How to Create Breakthrough Worldwide Hits, with Amy Jo Kim

Jordan: 00:00

Welcome to Playmakers, the game industry podcast, whether you work at a studio, publisher, service provider, or startup, this is the podcast that will give you all the information and entertainment you need to succeed in the game industry. Who am I? Just your friendly neighborhood veteran designer and producer, Jordan Blackman. In each episode of Playmakers, I go to work uncovering insights, tactics, and know-how from a wide range of game industry luminaries. My goal? To help you win the game of making games. Are you ready? Then let's begin.

I'm your host, Jordan Blackman. And this week we have quite an interview with someone who was named by Fortune Magazine as one of the top 10 influential women in games. She's a game designer, a community architect, and an innovation coach. She's worked on ridiculously innovative breakout smash super hits such as Rock Band, The Sims, Ultima Online, Covet Fashion, and she also has worked on amazing non game products like eBay and Netflix, the newyorktimes.com, and Happify. Some of you may have already guessed who I'm talking about. I am talking about Amy Jo Kim. She helps entrepreneurs and innovators bring your ideas to life with her Game Thinking framework. And she has pioneered the practice of applying game design to digital services. And she wrote two books, Community Web Building and Game Thinking.

I have read and thoroughly enjoyed Game Thinking. I recommend it. We talk about a lot of the key ideas from Game Thinking in this interview. We specifically spend a lot of time on the concept of superfans, which is absolutely critical, to getting what she calls a beachhead in the market and, you know, building something that can ultimately grow much, much bigger than that. So that's one of the many things we talk about. We also talk about what she calls the journey to mastery. We talk about learning loops, and ultimately this is an interview about how to create products that can scale really big. That are really innovative. So how do you innovate and do it in a way that's going to let you scale big?

Well, it starts with being small. It starts with the superfans. And that is what we talk about in this interview. If you are creating something that is innovative, you want it to get huge, this interview is for you. If you know someone who is working on something innovative, they want to scale in a really big way, maybe share this interview with them. It will certainly help them with their goals. So that is what this episode is all about. You'll also find some details about a free challenge that Amy Jo Kim is doing in September, and you can find all the links in the show notes at, playmakerspodcast.com. So we'll have a link to the free challenge. We'll have a link to the Game Thinking website and all the other key things that we discussed in this interview. Without further ado. I bring you Amy Jo Kim.

What's up, Amy Jo? Welcome to PlayMakers.

Amy: 02:58

It's a delight to be here.

Jordan: 03:00

I've had the opportunity to just sort of cross paths with you over the years and always admired you and always admired your work. I'm excited to connect with you a little bit deeper today and learn more about your thinking. I mean, I've read your book, Game Thinking, and thought it was great. And I'm looking forward to diving in.

Amy: 03:16

Wonderful. Me too.

Jordan: 03:17

Tell me a little bit about I know that, you know, you've worked on a lot of innovative hit games. How did you become you?

Amy: 03:25

Well, the short version is like many people in the games industry, I have a varied and eclectic background. I loved board games. And playing sports when I was a kid, but I wasn't a D&D nerd or anything like that. I studied psychology in school and then I went to grad school and behavioral neuroscience, which was a cross disciplinary degree at the University of Washington and did a lot of computer science and got a job in the computer industry at Sun Microsystems doing client server database engineering. But my background in psychology and neuroscience and computer science all really came into playing game design. I worked in tech, I did engineering work, I did UX, I did a lot of UX work to where I was leading a team of 20 people doing the UX on large projects.

I became a designer and producer at Paramount, which had an advanced product design lab. So after Sun, I worked there and through that, I got a lot of exposure to both gaming and communities. When I first got into gaming was when I was working for Paramount and I was the only person who knew anything about the Internet because I worked at Sun Microsystems, which was a very early Internet company. It kind of helped the Internet happen or help the web happen. And when Web browsers first came out in the mid nineties, that was a real explosion. So I was able to work with MTV and Nickelodeon and the folks that ran the Star Trek franchise and Entertainment Tonight and all these brands that Paramount and Viacom had, because they merged, I was able to work with them on next gen products and conceptualizing next gen products.

