We intend to reach all types of gamers, from little kids and casual participants to hardcore esports and gaming enthusiasts, inclusive of age, gender, ability and socio-economic status.

We need to make sure we reach our full gaming and esports community. Our approach—that we love to play games ourselves—makes community engagement easy for us. We love that people enjoy our game, but we prefer to engage one-on-one with them ourselves, to see how they interact and feel when they’re playing it.

For us, it’s not about the numbers, it’s about making sure that people enjoy the game and feel part of a genuine community. You can see how much passion people have for the game. But it’s also important to understand their interaction with the game itself and what they take away from the experience.

While many gamers will give verbal feedback while they’re playing, you can learn a lot from non-verbal clues, as well. We pay attention to their body movements, their gestures and the expressions on their faces as they’re playing our game. You can learn a lot from this feedback.

Within the gaming or esports community you’re building, gamers will talk amongst themselves about your game. They might have great feedback to move your game forward or set it in a great new direction. It’s key to build that community where your gamers are willing to engage. It doesn’t take many people, either—your community could be as small as five people.

Thankfully, we have a core group of people in our community who are extremely passionate. They provide us with great ideas and direction on where the game could go.

When it comes to the gaming industry, I think a lot of people focus on the size of a community. When we thought about our community, we tried not to think about the numbers—whether we had hundreds of thousands of followers or somewhere in the millions. We only wanted to make sure our community was genuine.

Even if there were only a handful of people following our game, we wanted them to know we cared about their opinions and their passion for the game. This is why you often see us in public—we want to meet gamers wherever we can. We want to know who they are, what they enjoy and what they might want to change. We’re open to feedback and want to provide online gaming education.

In our experience, being genuine about our intentions, getting out there and involved in the gaming community, means working together.

In other words, I’m there to help you and you’re there to help me.

This is part of the reason we’re out there in the community, taking part in events where we can. If we return to the numbers, this single action—reaching out to engage without our gaming community—has come back to us, two-fold. The gaming industry is willing to talk—make sure you are listening.

The gaming industry has understood the value of communities. There are many community managers in every video game company. They tap into the folks who follow their games for the folks who invest in their products.
“That’s brilliant,” says Malik Forte, “because you want people to play your games again and again. If you implement micro-transactions, and they keep coming back, you, the developer, make more money. “
A lot of games nowadays are about persistent online experiences. You play those games for a long time. The developers keep releasing content for the games.
Players look forward to all those content updates and additions. They see the game grow and mature.
It is like planting a tree and seeing it grow. Games are the same. Therefore, so many video game communities are passionate and dedicated to the developers and the game.
Forte’s been a part of several game communities like the Overwatch community. Overwatch is a team-based shooting game in which the players fight over objectives. Blizzard Entertainment, a veteran game publisher/developer, created the game.
“It wasn’t about me knowing the developers, the game, or the characters,” says Forte. “I got to know several people who were passionate about that game.”
The Overwatch community is one of the biggest of any video game. Community members love Overwatch and its characters. The community has people who passionately love the game, love watching other people play it, and love talking about it. They’re so invested that they make fan art and dress up as those characters at conventions.
Overwatch became more sophisticated on the competitive side, too. It became a whole league and made it to the Barclays Center for the grand finals in 2018. It’s been on television.
It is the community that made Overwatch a phenomenal success. “You see that with many games that top the sales charts,” says Forte. “If you go on Twitch,” Forte continues, “the most-watched games have the strongest communities.”
Establishing a community is crucial. You hire a community manager to keep that excitement going. With video games, it’s super imperative to have somebody in your company who focuses on your game’s community.

It is odd to hear sounds behind you, but it is actually on the screen in front of you. But that’s precisely what happens with Dolby 5.1 and gaming. We have grown to accept it. But it is artificial.
In VR, you want to hear a character coming up behind you. If a character is 100 feet away talking, you want to feel and hear them as if they really are that far away IRL. That is why the concept of spatial audio in VR is huge.
Spatial Audio
Sound is incredibly important in gaming. Yet, some developers do not realize how imperative it is. They’ll work on a game for a year, then show it off without sound. “Audio design is extremely important,” Dan Shimmyo says. “And if you are not thinking about audio early, I feel like you are failing to develop your game.”
In VR, audio is vital because players need to hear where sounds are coming from. Shimmyo describes a perfect example of this using zombies. “You want to be able to hear a zombie coming so that you can protect yourself and deal with them as quickly as possible, expecially when they’re coming/sneaking up behind you. And what could be more terrifying that sitting in a dark room but you can hear these zombies coming from all sides?”
If a player is holding a lightsaber in their hand, they should be able to hear sound like it is really there. Spatial audio is a fantastic part of the immersion of VR. There is a significant difference between looking at something two-dimensional and hearing a sound over here on stereo. It may work, and we may accept it in regular gaming. But in VR, we want technology to advance to full immersion for the best possible experience.

