What is the community experience for the user?
- The value proposition of the online game community is the expertise of the player network, the shared interest and passion of the core community members.
- In addition Game Data can be added as perhaps the most compelling reason for participation, but understanding what elements of data has value is critical to building compelling data-driven features.
- Data must be useful, in-depth, comparable and easily accessible.
- But a site needs to provide a socially interactive experience that is based on the gameplay data, yet which is self-contained and self-sustaining. In order to do so the community needs its own game mechanic.
Why is this valuable to a publisher or developer?
- Enables a publisher to strengthen their brand, expand their customer relationships greatly and form a community with identifiable cultural and behavioral traits.
- Interacting with customers will enable 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.
Original Article: http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/3828/building_social_communities_for_.php
