Table of contents
- ☁️ Psychographic Segmentation
- 🏃♂️🚣 Behavioral Segmentation
- 🧔👶👧 Demographic Segmentation
- 🗺️ Marketing Strategy
- 📌 User Acquisition Strategy: Engaging existing Discord gaming communities
- 📌 User Acquisition Strategy: Sponsoring game streamers to play with their communities
- 📌 User Acquisition Strategy: Engaging players that enjoy the Survivors-like genre.
- 📌 User Acquisition Strategy: Distribution by platforms with existing player bases
- 📌 User Retention Strategy: Foster a discord gaming community around the game
☁️ Psychographic Segmentation
Psychographic segmentation is used to define personas which guide development and marketing in Void Survivors. The following personas are the target personas for the game until release.
🤳 Persona: Streamer
The streamer is a Twitch streamer who is playing social multiplayer games, who is engaging with their audience through their feedback, their reaction to events in the stream, and ideally have experimented with playing games with their audience.
Lot’s of streamers have run events where they play with their streamers, a YouTube search of ‘streamer plays with audience’ reveals lot’s of results = e.g. xQcOW playing Jackbox Party with their viewers.
Streamers will integrate Void Survivors as an experience to increase engagement with their audience in down-times, such as switching between games or starting the stream.
Streamers are always looking for new ways to engage with their audience, to create new rewards and interaction dynamics within their community.
👉 Persona: Community Organizer
The community organizer is someone who is always looking for games they can play with their friends, family, or community. They are looking for accessible experiences that can be shared with a diverse set of people, with a range of different devices, skills, and tastes. They avoid experiences that may need lots of explaining (rules), that may cause technical difficulties, or be exclusionary to members of their community.
The community organizer plays on a high powered PC or on a large screen in a social environment, their community plays on laptops or mobile devices. Their community wants to play together without interruption by other players, and wants the ability to socially interact with each other.
The community organizer looks for games that are mechanics focused opposed to story or theme focused. Ideally the game will allow for emergent storytelling which will form stronger bonds in their community through shared experiences and stories. The community organizer will move players on from experiences if they are getting overwhelming or frustrating at the end of the session, and rarely during a session.
The community organizer discovers games using filtering in Steam or similar app for cooperative, competitive, couch games, and other specific tags. They will consider a large number of games in their discovery and quickly determine appropriate games by looking at the marketing materials.
The community organizer is willing to spend money on rewards that will benefit their entire team and on cosmetics which help themselves stand out from their community.
🤝 Persona: Social Gamer
The social gamer is someone who is looking to socialize, interact, and fit in with a community. They want to feel integrated within community and are looking to cooperate and compete within it. They are open to new experiences as long as they are social in nature. They enjoy competitive and challenging situations where they can personally stand out in their community. They enjoy cooperating with a team to overcome challenges and achieve unique rewards.
The social gamer plays on a low/mid powered PC, laptop, or mobile device. They are highly engaged in the voice chat or text chat of their community, preferring their community chat to an in-game chat, and aren’t entirely focused on the game. They are skilled at video games and are familiar with traditional mechanics, input controls, and tropes.
The social gamer plays games like Roblox, Minecraft, and Fortnite.
The social gamer likes achievements and status rewards which can be flaunted within their community, such as high scores and personal achievements.
The social gamer discovers games using the community they are a part of. They tend to play games based on the trends in their community so they can feel integrated.
The social gamer is willing to spend money on rewards that will make them stand out from their community, through unique class or cosmetics, or that provide them recognition and status within their community.
🚌 Persona: Transit Player
The transit player is someone who doesn’t have much time to play. They have a personal mobile device or a work PC in which they can play on. They are looking for a quick dopamine hit and stress relief whilst they are on break, awaiting a meeting, or their station while on public transport. They are not entirely focused on the game, as they may be in a distracting or social environment.
The transit player is attracted to pick up and play mechanics, they want to jump into the action straight away, and don’t want any risk for putting down the game at a moments notice. They do not engage in voice chat and rarely in text chat to communicate, instead focusing on their solo experience.
