Senior Social Media Marketing Coordinator – That's my new position at Perfect World Entertainment, a video game developer and publisher in Redwood Shores (South Bay of San Francisco, CA).

After about two months on the job hunt and several interviews and meetings with various companies, I was able to find a great opportunity with an exciting company – Perfect World Entertainment.  I will be joining the Marketing and PR team in just a couple weeks, working alongside ambitious and energetic folks that are trying to take over the Free to Play MMO space in the US.

Perfect World is probably most commonly known as the developer publisher of Perfect World International, their main MMO in the states which gamers can play for free, but can also buy items in-game through their cash mall.  You've also probably seen the Perfect World cash cards at your local 7-11 or GameStop.

Perfect World also has two other games out now, Jade Dynasty and Ether Saga Online.  They've got a number of new games coming out next year, with Kung FOO! coming out very soon.  What most people probably don't know, though, is that Perfect World published the popular PC RPG "Torchlight", which is a game that released this fall and was developed by former Diablo/Blizzard devs at Runic Games in Seattle.

To sum things up – Perfect World is a very ambitious company that is very successful in China and they want to make a big impact in the US.  Their current games are doing pretty well (1 million active players across their three F2P MMOs right now, I read in an article most recently), and they've got quite a few coming out in the new year and beyond.  They're doing some exciting publishing deals (Torchlight for example), and I'm very excited join Perfect World as they transition into a new phase of growth and expansion.

As I mentioned in my last post, the prospect of focusing 100% of my energy on using social media to build game communities and market games is *very* exciting to me..and it is ultimately what made this position a real winner for me.  I'll be joining a great team with some big goals and a totally open canvas in terms of what we can do.

Perfect World has community managers for their games, and I'm very excited to work with them to help build stronger and bigger communities around their games. With three games out now (and more coming next year), we should have a wealth of content to share and talk about with our community.  I'm going to try to really push things forward in the F2P MMO space, which based on some of my research doesn't seem to get a lot of love in the community department.  I'm very excited to get on Twitter, Facebook, build our blog presence, and hopefully get into other mediums/platforms so that we can interact with our community in the places that they are online.

Ironically, the week that I accepted the position, Perfect World relaunched their web portal and launched a new company blog.  I encourage you to check out the site – Nice work guys!

This job successfully rolls up my passion for community, social media and marketing into one role – and I'm very excited.  I've got big goals for myself in the social media/game space, and I think this company and this team will help me attain those goals.  I'm looking forward to starting in just a couple of weeks!

The whole F2P MMO space is new to me, and working directly for a game developer/publisher…but I'm looking forward to learning what works, what doesn't, and taking the journey along the way.  If anyone has any suggestions/insights on F2P MMO community, please feel free to contact me!

On a different  note – I now need to find a place in SF in a very short period of time. If anyone needs a roommate, or knows someone that does, *please* contact me ASAP.  I need everyone's help, since I need to move cross country *very* soon.  Thanks for any help you can provide!

In summary…I'm scared, excited, and very anxious to start a new chapter of my life in San Francisco at an awesome game company and in a dream role of a job.  It was a great Christmas/Birthday present, and I want to thank everyone for all the encouragement, support, and help that got me here!

Thanks!

Sam "QforQ" Houston

More social game company investment and development

A $400 million exit is a pretty good indicator that the social game market is huge, and that doesn’t even take into account the hundreds of millions of dollars a year companies like Zynga are making (Zynga is a competitor to Playfish, with games like Farmville and Mafia Wars in their portfolio).  These companies are crushing it, with what I’m guessing is huge profit margins.  These games aren’t particularly complicated..and in most cases aren’t even original.  They’ve got to be cheap to make and maintain, and the money that is made on microtransactions and offers is huge.  This market was already expanding quite rapidly, but I’m betting this encourages more game developers (that are now unemployed?) to create new businesses, and it encourages more Venture Capitalists to invest a few million in a social gaming startup.