I started going to the Game Developers Conference back when it was very small, and I felt like I'd found my people. I remember the first time I ever went to the Game Developers Conference, I was looking around, there was a talk, and I think it was on audio engineering, and I'm a musician, so I'm one of those people that likes to learn in different areas. And I looked around the room, and there were, frankly, a lot of pretty disheveled looking people. You know, it's the games industry and everybody in the room was utterly riveted by the talk in the way I was. And it was about this melding of creativity with analytics. That's what the talk was about. And that's what game design is ultimately about. And I just felt like I'd found my people. And I've been working in and around games ever since. I do a lot of work outside of games. I do healthcare, education, and a lot of entertainment stuff. But I also work in the games industry itself. And I find that combination of being very much in the games industry, but really bringing that to other industries to be very exciting and always keeps me learning and excited about getting up in the morning.

Jordan: 06:26

Right. So, through Game Thinking and through your consulting, you're kind of at this nexus between gaming, game innovation, and innovation in other fields.

Amy: 06:36

Absolutely. And it goes both ways. For instance, one of the games I worked on that was an unlikely hit is Covet Fashion. And I joined that team very early when we were trying to figure out what It should be. One of the innovations we brought into that game was coming from social media, which is that the game has a built-in network, social network, and if you're two way opt in friends within the network, you can borrow things from each other's closet. That idea came out of player testing and it came from zeroing in on who our earliest players were going to be, and then really talking to them and looking at the way they engaged already with the concepts we were bringing to life. And so that's an example of having a foot in both worlds, being able to design and pull design in from outside of gaming into a game. It was really controversial. The team wanted to build more of a Left 4 Dead style of multiplayer gameplay because that's what they knew. But this much simpler mechanic was fresh and it turned that game into a massive hit.

Jordan: 07:44

They wanted to, like, Have them decorate at the same time together or something like this.

Amy: 07:49

Game designers always bring in the mechanics and the dynamics they're familiar with. At least as a starting point, but it's the ability to go beyond that and really come up with something fresh that's based on who your customers are and what they're doing. Well, I've seen a lot of magic happen.

Jordan: 08:08

So I want to get into that superfans concept, which it sounds like is what you're alluding to. I am curious, you know, having read your book, I see how incredibly useful it is for game teams. I wonder if game teams kind of look at something like Game Thinking and they're like, that's what we do. This must be for people who are outside.

Amy: 08:26

Yeah, some of them do, but the really smart ones come and train with me. And a lot of this came out of working with people that had pieces of this already in place and doing it right. So Game Thinking really captures what the teams who've produced innovative hits do. And that goes outside of gaming. Like a lot of what Game Thinking puts forth as a framework, Airbnb followed. You know, it starts, like there's a quote from Brian Chesky, “build something a hundred people love, not something a million people kind of like.” There's many quotes from people that have been successful in startups.

Now, not everyone, Some people that have been successful in startups stumbled into it in a different way, but I've worked on dozens at this point, maybe hundreds of projects, both in a small way and a much bigger way where I'm involved for a year. And I've worked on seven or eight breakthrough worldwide hits that were all unlikely. And there were things that were different about those projects, many of which were counterintuitive. And the Superfans idea is one of them.

So the Superfans are shorthand for high need, high value, early customers. High need, meaning it's not nice to have. They have a real passion, a real itch to scratch, a real need, a real pain point for the thing you're building.

Diffusion Theory published in: 1961

There are many games for instance, like Zynga and they sort of manage through analytics or market analysis, and then take this proven system from this game and this from this game and put them together. And that can work for a while, but the fast follow, stops working at some point and when it does, this unlocks success, but it's hard to do, which, I mean, finding your earliest superfans pre alpha. You know, very early and making sure that the game you want to build that you think is so brilliant and wonderful people actually want to play and many game teams think you can't do that. You can't actually figure that out until you've built something and then they bring their research arm in and the research arm is essentially doing UX testing.

And I've seen this again and again. I saw this is how a lot of teams work. What we do is deliver an earlier kind of testing that's closer to paper prototyping, but for your journey by creating storyboards of your game ideas before you've built anything, including if you've got a working game with live ops and you want to do new features, you do not have to build the features to test them.

So it turns out that that methodology, finding your superfans, but also testing ideas in the context of a journey, rather than testing the UX once it's built in the game, saves you a lot of time, gets you much closer to your bullseye, but it also lets game designers and researchers collaborate much, much earlier in the process.

The teams I've trained up to do that have gotten much better success. Like they've solved problems that were vexing them. They've shipped features that worked, things like that.

Jordan: 12:12

Got it. Okay. Let's dive in cause I love this. I think this addresses some of the biggest issues that I see over and over again with people's concepts.

