than a non-Discord user their players their users are the people that are putting fans in wallets they’re kind of

the super fans who are really investing today’s playbook is with Tom Gainer CEO

of Leveler who’s helped Craftton Scopely and even the NFL turn Discord into an asset improves game time retention and

sales you get users in but ultimately the real job is keep them engaged and ultimately keep spending discord is

where that kind of hardcore player exists what are they usually getting wrong when it comes to the Discord

community the people that are doing this best are when they’re not only creating the hey you can now speak to me but how

can I also foster a space where the players are starting to talk and engage with each other cuz that can lead to

some real goals coming out of it there’s so much content out there i think it was 19,000 games on Steam last year and that

doesn’t even bring into the fact that 60% of game time is from titles that are 5 years or older you’re not only

competing with so much new content you’re competing with old your goal as a business has to be to keep those players

and keep them playing over and over and over again what needs to be in place before we start looking at launching a

discord i think this really depends upon today’s playbook is with Tom

Gainers CEO of Leveler who’s helped Craftton Scopely and even the NFL turn Discord into an asset and improves game

time retention and sales and we’re going to get into everything community on today’s playbook so a few things we’re going to cover for people at home

biggest mistakes studios are making when it comes to their Discord communities how to turn players into a loyal

self-sustaining community how to monetize and prove the return on investment with all that effort and then

a step-by-step discord strategy that people can take away after this call all righty Tom we were speaking before the

podcast i’d love to start with this so I feel like most studios know Discord is

kind of important but then many still don’t actually use it so I wanted to ask you like why do you think that is why is

that the case i think that you know historically the industry has kind of

had two different levers to focus on kind of the user acquisition piece which

has been advertising which has worked extremely well over the last decade uh

and as we know there have been large budgets and focus and and big businesses built around the user acquisition space

and then secondly I think the um the kind of growth of social media platforms

um which really haven’t ended up themselves as community platforms but

more as kind of broadcast media platforms and you know I suppose part of the

reason Harry that we ended up building our business in Lebler and and we felt that community platforms like Discord

were going to become so key was you know everything’s pretty cyclical when it comes

to um kind of platforms and you know when you and I were growing up we were

on web- based forums and chat groups that’s where that conversation used to take place and that then quickly shifted

into social media platforms right and in the early days of Twitter and Instagram and Facebook it was conversational there

was community there but what we started to see kind of three four years ago when

we were building this business was that those platforms were shifting really to broadcast media formats short form on

content algorithmic scrolling kind of top of funnel and not really the place for conversation and connection and what

we’re seeing is that cyclical uh nature come back to play where actually the vacuum is for platforms

like discord and uh and reddit and we’re seeing in in other industries WhatsApp and telegram also growing that kind of

community connection piece and I think particularly in gaming there

has been such a kind of decadel long bull run around growth that the industry

has been fortunate that it’s kind of been able to throw a dollar into the user acquisition advertising pot and

spit two or three dollars back out and and so many businesses have just focused

on the UA piece and I think that is starting to shift i mean you know I’m

sure we’ll get into some of the data and some of the challenges that the industry is facing at the moment but um you know

we are seeing a flatline for the first time in in a long time within the industry and so community retention

re-engagement is really starting to come under the spotlight um so I think that

the role that the community is playing within these businesses is changing Harry and I think the seauite in

particular starting to think differently about the value and importance of community but the reason that some

haven’t lent in I think historically is because the business has been able to have success on UA and and and and

that’s in some quarters perceived as easier as maybe focusing on the kind of pure retention and re-engagement piece

sweet i feel like I guess because you haven’t had to

I guess it’s just not been on the forefront but now you’re like “All right we need to find new ways to do what you

said.” And it’s like “Okay what’s that Discord thing again?” And then it’s kind of re-entering the conversation if I got

that right well and too often you find that um I mean two things a often you know

community teams aren’t invested into into enough um and secondly that

community teams themselves aren’t focusing enough or or telling a

good enough story of the value and the commercial value right not just the value of engaging with our customers but

this is why this is so important for the business and being able to put kind of ROI and numbers against that and again I

think that that that is now starting that is starting to change all righty so

before we dive into like what people should be doing what are the best doing what are people maybe not doing so well um you mentioned numbers I’m wondering

like could we get something tangible here to brace people for the conversation like what is the impact here of having Discord versus not having