More “social” elements and micro-transaction models in EA portfolio games

This isn’t anything particularly new, considering EA has been dabbling with this stuff for awhile now.  Most recently we saw them launch Battlefield Heroes, a free-to-play, micro-transaction funded game based on the popular Battlefield franchise.  I’m not sure how well it has done since launch, but I’m interested in seeing how many more games we’ll be seeing from EA that are micro-transaction based.

This should also manifest itself in the form of more paid DLC for released games, which EA has said “extend the life and profitability of our disc-based games“.  Last week Dragon Age: Origins released and had DLC immediately available, and EA reports that they have “seen strong early performance”.

More engaging social game experiences

In my opinion..most Facebook games are pretty lame.  I don’t feel particularly invested or engaged with the games, with most of the motivation for playing coming from the competition with friends to be a higher level Mobster/Farmer/whatever.  Ultimately everyone is the same, with your character and farm looking exactly the same as all the other players.  I never feel invested in my characters or the games themselves, which I think is a lost opportunity.

I personally would like to see more engaging and interesting experiences – something more along the lines of Quake Wars or even Battlefield Heroes, but in the browser and as a Facebook game.  I’ve never played a Facebook game that blew my socks off, and I’d like to see that changed.

Enthusiast Press will start covering the social game space

I think it has been interesting to note the lack of coverage of the social game market by the enthusiast press (Joystiq, 1up, Shacknews, Kotaku, Destructoid, etc).  I understand why they do it, though, since they’re writing content for their community, and most of their community probably doesn’t find this stuff very interesting.  If perhaps the game experiences become more interesting and advanced, the coverage of the space will start to increase.  Or maybe if EA continues to dump millions and millions of dollars into the space the enthusiast press (and hardcore gaming community) will have to take notice.

It’s probably worth noting that EA owns Pogo.com, a company that makes free internet games and casual retail games, and the enthusiast press don’t really cover that side of EA’s business…so perhaps this one won’t come true

Opportunities for game developers and publishers

I’m wondering what Activision thinks about all of this…Do they see a big opportunity to take market share in the vacuum that may form from all of the EA titles being canceled, or will Activision follow suit and join the social gaming market?

Since so many developers are now out of work, now is a great time for new businesses to be created.  Hopefully we will see all these creative and talented folks start new game companies that will push the boundaries and do interesting things.  The traditional big publisher model of funding isn’t the only way to go, with alternative funding models like Venture Capital investment being real opportunities for developers.  Riot Games recently spoke to Gamasutra about how they have funded League of Legends without taking money from publishers and sacrificing IP ownership.

These new indie studios could partner up with hungry publishers like Warner Bros. Interative Entertainment, who seems to be pretty eager these days to try new things.  They’ve been acquiring quite a few studios over the past year, and most recently published 5th Cell’s Nintendo DS game Scribblenauts.  With 194,000 unit sold in the first month, I’d guess that 5th Cell is pretty damn happy with that arrangement.

What are your thoughts on the impact of the EA changes?  Where do you think the game industry is going next year, and beyond?  Am I full of shit?

Interested in your thoughts!

-Sam

First off, E3 was tons of fun!  It was a great chance for me to see some new friends (mostly people I met at GDC/on Twitter) and meet lots of new folks, as well as get an introduction to a different side of the industry.  There is a big difference between the attendance of GDC (students/developers and press) and E3 (markters/sales, press, and buyers), so it was really interesting to meet more folks on the marketing/sales side of things.

GamerDNA sent me to E3 to do all of our press interviews for a new project that we launched, called TweetMyGaming.com .  TweetMyGaming tracks all of the gaming conversations on Twitter in real-time, and shows you what the most popular games are right now.  It’s a project that I was involved with since day one, all the way from the conceptualization and finding a contractor, to the execution/product direction and then doing interviews with the press .  It’s something that I’m very proud of, and I’m happy that I’ve been able to do yet another project around something I’m very passionate about:  Twitter and Social Media.

So far the project has been quite successful for us, with interviews going up on Kotaku , Joystiq , and Destructoid .  Destructoid’s article even features some quotes from me, as Samit Sarkar was kind enough to do an interview with me earlier this week.  It’s pretty good article, so I hope you check it out!