Amy: 12:20

Tell me about those issues. What do you see over and over again?

Jordan: 12:23

Well, and this has come up with other guests who've brought this up as well. We have basically you have people doing, you were calling it a fast follow. That's sort of the Zynga term. A lot of people think, “Oh, well, this was a really big hit. So I'm going to do that. But with these slight tweaks to these and those mechanics that are going to be superior. And then, and if I get 10 percent or 20 percent of that audience, I'll be successful.” So this would be, you know, all the Battle Royale products, all the Supercell copycats, et cetera, down the line, really. And that style of product is really what came to mind for me.

Amy: 12:54

And what do you see happening there? I mean, obviously some of them work, but none of them are breakthrough hits.

Jordan: 13:00

So the way I think about this is very much influenced by the book Play Bigger, where they talk about that idea of category design. And when you have a category king or queen, then if you're going to take on that king, that queen, then you really have to come to play. So you're basically vying for spot number one, spot number two, or maybe spot number three. And there's going to be hundreds of folks who don't make those spots and just aren't going to make it at all. So what I found is most of those people, virtually all of them don't ever get any traction, they don't make it very far.

Amy: 13:34

My experience on these breakthrough hits, every one of them created a new category.

Jordan: 13:39

You mentioned that you can kind of find these superfans really early through this research process. When is a team ready for that?

Amy: 13:45

As early as possible. And I will say that many teams are not ready for it early because they want to sit around and tell each other how great their idea is. But what the discipline of identifying superfans does for you is it forces you to design for them for real people who aren't you. And the problem most people have is they don't know how to find them and they don't trust that a small number of people will be an effective proxy, which is why the methodology is so important. Because they need to be the right people.

When you're narrowing way down and finding a tiny niche instead of your dreams of TAM, which means total addressable market and all the people that could be right when you're zeroing down like that, it forces you to question your assumptions in a way that's very painful for people who don't want to level up, who want to just feel good about themselves, who want affirmation of their brilliant ideas and I know you know what I'm talking about.

Jordan: 14:45

Totally. And that really is not just in gaming.

Amy: 14:48

It's everywhere. You know the lean startup that Eric Reese put out, I don't agree with everything in it, that's a very engineering centric, but it's a fabulous approach because it's rooted in testing your assumptions. And so Game Thinking is very much rooted in that as well. And that was something that I brought to the teams that I worked with.

I learned a lot from those teams and I also brought things to those teams. Covet Fashion was by far the biggest hit that studio ever had. It was the only game I worked on. And part of what I brought was “let's surface our assumptions and then let's prioritize them by risk. And let's test and stare at and really dive into our very riskiest assumptions right up front.”

The ones that make us feel queasy in our stomach because we go ”Oh, if that's not true, this whole project falls apart.” Testing your assumptions early like that, one, helps you find your superfans, but it also forces you to not make the mistake that you're talking about. All the people that want to do a copycat game, if you actually went through this process and tested assumptions, the biggest assumption is you're not different enough and differentiated enough from the market leader that anybody will care. Boom. Who wants to think about that up front? But if you do, you're going to build a much better game.

Jordan: 16:10

Totally. I was thinking your whole product is a feature instead of an actual distinct product.

Amy: 16:14

Yeah. You know, there's a game I actually really love that's trying to be a Fortnite killer. That's a tough one. That's a really tough one. You know, network effects kick in. I'm seeing the same thing happening now in all the play to earn gaming. There's a few leaders and just hordes of copycats and we'll see how it all plays out. But to go back to superfans, you asked me how early is too early. So, part of where I developed this concept was watching game creators who had developed very loyal fandoms, leverage those fandoms.

So, for example, I worked with Will Wright on many different games, and when we were working on The Sims together, there were a bunch of people that had loved SimCity, and not just SimCity. People that had loved SimCity, super nerds, simulation enthusiasts who had loved SimCity, they had simulation conventions. You know what I'm talking about?

And those were the superfans. We had other superfans as well. Like there was a lot of experimentation at the beginning of The Sims to find the core loop that was really fun, that worked, that we could build the whole thing around, right?

That's also a theme like tweaking and tuning and getting that core loop first, Getting it right first before building the rest of it. You know, all the progression, et cetera, around it, that that's a real expert move. I've seen that again and again, but the superfan thing, first of all, it gives you people to test your ideas with early.