Discord do you have any top of kind of average numbers that people can take into account yes so I mean I think so

the the first piece is is kind of on the importance of of the platform and we

talked about why Discord has started to kind of enter into the vacuum that social media platforms um kind of

haven’t let into which is that conversation and the connection piece and so Discord kind of organically

started to really grow as the place for gamers to go and talk and connect with other players around their games um and

you know originally the business uh wasn’t focused on building kind of large

community spaces which now most publishers and studios have in place i think the original cap of total users

you could have in a community on Discord was about 50 and many people you know listening to this will know that you know seen the growth of Marvel rivals

and over three three and a bit million people and midjourney and the size of those communities on the platform now so

that’s kind of organically happened um the platform today has 200 million

monthly average users on average um gamers are playing 14 times a month and

they’re paying for an average 90 hours a month which is pretty extraordinary right so this is a really

hardcore highly engaged audience and that on the one hand is obviously

creating a focus and um and a lean-in from the industry particularly at a

moment where there are distribution challenges we’re moving to a moment of kind of atomized audiences um and so you

know Discord kind of fills a bit of a void there and then the piece that we’re trying to kind of pull together on top

is okay so clearly this is a platform that you need to be on because this is where your players and gamers exist but

what is the value of that to you and to your business and that’s been quite hard to quantify so far um you know what is

the dollar value of a user on Discord um how much game time you driving from

those players um what does the engagement look like with your community and then kind of crucially how do you

turn all of that conversation and all of that engagement which is really real time right like think about the core

differences between Discord and Reddit you know Reddit is kind of you know that kind of follow on conversation you go

back and read through and scroll i mean Discord is really kind of fast-paced there is so much insight and gold to be

mined from that but actually like turning that and you know needle in a

haststack like how do you find that gold and get it to product teams development teams player insights teams player

experience community teams um and that’s kind of the piece that that we’re trying to come in and um and really build

around and you know some of the numbers are pretty interesting we’d be able to prove for a few customers that on average a Discord user is you know six

times more valuable than a non-Discord user right so their their players their users are the people that are putting

hands in wallets they’re kind of the super fans who are really investing so

that’s kind of you know from a core data point of view you know platform users

are highly engaged and then the piece that we’re trying to fix is showing you your specific users how they fit into

kind of your ecosystem and how engaged those users are interesting so 6x return

if you take a player into Discord and they stay engaged I guess on average so

of course some people were already spending that much but like if your goal is to guess you know increase the

revenue per user just getting them to Discord and keeping them engaged there which isn’t easy but if that is done

sounds like it just makes number go up from what I understand right you’re trying to drive long-term fandom and and

that’s where you where you ultimately drive that you know if you think about that kind of classic funnel

um you know you get users in but ultimately the the the the real job is how is to then keep those users and keep

them coming back and keep them engaged and ultimately keep spending and Discord

is where that kind of hardcore player exists

um so yeah you know get getting them in and keeping them engaged is is part of

the challenge but the platform naturally kind of feeds into that because what you are creating is then a two-way

conversation so that user you know not only starts to feel like they are part

of the journey I mean they they literally are right some of the best communities that we see are are when

um a voice is genuinely given to those users they become part of the creative process right historically Harry you

know we’ve as businesses kind of created products for our users and we’re moving

into a really interesting time and moment where the best games and the best

brands are starting to not create for but with their users and that really changes the dynamic it makes people not

not only feel a part of it but they are going to want to go on the journey with you they are going to become your

evangelists and we’re seeing an interesting trend at the moment where you know clearly the creator ecosystem

has really grown out over the last two years and gaming has leaned in really heavily here and um you know companies

like Supercell and and others have built um really powerful kind of creator and influencer programs but what we’re also

now seeing is you know Discord is where your kind of your street team exists those are the people in there that are

kind of going and banging the drum and shouting about your game and so we’re now starting to see you know some of our

customers are using our data on who are the most engaged users to to sort of convert those people into those kind of

influencer and creator and partner programs because it is that kind of really highly engaged user that that

wants to be a part of what you are building so if I have a product which

I’m building I’m kind of doing it in public it’s let’s say about to be on beta on steam and I do not have discord running

or I have it like where do people come to you in that situation like what are they usually getting wrong when it comes

to their discord communities so if we think about the life cycle of a game

there are different um values and problems that community and Discord as a

platform can fix depending upon where you are in that in your game’s life cycle and what we’ve really started to

see over the last couple of years is games pre-launch leaning into Discord

and there’s two core reasons that that they’re leaning in one is product

iteration feedback really fast feedback loops from early players that that want

to kind of you know be be a part of that game’s journey and the second then uh is

is mobilization so um how do you start

to drive more people onto Steam wish lists get people purchasing or starting

to play that game once it’s actually live how do you start to impact some of the algorithms on some of those

platforms and mobilize that core audience to do that so there are those kind of two things to think about at the