When I was actually at the E3 Convention Center, I did a number of interviews with Current.Tv and MTV Multiplayer.  These turned in to daily segments, and MTV Multiplayer has put up theirs:

MTV Multiplayer - TweetMyGaming Day 1 Wrap-Up

MTV Multiplayer – TweetMyGaming Day 2 Wrap-Up

MTV Multiplayer – TweetMyGaming Day 3 Wrap-Up

TweetMyGaming/E3 marks for the first project and event that I’ve had the opportunity to speak directly with the press and do interviews.  All the feedback internally has been positive, so I’m really excited and happy that I was able to do this for the company.  My hope is that I’ll get to do this more often, it was a lot of fun!

In the near future I may do a brief post about E3 and what I saw there, mainly with pictures from my iPhone.  So until then…see you around and thanks for reading my blog!

GameIndustryTweet.com will be the centralized site for the video game industry and gamers to find their favorite game industry professionals on Twitter.  Right now the site covers Game Developers/Companies, Press, Public Relations and Community Sites that are on Twitter.

Every update to the site will be posted on the front page of the blog with a list of the new people that have been added.  This means that by subscribing to the GameIndustryTweet RSS Feed you will stay on top of all the latest people added to the list.

As for QforQ.com, I plan to continue to blog about Social Media and offer advice on how the Video Game Industry can best leverage these new mediums.  I encourage everyone to read my latest article on How to Engage your Audience on Twitter .  If you would like to know how to contact me please check out my About page .

Thanks everyone!  I hope you enjoy GameIndustryTweet.com !

Engage your Audience

While this mainly pertains to "official" twitter accounts for companies that represent the company in its entirety (For example: Valve Software , CCP Games , EA , or Battlefield Heroes ), I encourage all Twitter users (especially those that are representing their company on Twitter) to use some of these techniques.

-Ask Questions/Invite Discussion

On our twitter account at gamerDNA I try to not only use it for information on our new blog posts, any downtime we may have, or news that we have to share…I also try to use it to engage and entertain our audience.  This can easily be accomplished by posing a question to your followers.  For example what Valve could ask,  "What is your favorite class in Team Fortress 2?".  You could ask for feedback on new trailers, announcements, additions to the game, or on the latest news from the game.  If someone gives a good answer you can then praise them and highlight them publicly through a new tweet that contains their @Name.

-Be transparent and show gamers who you are

What I also like to do on our official Twitter account is give our audience insight to who we are as a company.  In this new age of everyone being on the internet and on social media transparency is key.  Try tweeting about what the team is up to(IF it’s interesting and not secret) or share funny pictures on Twitter(Through TwitPic ) of your development team.

-Keep in touch with your community

Are you guys at a trade show or event that week?  Hold an impromptu "Tweetup" (a meetup of Twitter users coordinated through Twitter) where gamers can meet you guys at a local bar or restaurant.  Let people know where on the show floor to find you guys, when to stop by for contests and autograph signings, etc.  Twitter is awesome at events for keeping in touch with people and it’s a lot of fun,use it!

Random Tip/Note – Whenever you’re at an event tag your Tweets with a hash tag and an abbreviation for the event.  For example the 2008 PAX was #PAX08.  The reason why twitter users do this is that everyone both at the event or watching the event can keep up with what is going on by searching PAX08 on Twitter Search .  Using hashtags at events can be a great way to meet new people, get new followers who want to know what is going on, and find cool and interesting things happening.

-Highlight cool or interesting community generated content

Did someone make a really good forum post/thread on your official forums?  Did a fansite/podcast/blog launch for your game that blew you away?  Did someone just make some awesome fanart for your game that others should know about?  Share it on Twitter!

Hopefully some of these ideas help get the gears in your head going and you can go from here.  Do you have any additional ideas or thoughts on how companies can better engage their audience on Twitter?  Please share them in the comments section!

Do you have a question or a topic that you’d like me to write about?  Please email me at Sam AT QforQ dot com

To start, I should really be thanking everyone who helped spread the word about the article, retweeted it, blogged it, Dugg it and told their friends about it.  Big thanks also go out to Joystiq who broke the story about the article and then Kotaku who followed shortly after with a great write up.  Without everyone’s support I don’t think this list really would have been as good as it is and I’m happy to have helped everyone out by curating the list.  It’s my pleasure! Overall I’d have to say this experience has been quite encouraging, while sometimes a bit overwhelming.