You understand they're not the same people. As your total addressable market is your big mass market. So you collect them. You either already have some sort of fandom you can slice from, cause you don't want the whole fandom. These are people that are really into this genre. For instance, Ultima Online had that with Richard Garriott. We worked on Ultima Online and there were people that had loved his older games because they were really meaningful because they had a lot of moral issues you wrestled with. And so they were some of our early superfans. On Rock Band when we were, that was a very hard game to bring to life. The core loop was a bitch to tune.

Jordan: 18:21

I'm a huge fan. Thank you.

Amy: 18:23

I'm a huge fan too. And I'm like hats off to the team, I helped, but it's like an amazing team. That was hard to tune, but we spent so much time on the core loop and it shows. And I was itching to do something different, to like design the avatars and the levels and all the fun stuff.

Because I was a much less experienced game designer then. And it was like seven months of tuning that loop with the four parts all together and the feedback and how you handle people that aren't that good yet. And you still want them to feel like they accomplished something and all that stuff. So that was great.

But who are we testing on during that painful time that we were tuning the core loop, our typical target market? Nah, they couldn't have helped us. Just the team? No, that would have been dangerous. Superfans. There were like 20 or 30 people that we brought in who were rhythm action nerds. They loved Guitar Hero.

A lot of them were working musicians. Some weren't, it was a good mix. Some of them, a lot of them were really into DDR, Dance Dance Revolution. And at the time I was like, “well, wait, this isn't our target market. Why are they here?” And it was because they were the right people to first capture.

Jordan: 19:33

In terms of building a studio around an audience, it sounds like The Sims, and I didn't realize that it was connected to the audience of SimCity like that.

Amy: 19:42

Here's the thing, it went way bigger, but early on, that's what we leveraged.

Jordan: 19:47

Of course, that's really interesting to me. So are you suggesting that the superfans that you start with don't necessarily, don't have to necessarily represent the overall ham, but that they also might not even be the ultimate superfans of the product?

Amy: 20:03

Exactly. They're a beachhead.

Jordan: 20:04

I see. They're not necessarily the center of the pearl.

Amy: 20:07

No, no, no. They're the beachhead. And if you don't have an audience, there's other ways to find them. One of the most powerful things about forcing yourself to find an audience and test your ideas when they're in rough, paper prototyping form is the testing part gets into your journey.

So all of the games I worked on, Covet Fashion, Sims, Rock Band, Ultima Online had really strong retention. Like these are not fly by night games. These are games where people would play them for months, even years. And part of what we did and part of what I helped do and I now bring to my clients is, “how do you test a journey?”

You can build out a whole game and sometimes you don't test the journey and the game's fine and people figure it out like Minecraft. But Minecraft is in many ways an exception that proves the role. Because look at all the Minecraft killers that succeeded. Look around. Do you see any?

Jordan: 21:02

I know people out there are thinking Roblox, but that's actually not the answer.

Amy: 21:06

Nope. You're 100 percent correct. It's adjacent. Not the same. No, Minecraft is alive and well. You can, if you force yourself and your team to storyboard key beats in your customer's journey over time, just storyboard it. Just not every login screen. Nobody cares about login screens. What is the experience over time?

You've got all these great ideas. You want to do this. Great. What is it like on day one during onboarding? What about on day 7? How about day 14? How about day 30? What about day 60? How are things different at day 60? Is there anything interesting going on between the players who have reached day 60 and newbies?

All those questions-your storyboard your journey and ask yourself those, it's really a series of questions. Most game designers never do that and they just like to get lost in the mechanics because frankly that's much easier. That's what I learned from the Rock Band team. They don't get lost in the mechanics. If it doesn't feel like you're playing music with your friends and getting better, nothing else matters.

Jordan: 22:06

Yeah, totally. That sounds like a core loop thing.

Amy: 22:08

but the journey is built around the core loop. The journey won't work if the core loop isn't solid. That's why so many games and apps are leaky buckets. They don't really take the time to make a solid re-engagement. A core loop is a re-engagement loop. You can call it a compulsion loop, which is a certain style of free to play design. You can call it an engagement loop. We call it a learning loop to emphasize that ultimately, if you make it about skill building, you're going to win versus manipulation.

But whatever you call it, it's a re engagement loop. What are you doing on day 14? Why are you going back to the app or game? And really smart game designers. Think about that up front. And then again, the reason you want to recruit superfans as early as possible is don't test the whole thing. Just test the core loop.