kind of beta stage and and in the testing phase um we’ve seen different approaches here

and some of our customers use um use us for kind of access control so they can make sure that only specific users can

get access to the community if you have existing games and and an existing portfolio um you’ve already got an

audience that you can go and try and speak to and try and make them a part of this new games early testing phase if

you are launching from scratch then you may have to do some UA and some some advertising to try and get people into

into that community um but what you’re trying to ultimately create is two

different types of conversations so me as the as the studio I can start talking

with you as the player and I can get your direct feedback and you are also going to be speaking directly at me

about what’s working what’s not working what you want to see next but what you also ideally want to be able to see as a

studio is the conversation between players because that’s that kind of you

know people sat at a bar or sat at a pub or sat at a restaurant having that conversation that’s often where really

interesting stuff falls out as just part of that organic conversation that you might not always get if somebody is

either giving you a ticket or giving you that direct feedback so the people that are doing this best are when they’re not

only creating the hey you know you can now speak to me the the the game builder and I can speak to you but how can I

also foster a space where the players are starting to talk and engage with each other and they’re starting to share

ideas and they’re starting to ideulate because that can lead to some real goals coming out of them so what are the three

things someone should do to foster more of that player-to-player conversation in the Discord

so one is community architecture so you need to think about how are you setting

up your server to facilitate the right place for feedback and then the right place for the community to start

speaking to each other so just 101 is think about the channels that you’re setting up and the architecture to to to

encourage those conversations i think the second thing is what’s the value exchange

so just being clear on you know what is the value of the players starting to to

talk and and kind of engage with you and engage with each other so um is that you

know the game mechanics kind of feed into players needing to play with each other or matchmaking or um you know what

is it that’s going to get those players talking and engaging with each other and just being just thinking about that and being intentional about it and not just

expecting that to ultimately happen and I think the third thing is then having

somebody from the team that is ultimately part of a conversation right it’s not just a you know here’s our

community dive in like you need to facilitate and you know I think the best

communities are when ultimately you are sort of building the gates to Disneyland right but then with

the players are building the theme parks together but you’ve got to be part of that conversation with them

to to to encourage that and to foster that so those are the three things that I’ll ultimately be thinking about how do

you set up your server architecture properly how do you kind of create that balance change that encourages people to

have the conversation and how do you make sure that you’ve got the bandwidth and the investment from your side to to

lean in and to be part of that conversation with the person i’m thinking now like what do I need in

place before I start because you mentioned being intentional about having features which would enable conversation

and I’m guessing there’s a point where it’s never going to be perfect you still need to like in my head launch the

discord but you could always do something a bit better to kind of make it an even better experience but I guess

is there a minimum requirement that we should be asking ourselves certain questions like make sure okay we got

this this and this we’re ready for discord like what needs to be in place before we start looking at launching the

discord let’s say in the example where I already have a game and I’m an indie studio i have resources and I don’t have

a Discord yet like what should I be asking myself to make sure that I’m ready for it i think this really depends

upon what stage you’re at as a business and size imagine I’m a studio coming up

to you so this is what we’re seeing currently right based on that question where

things are falling down so often we find at a smaller stage studio or or

indie the kind of community managers are often literally the founders right um or

the you know the product lead and game designer and head of publishing and like

early stage often you find that the the the the core leadership team that are literally building the game are in the

trenches and talking to the community and they really get that and realize how important that

Then what we find sometimes is that if those games become successful and those guys grow and their team grows and

funding grows and obviously they then have a million things on their plates and and they can’t necessarily lean in

in the way that they used to but they haven’t then either invested into a

genuine community team and a full-time community team um or um you know community kind of

starts to fall off the plate a little bit as kind of new problems and more challenges come up um you then run the

risk of Discord just becoming a a place where the engagement quickly falls off and

you’re creating actually a bad experience for your users so what do you need in place to build a community

you’ve got to have people that are leaning in and that doesn’t have to be you know it doesn’t have to be a hire

and a full-time community manager can literally be the team that are in there and building it but when you then get to

that bigger size as a business having a core team in there that you know that

can spend the time to invest because the other challenge that we see sometimes Harry is a kind of community person is

given so many different platforms and area of focus that there is opportunity

cost there because they end up doing nothing really well so what are your core platforms right discord may or may

not be the right platform for your game your audience so either really lean in

and do it properly and invest into it or you know think about where your time can

be better spent the the the biggest challenges come when an organization tries to do everything but doesn’t

actually put the proper resources and time into fostering a genuine community that can be a success in the long term

so you said putting in the resources so we have resources of time from the

founders from my understanding and the core team but they’re also like a actually core community management team