The transit player is attracted to destruction, combat, and high octane mechanics. They are more excited to join an existing game in the flow of action, opposed to a slow burn in ramping up to the action.
The transit player discovers games by top games on mobile store or by hearing about it from a friend or influencer. They will quickly move on from a game if it doesn’t seem to be engaging or enjoyable. They prefer small download size and near-instant experiences.
The transit player is willing to spend small amounts of money on spontaneous decisions if they believe it will lead to tangible enjoyment and progression rewards that can be seen immediately.
Persona: Solo Player
This persona is for players that want to play a game and discover team mates to play with.
This persona is a secondary focus until the Beta milestone.
To be completed by the Producer in the Alpha milestone. See Development Plan for more info.
Persona: Survivors-like genre Fan
This persona is for players that really enjoy the survivors-like genre and are excited for a new entrant in the genre. They would like to interact with the developers and express their desires for the game.
This persona is a secondary focus until the Beta milestone.
To be completed by the Producer in the Alpha milestone. See Development Plan for more info.
🏃♂️🚣 Behavioral Segmentation
Behavioral Segmentation will be used in release to be better able to personalize recommendations based on player behavior.
eg A social player will be recommended to join large casual teams and purchase low skill requirement characters, whereas a competitive player will be recommended to join a smaller more hardcore team and purchase high skill requirement characters.
Player analytics will be gathered starting in the Alpha milestone through to Live and will allow driving behavioral segmentation.
To be completed by the Producer in the Alpha milestone. See Development Plan for more info.
🧔👶👧 Demographic Segmentation
Demographic segmentation will be used in release to drive development efforts for features, monetizable content, and coordinate sales.
eg Certain cosmetics will be available for players in certain regions to align with significant calendar events and holidays.
Player analytics will be gathered starting in the Alpha milestone through to Live and will allow driving demographic segmentation. Metrics gathered will be anonymous and comply with GDPR.
To be completed by the Producer in the Alpha milestone. See Development Plan for more info.
🗺️ Marketing Strategy
Void Survivors allows players to join an existing game session by using a simple web browser link. The marketing strategy is focused on user acquisition by engaging with existing synchronous gaming communities to motivate social gamers to join existing sessions, start and share their own session, and eventually have the community provide a permanent session link. Further, the strategy focuses on user retention through the formation of a Discord server and an email list.
The strategy focuses on synchronous game communities, ie Discord and Twitch, as opposed to asynchronous forums such as Reddit or Facebook, as the optimal way the game is discovered is by players joining a link to a live session shared on a community they are a part of.
To achieve this, the following user acquisition strategies will be deployed:
- Engage existing Discord gaming communities.
- Engage players that enjoy Survivors-like genre.
- Sponsor game streamers to play with their communities.
- Distribution by platforms with existing player bases.
Further, the following user retention strategies will be deployed:
- Foster a Discord gaming community and email list around the game.
📌 User Acquisition Strategy: Engaging existing Discord gaming communities
This strategy focuses on acquiring new players through existing gaming communities, specifically Discord communities.
Examples of existing Discord gaming communities:
- Socializing : 169k members.
- Tribe Gaming : 90k members.
- Aura Gaming : 40k members.
To achieve this, the following steps will be undertaken:
- Identify Discord gaming communities, join, and engage*.
- Occasionally post a link to an existing session, looking for online social gamers to join.
- Engage the community owners to post a permanent link to a session, this allows their community to be discovered by other players in game - increasing their community size.
*It’s important to engage consistently and for a long period, as some communities have posting restrictions, which disallow new or inactive users from posting.
This strategy is common in Reddit/Facebook forums, and it is very hard to cut through the noise without paid promotion. However this strategy is not common in synchronous communities as the lifetime of posts is very short.
This strategy is modern, as over the last few years many online communities have moved from Facebook/Reddit to Discord.
This strategy focuses on the main user target, that of a person in a gaming community looking to play and interact with others in the community.
The final step of this strategy is for communities to post a permalink for Void Survivors in their community, this allows players in their community to join at any time and be placed with others in that community. The main advantage for the community is that it can be organically discovered by players within the game, increasing the community user base. Further incentives are affiliation rewards of purchases by social gamers, and in-game boosts for social gamers.
