Community Managers: Building a Bridge Between Players and Developers
If you’re active in a game’s community channels you’ve likely seen a Community Manager chime in with announcements, support help and answers to everyone’s most burning questions. From writing tweets and livestreaming to providing feedback to developers and providing support to players, community managers hold many roles and are a vital part of the game’s team. So what exactly do they do? Our Community Manager Johanna aka Ciwiel explains.
What does a Community Manager do?
As a Community Manager, I’m the bridge between the players and the developers/the company. My job is to keep our communities happy and engaged by planning and creating interesting content and listening in on what players are thinking and feeling. I also keep the players’ interests in focus in discussions with our developers and marketing department. Want to know what players think about a certain thing? I’m your person!
When did you join Resolution Games?
I joined Resolution Games in 2019 and the culture is really what caught my interest in the first place. I wanted to work somewhere where my skills would be valued and I would be trusted to make the right decisions. I’ve never looked back once since joining Resolution Games.
I think the most exciting thing about working here is that we’re breaking so much new ground. VR is at a point where we’re waiting for it to explode and we get so many opportunities to experiment and discover what works and what doesn’t. Do our players like Discord? Let’s find out by setting up a server (the answer is yes by the way). Do our players like weekly challenges? Let’s try it out. It’s always fun to explore new tactics to connect with our players.
Why is community management important?
The reason why community management is important both at Resolution Games but also at other game studios, is that we’re experts in a number of things. First off, we’re trained in how to have good communication with players. You’d be surprised how hard it can be to try to understand what people want out of conversations sometimes – is the person looking for answers to a question, do they want to make sure that we’ve heard their feedback or do they just want to talk about how awesome the game is? Secondly, being that bridge between the developers and the community requires a lot of time and attention. We need to make sure that what we want to say comes out the right way, but also that what the players want to say to the game team is interpreted the right way. By building a relationship with the people behind the screens we can make better games.
What’s the best part about your job?
I love that I get to hang out with so many awesome people every day online. It’s so rewarding when you get to hear about peoples’ lives and how games tie into that. When you talk to people every day you start recognizing their usernames and who they are and build relationships. For example, we have a moderation team on Demeo's Discord server and it just feels like an awesome group of friends hanging out (even though we do work on the server together as well). It’s also pretty cool when you encounter a negative interaction but you’re able to “turn that frown upside down” by helping the player with whatever they need, whether it’s an in-game issue or finding someone to play with, that really makes the empath in me happy.
What’s one of the hardest things about your job?
One of the hardest things I encounter is when you can’t share all the information you want to share. There can be many reasons for why we can’t tell the players something. For example, we might be planning a big announcement with a super cool trailer that will have a bigger impact if everyone sees it at the same time, or there can be decisions that haven’t been made yet so we don’t have an answer for when X feature will come to the game. It’s never fun to tell people that they just have to wait and see, but there’s always a good reason for why we do.
What would you say to someone thinking of joining Resolution?
If you want to join a company where you really get to experiment and break new ground and have a great time doing so, this is the place for you. There are so many talented people at Resolution and they’re really fun to hang out with as well.
Check out our current openings here.