Company: Warner Bros
Entry submitted by: David Turner (david-turner) Digital Manager
Community: WB Play Community (Community.wbgames.com )
Lithy category: Marketing Champion
Our community is the dedicated forum for WB Games titles. Starting with Batman Arkham Origins, it has expanded to Mortal Kombat and mobile games. We now have 6 games on the community, with 230,000+ members with much more to come.
Our Lithium community is the very core of our conversion funnel. In the video game industry, hardcore fans- those who live, breath, and sleep the titles-- represent the figurative end of the consumer journey. People could pick up a game and enjoy it over a weekend, but there are those who play a game 10X over, sometimes in excess of 200 hours, ultimately wind up forming an identity around the game and the brand, and that's why our community exists, to connect them. Our fans write help guides, they speculate about the lore, and they find stuff so detalied (and often inconsequential) that it delights the creators of the game. Our goal is to let our most devoted of the fans create content, and we do everything we can do encourage them to do so. Success for us is a growth in our devotees; we want them to come to our community, stay, find friends online, and ultimately invite more friends into the world of the game. Our community is at the core of this strategy.
All of this leads to the next, larger plan, when it comes to fan migration. Rather than trying to market to the same fans every new title, using the community, we are able to keep them engaged and centralized, so when we annouce our next games, we know exactly where some of our best fans are and how we can share our new games with them.
Our marketing campaign
Last fall, we ran a community based "Cosplay Week" which was a celebration of some of the best user created Costumes based off the Batman Arkham games. We were in a particuarly content poor part of the year and our devoted fans were looking for anything about the game that made them reengage with the brand. I collected 5 top tier cosplayers from across the globe and did daily posts, each day with a new cosplayer or cosplay team. The results were enormous, garnering a reach of near 10 million. We took some of the most hardcore of our fans and turned them into content generators. The fans loved it and it was able to greatly increase traffic to the forum and across all of our social channels.
Campaign results
Because Lithium is able to incorporate WBPlay as it's SSO, we have been able to show a great cross promotion between in game and forum identity. Not only are we able to view the user journey from player to forum member, we are able to quantify results of playtime, forum activity, and ultimately, user value. While I cannot speak to our numbers externally, we have found that players of our games who are active in the forums are active players, on average, 10 to 20 times longer than those players who are not logged in.
We are approaching a quarter of a million members in the WB Community, and show no slow in growth.