so if I’m in that state let’s say I decided you know from what I understand discord is my is my

platform do you have a recommendation like what do you usually say like what does commitment actually mean does that

mean being online for for a certain amount of time like a certain amount of messages a week is it more of a mentality of like we need to respond

because you gave the example of like three million person server like how many people does that take to manage

because in my head it’s like is that like a full-time job is that like a mini business at this point um so I’m

wondering like when you say invest resources what does it actually look like right um I think the the obviously

that’s going to depend upon the size of the size of your community and the amount of engagement that’s happening but it comes with

uh the core piece here intention so um we are going to create a community where

we have a calendar of events and we have a reason for people to come back we’re going to create a community where um we

let the community know that they’re being heard and that we’re listening to them that does not mean responding to every single message that is not

sustainable and to be clear the best communities are when you’re creating peer-to-peer connections networking

conversations so the community is not just about you and your relationship with a player it’s about creating a

place for players to have connections and relationships with other players that’s such an important part of it

right so um it’s going to depend on that kind of first piece of size of server and and

and amount of engagement but fundamentally it is is letting the

community know that you are there that you are listening that you are responding and that you are creating a

space that that that makes them want to come back regularly and frequently and

that doesn’t just happen um by just spinning up a server right

some of the best games are in a fortunate position where they have such an engaged audience that their players

start to become part of the community ecosystem and they start to create events and they start to drive the

direction of community and that’s kind of the holy grail but to get to that point you’ve got to set the intention

and show people that this is this is a place where where that type of

connection can take place and then you will start to see things like that happen and then if you can build the

right guard rails around it so you’re keeping safety and um and ensuring it’s still a healthy ecosystem you’ll start

to see you can kind of flower out and create with your community and that’s where you really want to get to amazing

tom I’m curious how did we get here why are you spending your days your nights traveling

to c conferences kind of beating the drum of Discord community like what

happened before this good question uh you know ultimately every startup has

its own kind of origin story and how they ended up finding their core set of customers and problems but the the really the insight was this so I’ve kind

of been building communities for 1015 years earlier on in my career my co-founder and CTO Ben Barber Smith was

at YouTube um so he was kind of building community over at Google so we both had this shared kind of background of how do

we bring users together around a shared topic a shared interest and ultimately how do we fuel that and how do we engage

that that kind of passion and you know we we were kind of

reminiscing around the early days of fan forums and the enjoyment of kind of connecting with other players around

games that we loved and we felt that that was really lost when social came around and and noticed the the the sort

of shift that was starting to happen four years ago with of kind of Discord communities and and and Reddit suddenly

being on the radar a lot more and so as naturally inquisitive community builders we we just started to build communities

on Discord and for ourselves and for others right like early on at Level we were literally helping people with kind

of community management and setting these things up and and running them and what we found was this incredible

opportunity of getting people into one space that really love the thing that

that community is for and then talking about that thing like all the time and

that is really really powerful and doesn’t happen in many other places across the the kind of web

and we off the back of that felt that there are a number of questions that hadn’t quite been answered so the core

insight with Discord is you know this is where players tell us first whether

that’s a change to game mechanics they do or don’t like whe there’s a bug in the game whether there’s something that

they really want where they’re chatting about a new DLC that real time conversation happens in Discord and we

were seeing this for our customers and they were getting all of this feedback but they were just finding it so hard to manually scroll through that to find

really valuable data and then get that back into their teams and when they were reporting that back in we also found

this challenge of kind of community teams putting together reports sharing it within the organization and the

product teams often being you know kind of the push back was how do I know that

this is not one or two people being really loud and why should I necessarily listen to that data you know as a

product team we’ve got in-game data so I can I can literally see what’s happening with our players but we really felt that

kind of best-in-class game building and building longevity into games is when you can bring

together that qualitative community feedback and the quantitative game data

and so you know we’ve built kind of AIdriven social listening where we can

actually you know not keyword based which is historically how uh kind of businesses are built in this space we

can actually group together conversations so I can see you know rather than sending every bug message

through to a product team we can only we can alert them if 20 people are speaking

around one specific bug because the LLM is smart enough to start to group those conversations together so you’re

starting to get much kind of smarter and powerful community data and then we’ve

also built in integrations into PlayStation and Steam and and Xbox and and other platforms so we can actually

see what people are playing on Discord and that gets you to a really exciting opportunity where you know the the peaks

and troughs on game time sessions that that are being played you can start to overlay that directly with the community

conversation and so you know we felt that that was that was an opportunity for us to go and build the product

around alongside the fact that customers were just saying hey look how do I understand the value of this you know what is the dollar value of these users

how much game time do I drive and and finally how do I manage this right when everyone has a microphone and I’ve got