Adding accessibility features when you’re developing your game can help make it playable by a larger audience, even if they aren’t diagnosed with a specific condition. You may unknowingly be limiting your audience by not adding these features.
For instance, many high performing players will play with the colorblind mode on even if they are not fully diagnosed with color deficiency. Colorblind mode has a higher contrast which makes it easier for them to play.
Even for those that aren’t colorblind, when people get in a really stressed situation its harder for people to see color. It’s as if your brain goes into a high-octane mode and optimizes for moving quickly and efficiently. Color information is a lot to process, so you stop being able to see color clearly when you are pumped full of adrenaline. This is the reason why when people are in a situation where someone has a gun, they might not actually remember their shirt color, or if they were in a car accident, they might not remember the car color.
Another time when people can experience a lot of adrenaline is when they play video games, especially if they are in a stressful firefight or a large boss battle. Because of the adrenaline it might be harder for them to perceive color. Running colorblind mode can help in these situations.
Another area of accessibility that’s becoming more popular in recent years is around cognitive differences. People have differences in short-term memory. You might tell a player on one screen that you need them to do this thing, and then they move to another screen. There is a sizable percentage of players that might not be able to remember those exact words transitioning from screen to screen. This is important for game developers to be aware of so you don’t limit your audience from being able to play and enjoy your game.

Audio and haptics play a vital role in creating a full, sensory experience in games. Genevieve Johnson explains how these senses can define a game – and even how gamers move through virtual spaces and engage emotionally.
“Besides the sounds, you want to think about the button clicks and the sound they’re making. Think about the music in your games – music is a huge deal. I happened to play maybe six different zombie games for a minor research project just a couple of days ago.
“In one particular game, it had solid gameplay – most of them had solid gameplay – but its music was mostly sort of soothing. So you felt sort of soothing, calm, like, alright, I’m getting ready to go to battle these zombies. And it was a long, long battle.”
That juxtaposition removed tension that would have otherwise made the game unplayable while setting a tone that still worked with the horror.
“There’s no difference between music in a game and music in life,” says Dan Shefelman. “If you’re working out, you want to hear a workout mix. If you’re trying to relax, you want to hear calm music. It emotionally creates a feeling in you.”
Haptics – the understanding of the world around us through the sense of touch – works similarly. Shefelman details how haptics shapes so much of modern gaming, and how it can change depending on the medium.
“My first experience with haptics, or, I should say, with the lack of haptics, was in virtual reality . . . I couldn’t tell how far anything was because I’m used to sculpting. I’m used to feeling something that I hit. Until they have developed haptics, you’re in a three-dimensional space and you’re not feeling it. It feels vague.”
Now that games are becoming more of a sensory experience, audio and haptics have become just as important as optics. When you’re immersed in a game, you want to feel something at the same time.

“We’re saying something about something here,” says David Jaffee, “We’re saying something about the human condition.” Fundamentally, it’s what feels good when you’re holding that controller. That’s what most gamers love. Rocket League, Fortnite, PUBG– it’s fundamentally about mechanics.

Audio design is tricky. You know when you want the sound to show up and do a job. You know when you want to sound to evoke an emotion in the player-a reward– a warning specifically. Usually, it’s the audio and heads-up display that says, “Hey, a missile’s coming in,” or “a bad guy’s behind you or off to your right.”

Designing a HUD is really hard for a game designer. Because the game designer wants to think that the player wants to know everything they know about the game. It’s like there’s so much stuff that the game is tracking.

And you want to throw all that at the player and say we have audio cues, we have visual cues, and we have heads-up display cues. Did you notice the player’s feet glow a little bit when he’s low on health because the eye tends to be looking lower than the center of the screen?

And you can get carried away with that. The average player might ultimately– when they get good at the game– want that data. But if you throw that at the player at the very beginning, they’re going to get overwhelmed. The game is going to end up looking like user interface porn. And you’re going to push people away.

It’s a really hard thing to do, especially when you’re talking mechanics-based games, to design something that’s robust enough to yield a play experience that the player can have a meaty, deep, intellectual, satisfying time with but without overloading what’s on the screen. Because the minute we went over the shoulder or the minute we went first-person, we lost that brilliant play mechanics space.

These are not movies. And they’ve become movies because they look like movies. But what we’ve lost in that is so much that is germane to great gameplay.