Communities have become a powerful tool for enhancing and promoting game experiences for many console and PC games. Deep, immersive games that engage players are a rich source of conversation, with players looking to exchange tips, hints, thoughts and create clans or guilds for increased multiplayer fun. Mobile games haven’t generally had communities on the same scale of size and engagement, both because the most popular mobile games so far have been casual and because it’s been harder to communicate with other gamers across platforms and games.
Red Robot hopes to change that with its new mobile app F!RST. The [a]list daily spoke with Mike Ouye, the co-founder and CEO Red Robot; Pete Hawley, co-founder, and chief product officer; and John Davison, the GM of content & publishing, F!RST. “F!RST is a community app for gamers that our early users are describing as ‘like Reddit and IRC had a baby’,” said Davison. “It allows people to post topics and then chat about them using an interface very much like WhatsApp or other messaging apps. It’s all live chat, and lets you post links and media as well as location data (if you want) into the chat.”
Davison’s background and his previous role as VP of CBS Interactive helped give him perspective on why a new paradigm was needed to connect gamers and game information. “A lot of the conventional media wasn’t necessarily serving what a majority of gamers wanted any more,” Davison said. “Gamers themselves were actually shaping a lot of the story and the conversation through YouTube and Twitch, and there’s a lot of good stuff coming out of communities. F!RST is about capturing all of that with an application and a community that’s mobile first.”
Red Robot launched the development of F!RST after a disappointing experience with the community of their first game.“When we launched Life Is Crime, our first game, a couple of years ago, it got quite a large audience,” recounted Hawley. “It got very frustrating for us because our in-game chat wasn’t very good – in fact it was non-existent to begin with. As a developer it was very frustrating for us, because our audience was on mobile but they were fragmenting themselves all over the place. They just wanted to hang out.”
The company then built a product that would not only help connect players of Red Robot’s games, but would serve as a general tool for all developers to use for that purpose. The launch of F!RST coincides with the launch of Red Robot’s latest game, Friendly Fire, which uses F!RST. “We built an SDK and you can connect the chat lobbies,” said Hawley. “Players in F!RST can jump into the Friendly Fire chat channels and chat with the people in the game, and vice versa. It allows developers to throw in quite a lot of rich content. It goes beyond just chit-chat – it goes to video and pictures and comments and tips and tutorials. So we’ve got this live, rich stream of content and in the future we’re going to give that to developers. The developer of a game can feed that channel with cool exclusive video and content for players.”
F!RST is not only a useful tool for gamers, it’s also designed to be a big help for game developers. “The real thing we’re trying to solve for developers, the big problem for mobile that everyone’s trying to solve is, how to re-engage your audience,” said Ouye. “We found that chat is a great way to do that. What we’re really trying to do is allow developers to own their own audience and create their own network between their own games, and to make their games more social.”
The hope is to move beyond the rather basic marketing techniques used now for most mobile games. “Your marketing strategy is basically to get featured, and if that doesn’t happen it makes life very difficult,” said Hawley. “I’ve spent twenty years making games for various platforms. Audience is everything – it’s a bit of a cliché, but when you live it every day it makes life a lot easier.”
Hawley described the motivations behind the creation of F!RST. “One of the biggest frustrations is a lot of the stores are still driven by the top ten, and then that drives the downloads. That led to all sorts of bad behavior were gaming installs to gain position,” Hawley said. “If you look at the charts generally it’s super frustrating, it doesn’t allow you to find stuff. An algorithm is one thing, conversation among like-minded people is another.”
In order to make F!RST as useful as possible, Red Robot focused on making it easy to use, rich in content – and easy to find what you’re looking for. “One of the reasons we made it live, dynamic conversations is because things change very quickly,” said Hawley. “We do have algorithms on our popular feed that reflect that, the things that people are most excited about because they upvote it or they’re talking about it more than anything else. At the same time, we have this concept of subscribing. Whether it’s a game or a person, you subscribe to it and then it will dynamically update. For example, if you subscribe to Candy Crush, you have a Candy Crush channel and every time someone hashtags their post with #candycrush that channel will dynamically update. So it’s got all the new conversations and the new content that’s posted, but it does persist. If you want to browse through or search you can, we have some pretty powerful search tools.”
Ouye put the whole effort into perspective. “As developers, one of the hardest things to do is just communicate with your own audience because all you have is push notifications. Trying to build a mobile first community to bridge that gap is an important piece of the puzzle for us,” Ouye explained. You can even connect through other networks, and post your chat sessions to share with friends.
How will F!RST find its audience among gamers and developers “Short term, the goal for the effort is to really build audience. That’s going to be through multiple efforts,” said Ouye. “Working with the platforms, doing marketing and PR, working with developers. On the business side, we would really like to become a distribution point for games. The one thing Pete and I have always talked about, something that’s ripe for disruption, is how people find games. Right now a lot of it is chart-based, but we have some opinions on how it could be better. We want to make it more social. We’re trying to improve and disrupt the app economy of discovery and distribution for games.”
F!RST has been released for Android now, and will be on iOS in a couple of weeks when Friendly Fire launches for iOS. Will this become a widespread way for gamers to connect and share Only time will tell, but it’s certainly an important area for the future of mobile gaming to focus on.