100 thousand half a million million people that’s not easy and so we felt

there was an opportunity to build a product around kind of community insights community engagement and

community management and that led us to ultimately building the product and going on the journey of of building

leather that’s sweet so you mentioned something really cool the you can group

the bugs the conversations together and I’m guessing you can then score them like how often it’s happening but that

surely isn’t recent that probably wasn’t around four years ago unless I’m mistaken like when did that shift happen

where that’s possible to use like AI to like group all those conversations together yeah i mean this we we we’ve

built this over the last kind of you know we’ve been thinking about it for a long time but we’ve really only got the

product to to to to the point now over the last six months and that’s really been driven by the fast pace of LLMs and

their improvement so what we were hearing previously from customers

was you know keywords don’t really work long term because yes I can bash out 500

keywords but what am I missing so what are the trending topics in the community that I don’t have keywords around and I

might miss that and then how do I go deeper below a keyword and not just see all the conversations around that but

group together the different topics and conversations around that and how do I summarize that at scale right so even if

you know you can break down here are the 200 um kind of conversations around you know

a nerfed gun challenge um like we can then summarize that and

and the LLMs have got super powerful here so we can start to understand

specific slang sarcasm context for your game and every game has that different

so you can start to prompt um prompt the AI to make it unique to that game um and

so you’re getting much more accurate on on what’s a the accuracy of what’s

coming out of the community but b making sure that you’re actually focusing and

seeing the most important topics and conversations because the LLM allows

that to group it group it together so yeah it’s you know this is a really exciting time to be building a business

you know we’re not the only the only people that are that are really leaning in here but it’s having a a really big

impact and and changing you know it’s kind of changed our business and and the feedback from customers has been really

positive so yeah it’s an exciting time to be building with these tools yeah could I nerd out a little with you

because I’m curious so I started a ghost shrine business what 10 months 11 months

now and at the start all the writing was pretty much done manual ai was cool but it was mostly useful for ideiation and

now it’s gotten a lot better where it can give me a lot of good stuff when it comes to like I prompt my CEOs a

question about their company origin story for example or something that would become an educational post and I

get like an 8 minute voice note historically I used to listen to it all find the core story then start writing

when I have AI I can find as a first step a lot of the kind of oh this is an

idea this is an idea maybe this is an idea with like sources and everything and from what I’m hearing this basically

changes the game like massively so um I just got a couple questions on like how

it works if you don’t mind so I’m wondering if I have a game and then I plug in um Leveler is that the call is a

tool called Lever yeah so I plug in Leveler could I do I get like a knowledge base because I’m I’m thinking

you got all this data like can I just like ask Discord knowledge base like hey what’s happened in the last two weeks

about this like can I just start speaking to it like that now you can start to prompt and literally ask

questions about what your community is discussing and that

is a bit of a game changer does it source it as well sorry to interrupt

yeah so what you can then we can we we will summarize topics and conversations

but we will also show you the specific conversations that that was below that on Discord right so you can fact check

it we then deep link from our dashboards directly to the conversation on Discord so if you actually wanted to be able to

reply to that or kind of see where the conversation led on to you can jump straight to that conversation on the

platform so just the the knowledge that customers

can now have on on their community because historically kind of data was coming to

them versus being able to to kind of go and and dive into that data and try and

and and noodle and to poke at it and to try and be inquisitive and see what will come out and that’s allowing for even

more creativity and and faster feedback loops and and insights that maybe just

would have been missed before so yeah it’s it’s uh it’s pretty cool to be playing with this yeah that’s sick that

was just I did not know that was already possible so the fact that it is is amazing sweet so if you don’t mind I got

a few quickfire questions just these are things that I think a studio would be thinking about um if you will allow it

all righty so what is the fastest way to get like a thousand engaged people in my Discord

like if I had a mission as a community manager hey we need an active community yesterday what am I doing to get like a

thousand engaged players in my Discord ask encourage and incentivize your existing core users to bring more people

into that community how would you incentivize well would you offer is it in-game currency is there a go-to i mean

you’ve got lots of different tactics here so yes you can offer people V-Bucks and in-game currency you can give people

merchandise you can give them a shout out you can uh And what we’re doing now

is because we can see game data from Discord we’re actually connecting that to leveling so rather than giving people