I’ve received a lot of great comments from folks in the game industry saying that their company is now coming to Twitter partly because of this list, or maybe they are going to try to convince their company to use Twitter, etc.  I’ve also had a ton of requests for more lists, for people in different parts of the industry to be added, etc.  Don’t worry, I’ve got a plan and there should be more lists that includes a wider selection of people in a few days(Hopefully, depending on how much free time I have in the next couple days).

If you are in the video game industry whether it be as press, PR, investor or otherwise please let me know!  Send an email to VideoGameTwitter@QforQ.com and I’ll try to make sure you’re in the next evolution of this list and other lists.

I’d like to leave you by again saying thanks, this has been an awesome experience. Please Add me on Twitte r and check out my About Page for all my contact info . I’m planning to update this blog much more than I have in the past, focusing more on helpful tips and discussions on Community Management, Social Media, Marketing, and the Video Game Industry overall.

If you’re a game company interested in using Twitter/monitoring Twitter and have any questions please feel to email me at Sam AT QforQ dot com and I’d be happy to help you out.  We’re all in this together and the more game companies/individuals we can get on Twitter and other social media, the better.

Please subscribe to my RSS Feed for future posts!

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Luckily, since then a lot of game companies have signed up for twitter and they are using it for various purposes like personal use, advertising stuff they are doing(or worse..just using it as a way to post when they have a blog update via TwitterFeed integration), or even actively using it to interact with their customers/gamers and as a customer service tool.

Since things have changed since that August blog article and I haven’t really seen a list on the web somewhere of all the game companies on Twitter, I’ll try to start a list here.

Notice: Due to the popularity of this list I’ve decided to launch GameIndustryTweet.com .  If you’re looking for a list of Video Game Companies on Twitter please click here .

Please add me on Twitter to keep in touch and enjoy GameIndustryTweet.com !

Company I work for:

gamerDNA:

gamerDNA – Official Twitter account for gamerDNA

JRadoff – Jon Radoff, Founder and CEO of gamerDNA

SamHouston – Sam Houston (Me), Community Manager at gamerDNA

TrapperMarkelz – Trapper Markelz, VP of Product at gamerDNA

Duhame – Sean Duhame, Creative Director at gamerDNA

skio – Antares Meketa,  Social Media Engineer at gamerDNA

Colliny2k – Collin, Engineer at gamerDNA

FattyChubs – Stephen Sopp, Engineer at gamerDNA

Imran_Malek – Imran Malek, Product Specialist at gamerDNA

stealthbaz – Russell Miner, Engineer at gamerDNA

Some quick updates:

Last October I went to Blizzard’s BlizzCon, a convention for fans of all of their franchises (Starcraft, Warcraft and Diablo). It was very very cool..an awesome game convention that was put on by just one company. Every marketer/game company person that is incharge of putting on events for their brand/company should go. They really take things to another level and you can’t help but go away and be excited about everything that Blizzard is doing. Hell, I’ve hardly even played any of their games and I bought about 50-70$ worth of swag

Things are continuing to go great over at gamerDNA. I’m really busy with some new responsibilities, experience, and some great mentorship/learning opportunities within the company. I can’t wait to see what the next year brings, especially the next 3-4 months. March will bring my year anniversary at gamerDNA and it is amazing to think about how far we have come in the last year.

I’m continuing to be active in the social media space…namely Twitter. I’ve got a post that I want to write this week about game companies being active on Twitter, sort of a short update in response to my post last August.

It has now been a week since the last day of PAX and I’m still getting back into the swing of things.  Last week I had the pleasure of attending PAX with three others from gamerDNA from Thursday through Monday which was the entirety of PAX.  We went there on a mission:  Go to the biggest gaming expo in North America and talk to people about gamerDNA.  All in all, I’d say it was a success.

