GamerBraves Newsletter vol. 52 - Players Vs Fans- How Talking About Breakfast Drives Engagement To Your Titles
Look, it’s no surprise mobile games are big, especially in SEA. They’re a game you can have with you no matter what- I’ve had it from my own personal experiences that while people are less happy to see you whip out your Switch mid-dinner to hunt Malzeno, they’re a little more ok with you whipping out your phone, even if it’s in the tell-tale horizontal orientation.
That being said, not all popular mobile games are equal. While some games may boast big download numbers on sites like AppMagic, they won’t have that X factor that will keep them going.
Fans Vs Players
Look, I know this makes no sense at first, but downloads aren’t everything. Sure, they might be someone’s KPI, but from a user side perspective there’s a lot more going on under the consumer hood.
I’m speaking from experience too- as of this moment I have five gacha games installed on my phone, with two more having only been given the axe because I had to accept that no matter how hard I wished, my iPhone wasn’t going to get a better chipset or storage space overnight. On top of that, I’d made the moral decision to not have YuGiOh! Master Duel or Genshin Impact on my phone, so those are relegated to my PC and iPad instead.
Suffice to say, I play all these games. But I’m not a fan of all of them. Iron Saga is a gorgeous game with great character design and featuring giant robots- all things I adore, but the game’s never gotten its hooks into me in any way that matters.
Compare that instead to something like Genshin Impact. Even if I’m not grinding resin every day (who even has time for that), I’m constantly consuming Genshin Impact in other ways: my Twitter is a stream of fanart of my favorite characters, I keep up with the community’s in-jokes, and when a character to my specific tastes comes out, I’ll even cast the 8-digit incantation of my credit card with the 3-digit aria to bring them home. Despite my many articles complaining and my barely playing it, I am a fan of Genshin Impact.
But What Does It All Mean
Admittedly, creating fans is one of those things that is more qualitative than quantitative. You could argue having hot anime women creates more fans (historically, true). But Iron Saga has lots of anime women. Men, too. In fact, it even has guest characters from all my favorite anime like Gridman and Gurren Lagann.
Rather than give you a big payout all at once, you could argue that the fan-centric approach is more about having a longer tail for your game.
A great example of this would be one of my favorite titles, Revue Starlight ReLIVE. Admittedly, as a mobile game, it’s not great. It comes from an era of Fate/Grand Order clones,and while the anime it’s based off is amazing, the gameplay itself is arguably the worst part of it. Despite that, the Revue Starlight tag on Twitter boasts a pretty impressive amount of fanart, with a significant amount of it being based on characters exclusive to the gacha game.
Does Revue Starlight make millions of dollars? Literally, no. But it does have a strong community in it. One that are likely to be galvanized to show up for events and buy merch.
The easiest litmus test for these will be in your online communities- I’d taken a quick saunter over to communities for Ni No Kuni Cross Worlds- a popular MMO with a seemingly unending resource of lessons to learn from. Unfortunately, none of the communities actually seemed interested in the game, instead they were more interested in trading materials or accounts.
The game’s a financial success, sure. But getting bored is as human as getting curious, and what’s a lot of money now will eventually wither as the playerbase hit the limits of their curiosity in the game.
While you may roll your eyes at the idea of making a mobile game that doesn’t make money, it’s a legitimate strategy, as Tekken series producer Katsuhiro Harada revealed during an interview with Cover Corp CEO Motoaki “YAGOO” Tanigo:
”In our case, "THE iDOLM@STER" is just like that. The game is the starting point of the IP, but if you look at the scale of revenue, the merchandising and live performances are larger”, Harada says.
Basically, what he’s saying is that rather than make the Idom@ster series start and end with the mobile game, they instead use the ease of downloading a mobile title as the sort of gateway into the mixed media IP instead. Yes, Shiki is cute in the game. But what if she was in the anime too? What about a concert?
The Conversion Process
Personally, I’ve found the best way to create fans is to add superfluous content to your games. I don’t mean extra game modes that no one will play, but I mean actual content about your characters.
In Revue Starlight, characters will give you unique voicelines based on the time of day you open the homescreen. These are unique to each character, and will range anywhere from asking what’s for lunch to complaining that they couldn’t get up in the morning.
It’s innocuous, but it works. Genshin Impact does this strategy on a much larger scale with the voiceline menu- these cover everything from your favorite character’s favorite food to even their opinions on when it’s raining. They’re like fuel for fanartists- all it takes is one mention of a character enjoying a glass of wine before there’s a million pieces of fanart of them drinking too much being shared on Twitter.
Never Let Jared Leto Morb
Now it’s important to not go too hard the other way- fans are very sensitive to corporate interference. It’s not uncommon for companies to try to get in on the joke too, such as Jared Leto posting a video with a script for Morbius 2. Believe it or not communities don’t always like that, since part of the joys of fandom is creating something entirely independent of corporate and the IP holders.
A good example of how this was handled well would be the Overwatch character, D.Va. History will prove me right in that 1.0 D.Va was an incredibly dull character, who felt like someone was given the prompt “Gamer girl” and 12 hours to put together a script for voicelines before Charlet Chung came over. Yes, she was a “gamer”, but in the most bland way. Her biggest voiceline was “I play to win!”.
However, once the internet got a hold of her (in a SFW way), D.Va changed drastically. She was being compared to characters like Umaru. Her gremlin form spread like wildfire on the internet, complete with un-flattering doritos stains and horrible, insatiable thirst for mcdonalds. It was an interesting swerve for the character- once a 2d generic pretty girl with rabbit ear headphones, now someone you could put into situations and go “this is what they’d do” with some certainty.
And what did Blizzard do? To their credit, they rolled with it. Rather than fully embrace it, they snuck in neat nods to it, such as D.Va’s sit emote which had her pull a bag of legally-distinct doritos and Mountain Dew out of the ether to eat in her mech. Her Halloween victory pose even had chips scattered on her grave.
While adding those to the game was Blizzard’s doing, there’s no doubt they’d been paying attention to the community’s ideas for their character. By doing this, gremlin D.Va was still a fan creation. But just enough was added to make the community feel like they were contributing to the development, rather than having their ideas ripped off.
Closing Thoughts
While it may seem scary at first, sharing your IP with the community is a great way to get them involved. With so much of mobile gaming homogenizing, an engaged community will very likely be the deciding factor between which games live and die within 6 months of their launch.
Yes, your end goal is more sales. But there’s benefits to playing the long game- and it doesn’t take all that much to actually get people hooked in the way that gets that Twitter engagement going.
What We Learned
Players might play your game, but fans will live it- staying on it for longer.
The “Fan” model can also mean diversifying what you do with your IP. Fans are happy to do anything as long as there’s a throughline to supporting their favorite IP
Once fans transform your IP, don’t fight it- instead find what works and make the community feel noticed but not stolen from
Feature by Wan Amirul a.k.a one of the last shields for Revue Starlight
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