Khoros Communities Helped Us Level Up Our Stagnant Community
December 05, 2023
Khoros Communities Helped Us Level Up Our Stagnant Community
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with Khoros Communities
Business-wise, Khoros Communities has helped us tackle a tackle a number of challenges in our endeavors. While we have been using other platforms for such, Khoros Communities has been our go to hub for gathering feedback, not only from players, but also from other indie developers facing the same issues. First of all, this direct connection with players, whether they were interested in our games or not, helped us refine our various systems. As indie developers, the biggest challenge would be getting our concept out there and building a loyal player base. Connecting with players that would not have heard of us otherwise has also been a rather major advantage, broadening our reach and potential audience. Connecting with fellow developers, on the other hand, has helped us engage in discussions about various topics, including the latest trends in the our favored genres.
- Receiving feedback about our concepts from unbiased individuals.
- Sharing Developer Diaries and Behind-the-Scenes work.
- Problem solving with other fellow developers.
- Recruiting beta testers.
- A more refined and user-friendly navigation.
- A platform more optimized for mobile devices. We use it on PC mostly since it looks a lot better than on a mobile phone or tablet.
- More in-depth analytics. At the moment it is rather basic in my opinion.
- Community Growth and Engagement. We were already present on other platforms, so its not like we started from the grounds up. However, within a month of joining Khoros Communities we have experienced a growth of around 30% in our active audience.
- Feedback-Driven interactions. While on other platforms our interactions with our audience were mainly in the form of Q&A sessions, a good number of our Khoros Communities interactions (around 20%) were about suggestions to improve, and bug/design fault reports.
- The only negative impart we can think of (although it would hardly qualify as one for most) is that we spent more time on managing our interactions on the platform. This is a rather expected con when we needed these interactions, however.
We were quite fortunate in the fact that we have managed to reach our initial goals with the basic features alone. While we did not engage in any of the professional services, and it did indeed have a bit of a learning curve, Khoros Communities had a big enough community that we managed to increase our user interactions by a decent amount. However, we are aware of the many advantages of the professional services, and fully intend to use these when we reach the final stages of development.
Tools like moderation response, analytics, and content management within Khoros Communities have played a rather important role in enhancing our community operations, especially as our audience continues to grow. If we were to focus on one point, it would be that it was rather simple to sort out the different types of responses and address them according to our needs. While we still believe Khoros Communities could be more interactive and fluid in this regard, it performed far better than other platforms.
- Product feedback
- New feature ideas
While we limited the amount of information that our target audience could access in regards to the insights we received on Khoros Communities, it has acted as one of the central hubs for our internal members. The discussions with the different members of our audience have provided our team with valuable information into how users were interacting with our games and what they expected to see in the future, or disliked. This gave our audience a central role in the direction the development took, as it should always be.
Its no secret that the introduction of gamification elements has always incentivized active participation within a community. While there was room for improvement, we believe Khoros Communities has built a rather optimal model, where users earn points for contributing, answering questions, and engaging in discussions. What was surprising was that it also drove our team to be more active and passionate with their interactions. This really reflected the spirit of our game, where every action is rewarded.
- Discourse, Discord and Reddit for Business
First of all, we would like to stress the fact that one platform is never enough to interact with your audience. The different platforms all have their different strengths. While platforms like Reddit and Discord excel in certain aspects, in the past two years Khoros Communities has stood out with its toolkit, from its analytics to its engaging gamification elements. And yes, gamification elements were present on Reddit, Discord and Discourse as well, but it would be hard to say that they felt rewarding, either for us or for our community. Khoros Communities provided a more sophisticated approach to this feature, one where everyone could feel that their involvement mattered.
Do you think Khoros Communities delivers good value for the price?
Yes
Are you happy with Khoros Communities's feature set?
Yes
Did Khoros Communities live up to sales and marketing promises?
I wasn't involved with the selection/purchase process
Did implementation of Khoros Communities go as expected?
Yes
Would you buy Khoros Communities again?
Yes
Evaluating Khoros Communities and Competitors
- Integration with Other Systems
Khoros Communities has been a great tool, not only on its own but concurrently with other platforms. For indie game devs, the most important factor for success is to get people talking about your game. That means that you have to use every available tool to reach that goal. Khoros Communities has been one of our top three, however.
We would not change it. Joining Khoros Communities while still using other platforms has been one of our best choices so far. If anything, we only regret not joining it earlier and being active there from the beginning of our game development. This would have saved us a lot of time thanks to the quality of the user feedback.