What game is the most "Community First"?

Which online game operator is the most “Community First”?

So, in the beginning of 2023 I did a research study with some colleagues. We wanted to see if we could devise a way to measure how healthy a games community was and how engaged the game team was with that community. We called this “Community First”. Now granted “Community First” could have lots of interpretations so we set out to try and define it for ourselves. Is it just the absence of Toxicity? Is it a high percentage of engagement? Is a robust content marketing strategy from the dev team “Community First”? Maybe all of this and more?

Initially we wanted to look at lots of games but quickly we realized that it was going to be quite labor intensive, so we cut down the list to 10 games profiled. These 10 games are for the most part large established online games with active player bases and robust online social and community presences. You could argue that we should have included more or different titles, but this is where we started.

We wanted to create a scoring system to try and reduce subjective bias from our research so we chose metrics we could pull and devised a rubric. For this analysis, we pulled six months of data (from Aug 22 – Jan 23) and created three categories of study:

Social Media
Community 
Engagement

For social media we pulled data on their owned Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube and TikTok channels (if the game had them). We pulled total content volume, total original content (from the Dev) and net sentiment (we used the Netbase tool).  

For community we chose the games primary channel of communication. In some cases, this was their official Discord or forum and in other cases this was a fan run Discord or forum. We then scraped six months of conversations data total volume and sentiment.

Finally, we wanted to analyze what kind of content the dev team was making for their communities. We pulled all their original content and separated each piece into whether we felt it was intended to engage (created to have a discussion around like memes, fan art or polls) or whether it was intended to inform (to give factual information like launch dates or patch notes). 

Once we had all this data we ranked each game on each of these scales from 1-10. We wanted to try and normalize the effect of volume measures, so we reduced the weight of metrics like total post volume or Discord threads and gave more weight to sentiment and original content. 

So have a look at the image, you will see where our study netted out. This was out of a total 10-point scale. From our analysis the Blizzard WoW team is our top “Community First” group. 

We have deep dives on three of these games that Ill post later this week where you can see more on how we came up with these scores and what our takeaway was for each. I’ll show you more info on how the WoW team does this. In addition, Ill share case studies on GTA and Lost Ark.