Sid Meier calls it “finding the fun.” It's like, who are you going to test it with? Well, if you're going to test it with your ultimate audience, you're going to have to polish the hell out of it and make the instructions really good. And all the things that a mainstream audience needs, but your superfans, they can come in and they can look at something really rough and the graphics are kind of wonky, but they can help test it because they get it. That's part of why superfans are so important. if you can't find superfans early on, if you're just like, “well, we can't find any superfans for this,” that's a sign that your game idea might have a problem.

It's actually an amazing test. I have seen this over and over again, I have had clients come to me, struggling, zero in on superfans, and then boom, figure out what to build. They're like, “oh my god, it's clear as day.”I've also had clients come in, in love with their ideas. We work really hard to find the superfans and they can't find them. And then they're like, “well, our idea is just too advanced.” And that's not usually the case.

Jordan: 24:01

Some teams, their superfans are the venture capitalists.

Amy: 24:04

In the case I'm thinking of that's a hundred percent true.

Jordan: 24:08

And I've seen that yet where the team is so focused on getting capital that they lose sight of the audience and the product.

Amy: 24:14

Or if you raise capital on a dream, that's completely over-scoped and you're new to game design. I've seen that where it's like, “we don't know, we don't have the old style of thinking and we're going to build this thing.” I've seen that sort of thing get funded and it's just completely out of scope.

I teach a lot of people how to be better designers with lessons from game design, and I do have deeper lessons you know, game design programs that we teach as well. But I would say the main thing I've learned is people that have never built a game, but have built apps, they have no clue. And the more they say they do, the less they do.

Some people come in, they're like, I understand game design is a whole different level of stuff. But game design is so much more complex, particularly social game design, which is my specialty. It's just, it's awesome. I love it. Oh, I love it so much. It's so different than shoving out an app.

Jordan: 25:11

The dynamics, the aesthetics, they're typically at a much deeper level.

Amy: 25:15

Yeah. And if you're going to design a good progression system, you can't just take something from somewhere and plunk it into your game. It's not that simple. That doesn't work.

Jordan: 25:24

When you were talking about the relationship between the core loop and the journey, I had an image come into my head of like the core loop, almost like this thing going round and round. And it kind of, through that process, crawling across this journey. Is that kind of how you see the core connection?

Amy: 25:38

Well, there's a picture in my book of how I see the connection. I mean, like we've illustrated how we see it, but I love what you're saying because that captures why I call it a learning loop because what journey do people want to go on? I mean, when you get right down to it, we're talking about learning and mastery. We're talking about every compelling game. That is really compelling. You feel like you're building some sort of skill, some sort of mastery. You feel like on day 30, you're better at something than you used to be. How are you going to do that?

It's going to be in the loop. It has to be, and you're not going to do that with just rewards and manipulation. You have to give people feedback that helps them build their skills. And so one of the key differences for a lot of people that have been trained up in gamification or free to play mechanics of a certain kind, or even from the gambling industry is really understanding the difference between rewards and manipulation. It's a tool and feedback and skill building. And so that shift is very powerful for driving long term engagement.

Going back to superfans, these three things go together, the learning loop, superfans, and a journey to mastery. Superfans help you test your idea early and really make sure that you're designing for real people, understanding that they are a beachhead, not the destination. Focusing early on your learning loop, making it very simple, but tuning it will help you create long term engagement because you won't have a leaky bucket because you're going to start there. And if that's not good and that's not compelling, nothing else matters. All the gigas and the progression doesn't matter if that core loop isn't engaging and satisfying.

And the mastery path is a way to think about what it is your customer wants to get better at, how they think about themselves, and the journey of transformation, which could be very simple, doesn't have to be fancy, but there's some sort of transformation they're going to go through by playing your game.

Some skills, the way they think about themselves, the knowledge they have about something, even if it's simple. Slack is such a great example of a product that does this in a very game-like way without cluttering up the interface with meaningless mechanics, but it's very game-like in the way it unfolds functionality over time and gives you a path for getting better and better and better at customizing it.

Jordan: 28:00

They were game developers, right?

Amy: 28:01

Yeah, absolutely. It's so interesting to me that game developers don't do gamification. Some do. I mean, some absolutely do. But they do the deeper thing. And, I mean, Slack, they were their own superfans. They built this tool for themselves and then productized it. And they didn't do the fancy onboarding up front. They tune the core loop.