If you haven’t gone to PAX before, you should.  This was my first time going to PAX and it was the biggest gaming event that I’ve ever been to.  Last year I went to SOE Fan Faire and Gen Con and those don’t even compare to the size of this event or the amount of fun had at PAX.  The PAX officials have reported that about 58,500 people invaded Seattle and attended PAX, well over the 37,000 that they had last year.  I wonder what they will have next year…and how they will fit everyone in the Seattle Convention Center.

Most of the weekend was spent spending some time walking around the Expo floor and then meeting up with the guys from work for a press interview or some other event that we wanted to attend.  Friday was very busy for us in particular because that was the opening day for PAX along with the day of our gamerDNA PAX Party that we had later that night.  During the couple hours that we had to poke around on the floor we decided to hand out gamerDNA t-shirts to random PAX goers and check out the various booths on the floor.

The expo floor was huge, with booths from all the major and some of the minor game studios out there.  Strangely absent, though, was a booth from Activision(Besides Guitar Hero World Tour and the Blizzard Booth).  While taking a quick survey of the floor I noticed the dominance of the Xbox 360 which was being used to demo practically every game on the floor.  One of the games that I did see demoed on a Playstation 3 was Mirror’s Edge (they showed the E3 level), which ironically froze up while I was watching and they had to reboot the PS3.

After only a couple hours on the show floor we had to make it back to our hotel to get ready for the gamerDNA Party.  The plan for the gamerDNA party was simple:  Have some food, some free drinks and Rock Band.  We didn’t want it to be too sales-pitchy, we wanted it to be a fun atmosphere for people to come in, talk to people and have fun playing games.

The party was a definite success with over 150 people stopping by over the course of the night.  We had a lot of friends from Microsoft show up, the GamerCast Network stopped by as well as many others throughout the night.  My personal highlight was when Alex Albrecht and Jeff Cannata from the Totally Rad Show and DiggNation showed up for a little while.  The guys played some Rock Band (which by the way, they were really good at) and hung out for a bit.  I had a chance to introduce myself and talk to Alex a bit, but it was really just cool to have guys like them show up to a party that was put on by my company.  We also had Donna Park from Electric Playground (you know, that show that used to be on G4TV..and now it’s coming back on) who interviewed our CEO Jon Radoff and ended up sticking around at the party for most of the night.  Not only was she a gamer, but she was a very cool person to talk to and seemed very genuine.  Two thumbs up!

After that Friday (the first day of PAX), we spent the rest of the weekend walking around the show floor, hitting up some panels, and doing interviews with press.  I had a great time meeting various developers of different games, as well as friends that I’ve made but never actually met before, which was really cool.  I also had the chance to play some games, but not very many…I did a lot more looking than actual playing of video games that weekend..ironically

PAX was a great experience and I’d highly suggest everyone go!  I’m definitely going to go next year with gamerDNA and I can’t wait for PAX to come to Boston in 2010

They need to listen.

Over the past few years we’ve seen sites like Facebook and Myspace balloon in size, everyone and their mom become a blogger, and tools like Twitter dominate the news.  Surprisingly, a lot of companies that you wouldn’t think of as being very active and on the bleeding edge, like Dell and Comcast, are leading the way in Social Media and how to reach out to your existing and potential customers.  I think it is time for video game companies, especially MMO game companies, to take this bull by the horns and capitalize on the wealth of opportunities out there on the world wide web.

First, I think I should start out with how game companies can reach out to bloggers, since I’ve recently joined a Warhamer Online Guild full of bloggers .  Last week I asked them if any game companies reach out to them when they talk about their products and I was disappointed when they answer was "No" followed by, "I don’t think they ever will".  The extent that game companies had reached out to these bloggers seemed to be the simple beta key for a game, which I think is a step in the right direction but they could be doing a lot more.

How to listen to the blogosphere:

Start monitoring the blogosphere using tools like Google Blog Search , BlogLines and Technorati .  It’s very simple to setup a search for "Warhammer Online " (or any other game/company name for that matter), sort by the most recent date and then get an RSS feed for that search result and pop it in to Google Reader.  Every day, and if you can throughout various parts of the day, have someone on the staff monitor the blogosphere for these conversations and respond accordingly.  If someone is having a problem with the game or complaining about a system respond to it.  Even a simple "we’re aware of the issue and we’re working hard to fix it" and acknowledging the writer will help.

