discoverability as a distribution channel for UGC games
Breaking through the discoverability roadblock
In a world that gaming companies highly rely on live-ops (gaas), user generated content keeps gaining traction in industry conversations. Allowing players to serve new maps, items or content sets an opportunity for companies to focus on other goals while still nurturing organic growth through creators that will do anything to get players trying what they passionately built and feel proud of (IKEA effect, [1]).
Within this virtual world that UGC platforms are powering, players and creators join because there is value. And where there is value accruing within a platform, there is a value chain to be captured by creators—unbeknownst to them, they look for three things which UGC can precisely deliver: making them famous, making them money, or making them friends.
To grasp success on the first two, it’s key to subscribe to the idea that UGC is first and foremost an engine for innovation. Creator ecosystems are made up of countless creators that collaborate and compete with one another for audiences. Network effects are too strong to crack by coming up with the same game genres when you don't have distribution, forcing ambitious creators to innovate and anticipate what players might want in order to get some initial recognition—their first players, a remarkable moment in time.
Fostering innovation in games is particularly interesting because the gaming industry is additive instead of subtractive. Insofar as of other industries where innovation completely disrupts and force established players to move on and leave things behind, on games, innovative content or technology is added on top of old layers, coming not to replace the old ones, but to complement them.
Above all, UGC is also an early indicator lab of trends. Allowing creators to come up with authentic content was a significant driver of taste—a catalyst for tendencies—over the last decade. The well-known Battle Royale genre trended in the early 2010's on Minecraft through the hunger games title. Garry's Mod made popular the 'Hide and Seek' genre that's vastly known on Roblox now. The survival game DayZ was first assembled by mod creators expressing their creativity on Arma 2, which later led to more innovation, with the up and coming Extraction Shooter genre being originated from a combination of all that—Survival looters and Battle Royale's. Fun fact, a lot of the successful mod-generated titles were acquired by Valve and ran over the past decades (Counter-Strike from a HL mod; TF2 from a Quake mod; DOTA from a Warcraft mod; and somehow Left4Dead and Portal). This shows the power that UGC games have, and that numerous well-known game genres were born proceeding from UGC.
MM dollar question: how to create a snapshot of the ugc scene to detect emerging genres/trends.
However, not everything is roses when we allow players to create content. Healthy creator ecosystems should empower a multitude of creators to grow. Innovation seems to be going astray when your game can't grow amidst competitors that drains all players, and, if Roblox, Minecraft, and other creator platforms are any indication, the UGC dream for creators is currently a lot less uniform than we imagine. Why?
The status quo for UGC gaming
“Danger forms when a few creators become too big at the expense of others”.
As gaming platforms grow, established creators are benefited in a particular way from UGC because games, unlike videos, can have no engagement limit. While someone may watch their favorite YouTube video a dozen times, they could sink hundreds of hours progressing into their favorite user-created game [2].
Not just that, but any successful game demands more time to create—and maintain—than producing a video. YouTube creators are fine knowing that getting viral takes time, they know that the curve feels flat in the beginning—but the reality is that it is not; it's still a wonderful exponential curve that's fed by consistency on content creation. Games are different though, you can't easily produce different games and not touch them anymore waiting for a magical distribution to come.
In addition, games are often social experiences. Players like to play with their friends in the same game. More players beget more players. This social tendency to cluster creates two layers of network effect for gaming creator platforms: one at the platform level and one at the user-created game level. When network effects are present they are among the most important reasons you’ll pick one product or service over another.
Due to that, UGC platforms often exhibit monopolistic tendencies where one small percentage of games dominates all emerging rivals.
And for what it's worth, I can briefly recount my past experience as a creator on Minecraft.
Six-figures of Annual Revenue
Let's analyse a real example of over-concentration.
I spent my childhood developing game servers on Minecraft. Over the years, I founded a highly prestigious server, and after all decided to merge one of my games with an extremely popular NA network.
The success wasn't clear though. When I started venturing, no matter how good my games were, I always had a hard time finding my distribution channels. A common method was getting YouTubers to play it, but, even with them being surprised by the game quality (and overall having fun playing it), they were still too afraid of recording outside the bubble where 90% of their subscribers were playing on—the dominant servers. Without a significant distribution channel, I knew I could never scale.
Over years, I got lucky to generate enough early excitement and cross the hundreds of players I needed to ignite initial traction. But the problem always assembled back; the two-sided network effect—at the platform level and at the user-created game level—from big creators was so strong that I was challenged to simply sustain growth. I call this the "Death Valley"—you've to hustle, as much as you can, to cross a specific bar of CCU's that will beget enough word-of-mouth for you to keep growing.
If this bar is not constantly hit, your game will lose players over the months and come back to the level that just your true fans will be playing it.
This last example is a critical point to any ambitious creator that dreams to compete with an established rival. Winning players away from a dominant game server isn’t as easy as offering a product or service that is better. Any product that is incompatible with the dominant server has to exceed the value of the technical features they have, plus—since the new creator likely starts with a very small amount of users—the value of the incumbent’s exchange, switching cost, and complementary product benefit. And the dominant creator must not be able to easily copy any of the newcomer’s valuable innovations; otherwise they will quickly neutralize any valuable improvements they had.