Jordan: 28:22

What do you think of that model? I can imagine folks listening right now being like, “Oh yeah, I can be my own superfan.”

Amy: 28:28

Sometimes you can be your own superfans, but you have to reach outside. And they did reach outside. I wouldn't say Slack, trying to build a game for three years and then having the game fail and then scrambling and turning their internal tool into. That's the model. you have to understand that it was connected to that model.

Being your own super fan, sure to get it going, but as soon as you can find 20 strangers who are so excited about the idea of this existing, because XYZ, the sooner you go outside of yourself and your own little group, the smarter you're going to be.

Jordan: 29:04

Do those relationships with superfans, is that going to last over the length of the development to the superfans change over the development process?

Amy: 29:11

Well, you're going to be adding concentric circles to that initial core, because you need to grow your audience and you need to test your game with your audience, and you're going to need to polish it in ways you don't have to with the superfans.

But there's different ways to leverage superfans. So what happens with the superfans is completely up to the studio, the really smart studios and teams keep them close and make them feel special. No matter what, here's the thing. The superfans are going to hate what the game becomes often. Old timers always hate change, right? It's just, it's always how it goes. So you have to be prepared for that. But if you keep them close and make them feel special, you can usually navigate through that. You really don't want to like to collect them, leverage them, and then dump them on the floor. Essentially, your superfans are a mini community within your larger community of people.

So what I've seen most successful is to put them in some sort of communication thing, whether it's a message board or a discord or a telegram or whatever. Just have them feel like they're a little bit behind the scenes with the devs. And then they tend to stay really, really happy. You can give them like little bits of dev diaries. I've seen that work really well with superfans. Sometimes you can bring them in to test new game ideas. It depends on whether they're the right people to test them or not. It depends on what kind of games they like and what's going on in their life that makes them just right for testing your game.

I worked with a client recently and their assumptions about the game, it turned out that it was perfect for college students, but people that were in their early twenties or mid twenties and had a job were not nearly as enthusiastic, partly because they just didn't have as many hours to spend. And having the team actually see that and play test was mind blowing for them because they hadn't thought of that.

Jordan: 30:55

I love this idea that you can do this process that will help you improve your core loop, the path to mastery, but also it sets the foundation for your community because that's another area where I think a lot of teams get started way too late. It's kind of addressing this other need in a really clever way early on.

Amy: 31:11

I saw Will Wright do that. He had a mailing list of these simulation nerds. And I was very involved in that. And we, you know, brought them in for testing, et cetera. And they also built a lot of content for Beta. Because we let them use our tools. So, there's other things you can do. And then the Rock Band community, that studio Harmonics is very, very good at treating their superfans and their larger community, like a community. You can look at all your fans as an audience, or you can look at them as a community. And those are very different points of view. And you're going to take different actions as a publisher, depending on that point of view.

Jordan: 31:51

Do you think that it's binary like that? Like you're either looking at them as an audience or as a community?

Amy: 31:55

No, it's a continuum. And in fact, looking at them too much as a community and not as an audience can get you into trouble. Somebody's going to have to make money sometime, you know? You have to know what to listen to and what to ignore.

In a sense, you can think of this as community driven game design. And if you have a new game idea and you don't have a brand and you don't have a community, you can actually use the super fan techniques that are outlined in my book, our book, that we teach. We have a three stage funnel, and the first two stages are a screener, a very, very short six question screener, and then five minute speed interviews. It's filtering. And people often come in, and they're not sure about this, but they really want to try it. And so we do it and it's iterative. Sometimes they don't have the right channel and then we have to find a different channel. But once you iterate and find the right channel, get your screener tuned and then get the right questions in your speed interviews, it's astonishing what that machine churns out. It literally drops out superfans. You can use it to test an idea as early as you want because it just works.

So I've trained up entire game studios in this methodology because they tried it once and went, “that saved us a lot of time.” The question becomes once you've bothered to do that, and you've built this little machine that churns out superfans for a game concept, you can tune it, if you have a new game concept and you're not starting from scratch, but then once you collect those people, you create some sort of community situation where they can go into. You can think of it as an expanded and connected prosumer panel. That's how old time marketers and ad companies that do physical products, they'd often have a consumer panel or a prosumer panel or a user panel if you're in digital, where you pluck people that are particularly into what you're doing or have really good feedback. Maybe they wrote to tech support and they were like, they had really great questions. Maybe you invite them onto your consumer panel. I've seen big New York agencies do that. So that's a really well established practice. you put them into a community and you test ideas very early and you filter them for people that can give you good feedback on rough concepts.

