Why is a gaming community valuable to users?

Now, assuming that you have identified the critical elements of gameplay that will drive the features your site will support, and you have a robust social mechanic in place, you are ready to ask yourself "what is this worth?" This is the million dollar question and the answer is not going to be as concrete as you may like.

It is possible to value the community site you have developed by forecasting the site traffic and determining based on a Cost per Click method, the value of each user based on advertising revenue. This is a simple and easily understood model which defines the site as an independent revenue-generating entity. 

However, what if you wanted to evaluate your community in relation to your game? What value does the site add to your game? It is difficult to evaluate your community based on the complementary value of the community site because you may not have any baseline information to use to estimate the delta that your community adds.

The baseline information required are the unit sales, product lifecycle and average player lifespan, all absent of the influence of a game community. Sequels and franchises are usually easier to evaluate because you have baseline data, but the data is usually biased by changing external factors such as marketing and macro-level events. 

Why is this valuable to a publisher or developer?

If publishers are able to adequately plan and execute a portfolio-wide community strategy, they stand to strengthen their brand, expand their customer relationships greatly and form a community with identifiable cultural and behavioral traits. 

Real-time customer feedback is guaranteed, though it must be filtered through a community management staff able to usably distill the data. Your product, though thoroughly tested and debugged will have every possible flaw exposed in the first few days of sales. In addition to game bugs there will also be networking issues, account issues, and platform issues.

With the proper tools and communication protocols in place you will know very quickly what elements of your game need to be patched, which features of the game are successful (or unsuccessful), and what to start thinking about for your next title.

In the weeks following the launch of your game, the community site will keep your customers engaged with your product, its community, and your company.

Interacting with your customers will enable you to better understand their needs, and apply incremental product development releases (such as DLC) which provide a lot of customer satisfaction for a marginal amount of budget and time. 

Community design as a critical element of game design

Designing a community is a process requiring the input and participation of any and all stakeholders in the game.

Planning for the community should begin during the initial design stages of the game to allow for adequate consideration of the data that you will plan to track, the design of game elements to support web features, the technical requirements and the overall interactivity between the web and the game. 

Networking as game design

The fundamental elements required for an online community site necessitate planning and design well in advance of beta phase of game development. It is important to consider how your site will function during the implementation of data collection hooks in the game.  Furthermore, it is important to consider the social aspects of the community while you design elements of your game. 

Have you included features into your game which support socially-oriented activity on our community site? These would be features that enable users to compare and contrast one another, features that enable cooperation or competition, features that provide two-way interaction between the game and the web. The answer is probably no.

The integration of the game and the web has only recently begun and the full potential of that integration only scratches the full potential of both games and the web. The paradigm of multiplayer cooperative/competitive play is firmly established. The paradigm of community-based game shaping is emerging.

In a few years games will be shipped in one state, played and manipulated by the community, and over a matter of a few short weeks metamorphose to another form shaped through the collective efforts and creativity of the community.