XP points and ranking them for just engagement we can actually rank and and

move people up for literally playing the game uh which is driving more game time and and bringing people back and then

where that gets really fun is when you kind of turn Discords from a separate

island for conversation into a connected ecosystem where if I then rank at level

50 in Discord I unlock an exclusive skin or something back in game right and that

then creates really powerful loops because people in the game then see other users with a special sword or a

special item and they go “How do you get that or I get it some Discord and by getting to this rank that drives more

people into Discord and then you’re creating these really powerful loops do you have a situation where if you can

connect it to the game is that also reverse so if I’m like level 100 in the

game can that be connected to my Discord account and then unlock a new channel and only speak to like people above level 100 there you go and then you can

also get people custom rolls when they hit those ranks and hit those different levels so it’s really bringing both of

those things together like this is what we’re going to see a lot over the next kind of 12 to 24 months within gaming i

really think that Discord is going to cement itself as

uh the the kind of the core chat platform not just where gamers go to

speak about the game but actually in game i think we’re going to start to see these things cross over a lot more and we can build a really kind of powerful

layer on top of that where we’re then driving that reward system between both

the platform and the game as well as of course the fact that as we start to connect kind of these user IDs together

you can start to understand the dollar values um understand how Discord users

then then rank and stack up in your marketing stack so lot of change happening here at the moment yeah that’s

really cool because um I listened to a podcast recently where they were struggling this was Facebook and they

were struggling to retain people on the platform and then they couldn’t get like

data on it but they figured out the best way to retain people on Facebook was like we need to get people to 10 friends

ASAP like within a week then once they did that then they got that network glue

and then they stayed and kept going rather than like oh what’s Facebook and then see you later and now I’m thinking

in the context here this actually helps also with the

management because let’s say the base general um channel is available to

anyone who’s got an account let’s say um but like where most of the action happens might be like after level five

or 10 just in thinking of an example which would mean like moderation becomes a bit easier because like you can’t

really I guess come in make a new account spam um I don’t know if that’s an actual problem but I’m just thinking

if I was playing a game and I’m like top 100 in the world I can go and chat with the other top hund world who are on

Discord pretty awesome and that would for me was like I don’t really care what’s happening in this channel because

that can be very very busy but it’s literally a verified yes I’m with other

people playing the game who are also good which for me it’s like really powerful well that that if you’re

intentional with levels and ranking uh not only should it help with some

spam and safety issues because you can you know block people from coming in and

immediately causing chaos in in a community by not letting them you know

write comments until they get into a certain level for example um but one of the challenges with community is we want

to keep people retained but then we’ve got this really hardcore audience that know each other know the slang are

talking all the time have all of the the inside information have got all of the context but we want new users and in

that kind of funnel analogy we want people to keep on coming into the community because we know that those are really valuable users and when they come

in and suddenly there are you know 50 people over there that you know are talking in a language that they don’t

know because they haven’t got the context yet and like how do you then make that person feel comfortable how do

you then get them up to speed and that’s where levels and ranking can also really help with with taking people on that

journey so it doesn’t feel intimidating when you first come into a new community in the new specs yeah you kind of can

hide them for the thing that has I guess a higher learning curve to like enjoy the community that’s pretty cool you

mentioned community moderators before and just thinking about how you got this tool now you can have an AI from my

understanding like you probably have a situation where one community manager is now like really powerful like they can

probably do a lot of community management versus a year ago i don’t know if I um speaking out of turn I’m

thinking like what’s the best way to find a good community manager like in

today’s world now that you got all these tools like is it different to how people should approach it before like if I’m ready to find someone who’s dedicated to

manage the community in Discord i mean often the best community managers come

out of highly engaged community members yeah but where does that go wrong because I feel like that can go wrong

well I mean like you know any hiring process right you’re going to take

people through stages um and some of those stages aren’t just interviews they

might be that you have tasks for people so you know actually the fact that people have a kind of online presence

and they’re part of the community and they’re literally talking and engaging you’re seeing a task in real

time as to whether those people are potentially capable of taking on a different role and yes going from being

a kind of volunteer community manager or moderator to representing a business and

that business’s values and the way that that business thinks about the world and

then of course also thinking about the commercial impact and how this how the

community needs to tie back into company goals and company OKRs that requires kind of evolution but we have found and

we’ve done this with our account managers at at Leveler we’ve not gone and hired you know typical kind of SAS

customer success people and then trade them on community we’ve found incredible community managers that have worked at

Blizzard and Epic and Discord and other organizations and then we’ve helped skill them up on you know what taken

customers on on an incredible on boarding journey and and keeping those customers um happy and retained some of

those skills and I think it’s similar for that kind of community management pieces you’re probably gonna find better

community managers and the people that actually are genuinely part of the community care want to be there want to

talk want to shout about your game and then you can help scale them up on the other pieces versus the other way around

where they might lack that that authenticity and just the kind of that gut feel and insight on when they should

jump into conversations and where they should steer the conversations that’s a very important point because if

you just did a traditional hiring process you would miss all of that like all of it they might not even have a