Sure, there is a lot of noise out there but you will also find a lot of opportunities for you to create a positive customer support experience with your company.  I’ve also learned that responding within the first few hours of the post is very key so that the writer sees your comment, other commenters see your comment, etc.  It doesn’t help anything if you show up 2 days late to the blog post..everyone has moved on already.

Once you’ve mastered monitoring keywords and phrases that have to do with your company and/or products (game names, company name, etc), you could start monitoring keywords that your company estimates will provide a lot of opportunities to bring in new customers.  Perhaps you could monitor "What’s a good MMO" and pop in the comments telling them about your game and providing the writer a free trial key to the game.  As long as the original poster is asking a question and inviting replies/discussion, you should be welcome and be seen as helpful.

How to listen to Twitter (And other status related applications)

Twitter has a recent success story for a company that has really caught on and being used by millions of people every day.  Luckily monitoring Twitter and other status apps is relatively easy because it has a lot less spam and noise than tracking blogs or forums.  There are also a few great examples of companies that really do well in this area

1. Create a company Twitter account and start updating about things related to your company.  Online game companies could use this particularly well, encouraging all their fans to follow them on Twitter and use it to update them on the status of servers, downtime, patch time, new updates, etc.  Thankfully Twitter has had pretty good uptime lately, so if your game is down, hopefully Twitter will be up and your fans can find out what is going on via SMS, IM, Twitter.com or various Twitter applications.
2. Similar to blogging, start monitoring certain keywords on Twitter and act on them.  Search.Twitter.com is your friend and you can easily create another RSS feed for your search and import that into your staff RSS reader.  You might also want to check out applications like TweetDeck which allow you to use all of the features of Twitter.com and their Search within one application.There are a couple examples of companies using this as a great tool to engage with their customers.  If you ever go on Twitter and complain about your Dell computer not working, expect a reply from Richard who will try to help you.  If you ever are having problems with Comcast expect Frank from ComcastCares to show up and ask you if you need anything.  Two of my coworkers have mentioned Comcast on Twitter before and been contacted by Frank who tried to help them out.  Twitter is a great tool for customer support, community management, public relations and marketing.  Everyone should be using it.
3. Just like blogging, once you’ve mastered the previous steps you can move on to monitoring keywords that will create opportunities for your company.  Here is a fantastic example of how to do this and convert someone into a customer.

For more examples on how to use Twitter for business (or for personal use), check out Chris Brogan’s writeup on the subject.

Another social media site that you can monitor in a similar way to Twitter is FriendFeed.com, which sort of pools all your Social Media action into one account online.  Use their search system to monitor conversations there too.

Right, sounds awesome but…how does it scale?

When you’re a relatively small company or a niche title, I imagine it would not be terribly difficult for a community manager, marketer or PR person to monitor all these conversations.  Once you get up to games like World of Warcraft and Call of Duty 4, it gets a lot harder to separate the important information from all the noise.  At that level you could probably have someone like Frank at Comcast who works full time monitoring social media and taking action if not more.  In the near future I think you’ll see a lot of companies crop up to make applications that are supposed to help you monitoring social media.  I’m currently checking out one of those companies now, so I’ll have to let you know if it’s any good.

Conclusion

All of these are methods that I’m using today at gamerDNA to listen to potential and existing conversations about our brand, products and opportunities that might arise for us.  I’m just beginning to learn about these things so I’m by no means an expert, but I think this is too big to not share with everyone out there and to get some discussion going about it.  It may take you awhile to master each of these things but in time I think you will see how powerful these tools really are.

After all, when have we ever been able to listen to what people are saying about your brand and act quickly?  These are exciting times for marketers.

If you would like more information on social media and getting more involved I’d love to offer advice or my thoughts on the subject.  Please feel free to contact me if you have any questions via email at sam AT qforq DOTT com or leave a comment.  I’d love to hear what other bloggers, media and others in the video game industry think.  You can also find our gamerDNA Twitter account here (which I and a few others are behind) as well as my personal twitter account here.