The Ultimate UGC marketing playbook
By Creative team. Top image: Kashawn Hernandez (Upsplash)
How to implement a brilliant UGC strategy
The benefits of user-generated content (UGC) as a marketing strategy are now so widely accepted that even brands like Aldi and Lidl have gotten in on the act.
Hence, from a gaming studio or publisher’s perspective, it seems certifiably insane not to build in a UGC strategy. Afterall, who wouldn’t want to:
Tap into gamers’ inherent love of creativity and self-expression.
Generate a steady stream of free, fresh, and shareable content that retains existing players and attracts new ones through positive word-of-mouth.
Benefit from a virtuous feedback loop that allows you to track your community’s tastes and interests.
Reduce content creation costs by sharing the load with the collective inventiveness of your fanbase.
Create a stronger bond with users by enabling them to deepen their emotional investment in the game.
UGC refers to any content that is produced by a game’s community as opposed to its developers. Examples of UGC include:
• Visual content such as memes, emoji, fan art, screenshots, and cosplay.
• Video content such as walkthroughs, tutorials, live streams, gameplay clips, and machinima.
• Written content such as user reviews, tips, fan theories and fiction.
• In-game content such as new items, cosmetics, maps, levels, modes, mods, and even entirely new games built on the original platform.
So, if failing to market your game through UGC is tantamount to tying one hand behind your back and both feet behind your ears, what does a brilliant UGC strategy look like?
A brilliant UGC strategy
Here’s a comprehensive plan for building your game’s profile and playerbase through UGC…
Give players the tools and support they need to be creative
In-game tools: Design user-friendly tools that maximize freedom, minimize effort, and promote ease of sharing. Templates, presets, and drag-n-drop mechanisms lower barriers to entry. Provide prominent buttons that enable gamers to share their efforts on social media channels and to your UGC platform (see below).
Support different types of UGC: The majority of players want to quickly create content so they can enjoy the approval of their peers ASAP. Empower them so they can take in-game screenshots, record video, or live stream without even thinking about it. That said, it’s still worth providing more complex tools to empower super-users to produce transformative content like new levels, campaigns, or altered game logic that reimagines the gameplay itself.
Make it easy: In-depth guides, video tutorials, and community workshops help players master the UGC creation process. Incentivize your top creators to produce these materials for you. If modding is important then comprehensive documentation and a dedicated support channel (e.g. on Discord or a forum) where developers answer modders questions can help nurture your community.
Leverage influencers and streamers
Creators can attract an audience and catalyze your community with paid UGC until you reach critical mass:
Choose the right partners: Collaborate with creators who operate within your game’s genre. Provide them with early access to the game, exclusive content, and incentives to create and share UGC, such as gameplay videos, tutorials, and walkthroughs. This will help generate early buzz and expose your game to a wider audience.
Diversify: Some games have caught fire when a few major-league influencers have promoted their cause - Among Us is a classic case. But others have benefited from a more grass-roots approach. Investing in a diverse roster of nano- and micro-influencers sparks the initial waves of interest. These lower tier creators are super-influential among their followers, inspiring take-up of your game and then organic UGC as the community grows.
Twitch drops: A great way to boost interest and extend watch times - the drops system rewards viewers with keys or in-game codes for watching a broadcast for a certain length of time. The added incentive is particularly effective when generating hype for launches, major updates, and special events.
Cross-over collaborations: Explore cross-promotional opportunities with other popular games, brands, or artists that resonate with your target audience. This can help publicize your game and its UGC community to a broader audience and potentially attract new players and creators.
Recognize and encourage contributions
Celebrating your players’ creativity, recognising great contributions, and positively engaging with fans is the best way to build community and incentivize more UGC:
Community hub: Create a central hub on your website or Discord where players can upload and share their screenshots, videos, and other creations. Enable commenting and sharing to foster interaction.
Valorant Lobster? Spray
In-game UGC showcase: Implement a UGC gallery in the game, where players can browse and admire the best community creations while contributors can bask in the acclaim of their peers. Add a rating system so players can upvote their favorite contributions.