LinkedIn you know so I guess would you say that’s just like the

law now like just only hire from your Discord community wherever possible cuz

I feel like a lot of what you said resonated but I’m wondering why do anything else

well I think the the other thing that we’re seeing is people’s roles within

gaming organizations just shifting um so as you know some of the kind of

legacy media formats you know press as social changes

um you know these platforms are still pretty new right we’ve not had discord experts for a very long time and a lot

of these organizations don’t have experts yet so um there’s definitely scope for people

within gaming orgs that um are passionate about how to kind of fuel

engagement with their players to evolve and and grow that skill set so I think those are the kind of the two areas that

you’d be looking at is are there people within your community that could be a natural fit there and secondly within

your own organization thinking about well let’s be really clear around where

our conversation with our players is now going to take place and is Discord a part of that and if the answer is yes and if you’re then going to lean in who

within the team could potentially go and learn and kind of grow into that that that already brings that knowledge of your business and and your players and

already has some of that connection with them you know I think that understanding of the players and the game first before

all the other stuff is like really important it’s like when you’re hiring I guess someone for a new role usually if

it’s something which is easily trainable then the only thing you’re really looking at is are they kind and their mindset right cuz the rest is easily

trainable so I think there’s something similar here right cuz I feel like because you have such a new product

you’ve probably had to pitch and explain this over and over again to studios and then some obviously become clients but then some don’t i’m wondering when you

get the questions like “Right what is this worth to me?” You know what’s my ROI going to be isn’t it hard to give a

direct answer right now like we had that number before of like 6x Discord users i’m like “Okay but then how many

resources am I going to put in or whatnot?” Like is this a problem like

kind of actually proving the ROI right now or is it pretty much solved i mean

ultimately every business wants to have a clear site of attribution and where

dollars should be spent and where they should be focusing and you know Discord haven’t answered

that question directly today um and maybe it’s not our job to do that as a as a platform but um it’s definitely

something that we have focused and focused on a lot and we can start to do

that because you know we have the tools to uh be able to connect Discord user ids

to you know game user ids and then we can start to understand what those

dollar values are and we can start to understand the value of those users in our stack and that is that’s really

powerful um I think funnily enough where you know if if we don’t end up working

with customers it’s I it it’s kind of two reasons a

um connection between kind of community and the rest of the organization not

being strong enough yet and and this is changing right and I think organizations are realizing how valuable that insight

is but they’ve not always been able to trust the data and actually typically

Harry we’re working with you know community team are one of our core set of users but equally so are product and

kind of player insight and experience teams and and marketing teams because

they’re now accessing data that that they couldn’t necessarily get before so sometimes when those things aren’t

connected up as much and that kind of leads into the second one which is just where those businesses are invested and

one of my kind of I suppose um bug bears sometimes with

uh with some of the push back is well Discord is where our highly engaged

players are are already spending money so we need to focus on other areas but that is where long-term spending

happens and that’s ultimately where you want to get as many of your users to as

possible so you need to learn from those

users how you get other people there and how you get other people on that journey and I think sometimes there’s such a

focus on user acquisition that you forget that you’ve already done that really successfully with a percentage of

your players and they’re over there so how do you lean into that to then create that flywheel and get more people into

that long-term spending and that long-term fandom and look if you don’t

if you neglect and you don’t need in there then you risk losing the most important thing to your business common

zone right retaining a client is worth a lot more than a new client and I guess in gaming think of mobile games that

makes a lot of sense but maybe with a PC game if you got a good doc or future games that they can buy in the future

then again also makes sense is there a fear here because I actually had a chat

with some people from uh EA and some other companies who are like part of

MMOs specifically like really big games where the community is like quite passionate and actually scared like some

of them like on purpose don’t do anything public because they received backlash before kind of directly whether

it be on Twitter or they try to find them on LinkedIn and Discord is or I guess like you said it’s a direct way is

that a fear that is kind of based in truth

like have you seen that with any of your clients yeah I mean this is a really interesting one um and you know we we’re

also working with some quite large consumer brands and um certainly comes up kind of outside of gaming mall but

there are still some very large publishers that don’t own their own Discord communities and I’ve always

found that response of you know well we’re scared of what’s going to come out

as as a really interesting one because users and players will go and

speak about that anyway right they can literally go and shout about that on Twitter or they can spin up their own