Focusing on uniqueness of gameplay to spread the word and get players is one solution, though that alone will not lead to sustainable growth over a long-period of time. A healthier creator ecosystem requires different approaches from the platform level. I will focus here on the one I believe the most: content discoverability—a huge benefit for platforms to create and own the means of distribution inside their ecosystem.
Reimagining Content Discovery
“Content discovery sits at the heart of creator platforms. It’s what enables players to find new content, and by the same token, allow new content to be discovered”
The reality shows us a need for improvement on the platform's recommendation side. Players will see other recommended games at the beginning of their play session, when they first log in, but completely despise new content when already hooked to a game. This is a huge problem as every freemium content platform often get users to engage with popular titles at first [3], feeding a long tail effect on content engagement. A Roblox user who wants to play Brookhaven will barely interact with the recommendation system, spending countless hours until jumping into her next adventure.
The player distribution looks even more concentrated among Minecraft servers.
To offset this inherent stickiness, UGC gaming platforms have an essential role here: to provide a better distribution layer—to cross the Death Valley—and allow outstanding content to scale. This is positive not only in the creator side, but also for the platform growth, as the more delightful a new player experience gets, the higher the chance the player will stick to the platform as well as invite their friends to it.
One of the solutions is by reimagining content discoverability when the user is still at the beginning of her play session, at the recommendation screen. For that, a few opportunities are:
Powerful content search: The platform can give gamers the tools they need to proactively search within their areas of interest—not just filters, but a comprehensive approach to connect the player with the game value proposition more quickly, highlighting the “Why should I care about this game?” better. Super Mario Maker 2 does that well by offering an ability to search for game style, course theme, difficulty and unique tags that game creators add to their games [4].
The powerful search for players is also connected to their social habits. Valve is smart in this case as it uses your friends activity along with a curator system, discovery queue and tons of other strategies to try and surface things you might like, combined with the bonus of a generous refund policy.
Featuring events: The platform can run recurrent events that pose challenges to new game creators and feature the winners for a limited period of time at the discoverability screen. To protect incumbents from competing with bigger developers, rules could be attributed to enter the event.
A good question to ask ourselves: what's the platform monetary incentive for featuring newcomers? Platforms operate aiming revenue. Observing what Apple does with Apple Store, it's hard to feature new games when they can promote an event on Candy Crush that will drive an astonishing amount of purchases and revenue share for them, thus, it’s controversial how platform incentives might play here.
Discoverability ads: Just as featuring content provides visibility for newcomers, I like the approach of having a light amount of ads embedded on the discoverability screen, and there is one UGC platform that does that very well: Roblox [5]. With biddable banner spots, emerging game servers can ignite their growth by reinvesting their first dollars on this strategy. Obviously, this requires some level of initial traction, but could help driving sustainable growth once the game cross the 'Death Valley' path, as explained before.
Other solutions lie on the broader platform sphere, such as monetisation, community and gameplay layer:
SHRAPNEL model: The economy design for Shrapnel incentivises land holders—game creators—and curators—players who successfully discover great content for the community to enjoy— in an interesting way. Both groups can spend SHRAP to promote maps or vanity items and earn rewards based on how well that content performs. This creates a culture of spotting talent early on while having incentives to back them, much like a scout in the venture capital environment.
Distribution pairing: Community-centric models are here to drive distribution as platforms enjoy the holy grail of software, where the product doesn’t need to be sold, as it’s adopted. To foster that, platforms could build a mechanism to pair game creators with influencers of all sizes (communities). This also promotes serendipity through a co-creation model where game creators meet influencers who are looking to build their own games, for their communities, and get a shared ownership/upside of it.
Portals: Platforms can introduce content discovery within game experiences. “Portals” could be in-game objects that allow users to “traverse” across games, without needing to navigate back to the recommendation screen. We're seeing startups such as Bildrs—who recently closed their program after partnering with Roblox to support their own portals—building such integration.
Removing friction to discover new content was a big reason Google constantly tried to push the tech around instant play (Facebook did as well for a while), and portals could ignite that—even though I'm not convinced if this actually makes sense, as it takes the sweaty effort new creators faced and redirect their handful players into other experiences.
A future beyond gaming platforms
UGC -> AI -> content explosion -> discoverability
The platform winners will be the ones that offer unbeatable value for creators to grow—Roblox, for example, is doing that well. But there's a thin line to prioritise newcomers when the incentives to help established games is immense (CCU concentration on top 1 percentile games, see public results on ABPDAU). What can we learn from that?.
UGC gaming platforms have to pick the challenges to master in the coming years; Owning the means to distribute value (i.e share/discover) is one part of the value chain. The means to capture value (get rewarded as a creator) is another topic I'm deeply interested in—which I'll also write about my experience in the future.
Thanks so much for reading this piece. I appreciate your time a great deal, and I hope in return you learned something new.
If you have any thoughts… share them in the comments below or email me at ninovizii@gmail.com. I’d love to hear what you think.
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Until next time.
— Nicolas ✌️