together a report that no one's going to read, or maybe a couple of people read, depending on the. On the, on the, the role that I was in. So, you know, there's, there's, I guess that's the summary is there's never a shortage in things that you could do.

So figuring out ways to simplify ongoing, Tasks that are sort of this, the same week to week, month to month, the better.

Tim: I really think communities are becoming a lot more aggressive in understanding what it is that they won't and what the experiences are. Okay. That they are looking for in games.

And I think that's going to be one of the biggest challenges for studios is how do you understand your community at scale, given the amount of data that is created across all social platforms, and how do you take that data and turn it into something actionable? Something like YouTube, Tik ToK, Twitter, Rex, discord, astronomical amounts of data.

You know, we, we see some discord that have north of a hundred thousand messages a day. It's. It's a lot of data and it's really hard to comprehend and manage at scale. And those players that feel like they are not heard quickly go to their friends and family and tell them, Hey, I'm not playing this game anymore.

It's not great. It's not the experience I'm looking for. Because they don't feel like they're able to contribute to those things. And they're starting to weaponize their wallets a little bit. So I think that's going to be one of the biggest changes that we see moving forward in the industry as a whole, not just this upcoming year, but this is going to be a bigger improvement across the entire industry.

Andrew: All right, Alex, unless you like my previous answer, I would like to answer or sort of respond to. No, you know, in a plus one, in a plus one way to what was just just in case you wanted to go with a different, you know, something that I see a lot and have seen throughout my career is you've got us like a single person going through hundreds or thousands of threads and comments and putting together a report that at the end of the day is prone to human merit.

Human error and subjectiveness. And so when you have a tool that you're able to funnel all of that through and come up with insights that are less, more or less unbiased, I think that's really helpful. One of the biggest challenges that a community person has Now and for a long time has just been the scale of comments within a passionate community.

We're not really built to keep to, to read thousands of comments and then have an unbiased opinion on what the, the state of a community is that we then represent the people who are making decisions about a product. But technology can do that. AI can do that. And so finding the right tool to be able to help with that is, I think, a big challenge to overcome in 2025.

Alexandra: Awesome. Yeah. I mean, I can barely keep up with my family group chat. Too many WhatsApps, Too many slacks. I'm like, you know, but guys, this was so awesome. Um, and it sounds like, honestly, like there's so much more to discuss here. Probably could do like an extra entirely extra addendum chapter to some of the things we've discussed.

But we're approaching the end of our time here and there's clearly so much to learn from the both of you and it's been so amazing to have you guys share your journeys to your companies and share your expertise. So, as always, thank you guys for coming on air, Tim and Andrew, and to my audience, if you have feedback or ideas, please hit me up at [email protected]. I'm always open for notes, and with that, Tim and Andrew, we're wrapping. And everybody else, see you next time.

If you enjoyed today's episode, whether on YouTube or your favorite podcast app, make sure to like, subscribe, comment, or give a five-star review. And if you wanna reach out or provide feedback, shoot us a note at [email protected] or find us on Twitter and LinkedIn. Plus, if you wanna learn more about what Naavik has to offer, make sure to check out our website www.naavik.co there. You can sign up for the number one games industry newsletter, Naavik Digest, or contact us to learn about our wide-ranging consulting and advisory services.

Again, that is www.naavik.co. Thanks for listening and we'll catch you in the next episode.