Eight principles for making a game influencer-friendly

Streamers and influencers can play a key role in a game’s success, but they don’t throw their support behind titles completely at random.

In a Game Developers Conference virtual talk yesterday, ICO Partners communications director David Ortiz Lapaz offered ways for developers and marketers alike to foster that kind of support and create games that naturally lend themselves to meeting the needs of today’s content creators.

Lapaz’s suggestions were built on eight principles of desirable qualities for streamer-friendly features, with each suggestion tapping into one or more of these principles.

1. Creation of narratives: Anything that creates stories people will want to share
2. Sense of ownership: Content creators are more likely to stick around if a part of the game feels like it’s theirs
3. Supporting creators: Features that let content creators turn community support into money will appeal to them
4. Playing with fans: Friend lists, quick joins, and anything that makes it easy or quick for streamers to play with viewers is good
5. Real-time, shared experiences: Whether through chat or multiplayer, things that allow for personal moments between influencers and fans help
6. In the moment: Special events, esports competitions, anything where everyone watching and sharing the same thing is a real part of the experience
7. Emotional connections:: Personalized experiences that let creators connect one-to-one within the game
8. Fun, quick: Make it quick and easy to get into and out of matches to keep the flow up so streamers don’t have downtime or need to fiddle with settings

Having established the basics, Lapaz then ran down a number of features based on these principles, broken down by what point in the game’s lifespan they could be implemented.

Pre-launch

The first things Lapaz said developers can consider are the social features that let people play with each other. Whether it’s friend lists, guilds, and clans within a game or integration with platform-level social tools, Lapaz said…