Jordan: 34:15

How many people make for a good Start for this sort of group?

Amy: 34:19

you can get started with 7 to 10 and then grow from there. People always think you have to have so many. Even if you can even find five to seven, you can get started.

Jordan: 34:29

Great. I'm curious. I think one thing that some folks listening might be thinking to themselves, I try to channel some of those thoughts is, well, our game is casual and therefore, we're not necessarily going to have superfans cause it's meant to relax people.

Amy: 34:43

That's not what superfans mean. It doesn't mean you get riled up. It means you want a game like that. It means you've been looking for a game like that.

There's a whole framework, but let me just give you a few tips. Three words to remember solution seeking behavior. You always want to see if you can get at people's behavior. Not just what they wish. So much better data. And what you want to find is people that are looking for something like this. Now they might not be looking for a game because your competition isn't always a game. It might be a yoga class or a meditation or taking a walk or maybe taking a nap. You know, looking at Pinterest, trying to relax after something, who knows, like I've tested games where we concluded our competition was Pinterest or Facebook, right? So it just depends on what you're building. But if someone is trying to build a really relaxing game, you want to find people who are through their behavior showing you that they are looking for something to fill this need.

Jordan: 35:45

So right. That makes sense. If it's a strong enough need for them to take action, that's a really good qualification. And that's a really good sign that if you were to solve their problem, they would take action towards you.

Amy: 35:55

Here's a really good example. I worked with a wonderful game company, a game publisher that had been having trouble differentiating their game in a particular market. This is in the home design market, which is very big and there's a lot, it's crowded. There are many, many home design games. There's a few standouts, but people love to redesign a room or a home or a front yard, right? It's very fun. And HGTV has caused that explosion. It's a lot of branded games.

This client, they had some really great tech. They felt like they could tackle this market, but they couldn't figure out how to differentiate it. So we used this methodology and we found superfans and it took a little while, but once we found a vein, we really minded it. And what we found where there were people, often they were couples and they really liked playing these home design games together, but they wanted it to have a co op element in a way that it currently didn't, like they weren't able to find a game where they could really design a room together in a way that was satisfying for them. They could sit together on the couch and talk and look at the same screen. But they wanted to, what we interpreted as was there were numerous people that were in family groups. Some of them were brothers and, or parent and child, or husband and wife, or college girlfriends now living in different places. And they wanted a game that they could play together, that would make them feel closer together.

And this is, I mean, in MMOs, I know all about this because this is very, very common. A lot of guys who were together in college stay together by playing an MMO together, or some other online game. And so this was a different kind of person, but we heard this again and again and again in our interviews when we did the Superfan funnel. And so we said, well we had been thinking about differentiating it with certain mechanics or certain branding.

They said, “Well, maybe the way to differentiate it is actually co op challenges.” And then that's what it turned out to be. And we found a hunger for that type of gameplay. We found people that when we got them into interviews, things would fall out of their mouth. Like, “I did an app store search the other day looking for a home design co-op”. Bingo. That's a solution seeking behavior.

Jordan: 38:15

Amy Jo, this has been absolutely amazing. I could definitely do this for another hour with you. I've so enjoyed you being so generous with your time and with your experience and knowledge. I know you have a superfan challenge coming up. Can you tell us a little bit about that?

Amy: 38:31

Absolutely. So every quarter we run a short single focus challenge on a key aspect of Game Thinking coming up in September, the 14th through 16th. We are focusing on superfans, what they are, how to find them, how to take action. Everything I talked about today and get results on your project. And if you go to challenge.gamethinking.io, you can sign up on our waiting list.

Jordan: 39:01

Excellent. And we'll put that in the show notes as well. Unbelievable. It's been wonderful.

Amy: 39:05

It's great to connect. I look forward to having you on my show too. That's going to be so much fun.

Jordan: 39:11

That would be great.

Another episode of Playmakers Podcast is in the bag. And if you want the show notes with all the links wrapped up with a bow for you, you can find all that at playmakerspodcast.com. If you're interested in giving some feedback on what you'd like to see on future episodes, you can also reach out to me there. And in the meantime, if you want to support what we do, the way to do that is to write us a review and subscribe. I will see you on the next episode. We have some great stuff coming your way. So I will catch you then on PlayMakers.