Engage regularly: Have community managers interact with players on social media, reddit, Discord and wherever else your audience congregates. Respond to feedback, highlight exceptional UGC, participate in discussions, and encourage collaboration.
Social media: Your social channels should be a festival of UGC. Share, like, and comment as often as possible, encourage the use of specific hashtags, take highlights you find on other sites like reddit and promote them, and celebrate the diversity of your user’s efforts: from memes that raise a smile, all the way up to impressive cosplay and outstanding in-game achievements.
Inspired by the community: Turn memorable UGC such as funny memes into official content. For example, Riot Games created a spray for Valorant, based on an entertaining clip from a Twitch streamer.
Events and contests
Every community needs a calendar of activities to stimulate interaction and excitement:
Regular competitions: Host regular contests for best maps, items, screenshots, and creative gameplay clips. Offer contributors appealing rewards such as in-game currency, consumables, rare items, or the chance to have their contribution realized as in-game content.
Themed challenges: Organize competitions that tie into cultural events, holidays, and game updates to inspire creativity. Aim to create repeatable formats that people can look forward to, and make challenges inclusive: by giving the whole community a chance to vote on the winners, for example.
Co-op projects: Challenge the community with large scale tasks that require collaboration to complete, promoting teamwork and interaction.
Community spotlights: Curate and highlight exceptional UGC on your website, social media, and in-game to inspire others to join in. Introduce features like, “Play of the Week” which encourages users to record and share their moves - promoting the game to others and showing how fantastic it can be. “Creator of the month” celebrates the contributions of a particular community member, including an interview and a gallery of their work. Regulars like this can be collated later into annual “Best of” collections. Some studios drive even more views to these posts by attaching reward codes to a selection.
Trend-spotting: Jump on trends that light the touchpaper of creativity. For example, players may compete to build insanely hard levels, or make a cosmetic inspired by a real-life TikTok viral trend, or design a tricked-out vehicle that’s functionally a liability but looks amazing. You can stoke the flames of competition with the immortal call-to-arms: “Can you make something better than this?”
Community management
Naturally you need a system for maintaining control over UGC to ensure that shared content is appropriate and reflects your brand values:
Moderation: Establish clear guidelines and policies to ensure the community remains positive, welcoming, and respectful.
Build a UGC framework: Develop a system for accepting, moderating, and publishing UGC. This may include creating submission guidelines, establishing a review process, and setting up a platform for players to share their creations. Be prepared to address conflicts, copyright violations, and other issues that may arise.
Select your UGC platform: This is where players can upload, browse, rate, and download UGC. A UGC platform can be integrated in-game as a first-party or third-party solution. Alternatively, you can use an external site such as WordPress or Discord.
Monitoring and adjusting your UGC strategy: Ensure your platform includes analytics that enable you to understand the impact of UGC on your game. Track engagement, conversion, and retention rates, especially on UGC that you are promoting or is popular within your community. A user review system adds an additional datapoint to measure UGC relevance and quality.
Adjust your tactics to generate more of the UGC types that attract and retain players in your ecosystem.
Positive feedback loop
Executing a brilliant UGC strategy enables studios and publishers to enlist their community in the endeavor that underpins all gaming: having fun through creative self-expression.
That makes UGC a natural resource that will flow organically if managed correctly, and with an understanding of the shared passion that all gamers share.
We can help by firing up your community with creative ideas that get their UGC juices flowing, and by deploying the best practice we’ve learned by building communities across a diverse range of videogame clients.
With dedicated management, a UGC strategy can create a virtuous circle of fresh content and social buzz that keeps drawing in fresh players, retains the ones you have, and extends the lifecycle of your game.
Did you know?
The first game to enable UGC is commonly accepted to be Pinball Construction Set (1983, Apple II).
Castle Smurfenstein (1983) is credited as the first mod (Parent game: Castle Wolfenstein, 1981, Apple II).
If you would like to discover more about our integrated approach and work together on a project, get in touch.