This strategy requires no financial investment and a continual small time investment by having accounts active and engaged in a number of gaming communities.
This strategy will be executed upon during the Beta milestone and persist into Live Ops, after release.
📌 User Acquisition Strategy: Sponsoring game streamers to play with their communities
This strategy is about acquiring new players through existing gaming communities around a Twitch streamer.
Void Survivors provides a unique and highly interactive way for Twitch streamers to engage with their audience. It provides a lot of value in that alone. Ideally this value for streamers will be enough to motivate streamers to invite their communities without explicit partnership or sponsorship.
Twitch streamers like to engage with their audience through a variety of activities, including chatting, content sharing, and games. There are very few games that allow Twitch streamers to interact with their communities, due to player size limits, pay walls, or unfair advantages gained by being able to view the streamers’ screen. Void Survivors is uniquely positioned in that it has no restrictions or drawbacks for sharing.
To achieve this strategy, streamers with small followings (~100 CCU) will be engaged with an affiliation partnership on purchases by their viewers and/or sponsorship costs.
Ideally streamers with larger audiences will see a trend of smaller streamers engaging with Void Survivors, which motivates them to play and share with their stream.
This strategy would benefit from financial investment. If no marketing budget is able to support this effort, then affiliation program’s should be mature and accessible to execute this strategy without sponsorship.
This strategy will be executed upon after the Release milestone.
📌 User Acquisition Strategy: Engaging players that enjoy the Survivors-like genre.
This strategy is about acquiring new players through engaging with players that enjoy the Survivors-like genre through posting on existing game forums and communities.
As determined in the market research there is a huge amount of players enjoying the Survivors-like genre and are demanding new entrants in this genre. This demand means players will be looking for similar titles through the channels of, YouTube comments, Reddit, Facebook, Steam comments, and recommendation sites.
This strategy involves engaging on as many of these channels to spread the word of a new entrant in the field, Void Survivors.
This strategy requires no financial investment.
This strategy will be executed upon during the Beta milestone and persist into Live Ops, after release.
📌 User Acquisition Strategy: Distribution by platforms with existing player bases
This strategy is about acquiring new players through distribution on platforms with existing player bases.
As Void Survivors is deployed to Web, we are able to distribute the game for free via web game distributors such as Newgrounds, Kongregate, and Armor Games. Each of these platforms have over 100K monthly users and distribute web games without royalty or cost. Further, the Steam platform is a primary target for release.
There are lots of opportunities to integrate features for specific platforms, such as achievements, and recommending groups that are using that specific platform.
This strategy requires minimal financial investment, only integrations with each distribution platform’s specific achievement, social, and other services.
This strategy will be executed upon after the Release milestone.
📌 User Retention Strategy: Foster a discord gaming community around the game
This strategy focuses on increasing player retention by creating a centralized community in Discord, which sends notifications, and by building an email list.
This strategy is about creating a centralized community in Discord for players to engage with the game, including finding existing sessions and players to play with, and to keep up with the development of the game. The community will increase keep player retention through consistent updates and events, which are sent out as notifications on Discord and via email.
The achieve this, the following steps will be undertaken:
- Set up a Discord server under the games’ name.
- Provide a link to the Discord server in the game.
- Set up group channels, allowing players to join active groups and join via their link.
- Host events, such as double XP via specific links.
- Provide channels to interact with developers, and development updates.
Games that have used this strategy successfully to foster server’s with 10k+ players are:
- GTFO
- Dark and Darker
- PUBG
Upon joining, players will be asked for their email address for infrequent communications about the game. This email list will be used to send an email once per month for events and game updates. This will increase player retention.
The community will have release updates and development changelogs for the game. This will be posted as a notification to draw interest from players, get them hyped for the update, and increase player retention.
The community will have opportunities for players to engage with developers and the development, through polls and channels that have direct communication with developers. This allows us to receive and react to player feedback.
This strategy requires no financial investment, only time investment in having accounts active and engaged in a number of gaming communities. A small financial invesment is optional for more discord community features which can be added if this strategy has proven to be successful.
This strategy will be executed upon during the Alpha milestone and persist into Live Ops, after release.