Discord community and shout about that and you then as the business and the brands have no way to respond to shape

and be a part of that conversation because you’ve not created that two-way dialogue so why would you want people

out shouting about it when you can’t um when you can’t have any impact on that

versus you know people are going to talk right like you know just be real about

you know you know users and and hey it’s better to have people complaining about

something than not having people complaining at all there’s people that are passionate and they want you to to be better though be better by being part

of that conversation and and and letting them talk and listening and improving from that

versus you know we’re scared of that because they’ll just go and do that anyway um and look we do see sometimes

customers so you know we don’t necessarily want to own our own community because you know we think that

players will be more transparent and they’ll be more real if they’re talking

in a in a creator community versus ours um I mean there’s two ways of going

around this like people are going to set up creative communities anyway right if you type Fortnite into Discord there’s

there’s over 1,500 communities but if the business doesn’t

own their community then they can’t they can’t share those real-time updates and

announcements and the feedback that that community wants and you know you should be able to encourage them to then go and

if they want to speak somewhere else as well that’s great but then not be able to have that direct feedback and

dialogue yeah you get both right like it’s not enough right

yeah thinking now going forward like what do you see changing like in the last six months already it’s changed in

the terms of I guess the unwieldy nature of managing all the data is now becoming easier with AI but how do you see

Discord communities playing out in the future like the fact that you said there’s massive publishers who don’t own their communities and that’s still the

case given our conversation for me blows my mind cuz there’s like so much money slushing maybe dedicate a little bit to

you know get the discord in order but how do you see the I guess discord playing a role in games in you know over

the next few years well I think this this is a really interesting and pivotal time for the industry where things are

having to change because you know there are those user acquisition bottlenecks you know there’s so much content out

there I think there was 19,000 games on Steam last year 5,000 console games launched there’s now 700,000 games

mobile games on iOS and drawn combined um and that doesn’t even bring into the

fact that 60% of game time is from titles that are 5 years or older so you’re not only competing with so much

new content you’re competing with old and by the way that last stat that’s 60% of play time from games 5 years and

older i mean literally feeds into this piece here right like there is switching costs as players and so your goal as a

business has to be to keep those players and keep them playing over and over and over again i mean look at the success

and the and the strength of communities like Runescape that are still thriving so many years on and that is combined

with you know the shifting sands around kind of the UAPs and moving to a postcy world and advertising becoming more

expensive and you know the kind of the the some of the revshare challenges on on platforms unnamed so um this I think

is really putting the spotlight on hey when we get a new user we have got to hold on to them for for dear life that

hasn’t necessarily always been there so so I think community is starting to

shift in the mindset of these organizations people are starting to see it as as kind of core and core from a

commercial point of view and really thinking about how it connects to business goals and commercial goals which often it it hasn’t so that’s then

feeding into the growth of platforms like Discord and and investment there i think what we’re going to see over the

next couple of years is businesses and games getting much smarter at really

like connecting that community to the game um and the game to the community um

and making it part of a a kind of an ecosystem um where you know purchasing is rewarded

on both platforms and engagement and playtime is rewarded on both platforms and you can unlock things in game from

things done in Discord and vice versa because I think the industry has has

realized that you know you’ve got to go and be part of the conversation where the conversation is taking place you

can’t own all of this and right now that conversation happens on Discord that’s where the players are that’s where your gamers are so how are you going to add

value to that conversation and make people want to be a part of it with you yeah 100% i’m You mentioned Runescape to

a game I’ve put I think 370 days of my life something stupid so like I did I

every time you log in it tells you you’ve played this amount of time i’m like oh my god and they are a great

example of we have they’ve got their their own communities where they’re

running events they’ve got leveling systems set up um people are coming in

and you know directly sharing feedback they’re asking for that they built forums around it but there’s also over a

hundred communities for different niches of Runescape that creators have gone and set up and they

encouraged that so I think they’re a really good example of we’ve got our own space but also if you also want to go

and have those other conversations that’s cool i think the other thing that that we’re then trying to fix for um for

publishers and studios is how do you then add value to those creative communities that are currently dark spaces right for you as a business and

how do we also shine a light on what’s on what’s happening in there um because

you know there’s hundreds of those spaces and it’s very hard to get those insights out and so there’s a there’s a really exciting opportunity around that

whole kita ecosystem as well are you saying you can extract the data without

like owning the Discord so we’re actually you know increasingly

bringing uh brand owners and IP holders into creator communities um because more

often than not those creators are really excited about having a relationship with that persistent brand right like I can

now actually get you giving amazing stuff to my community not just the insights and and announcements and

updates but rewarding the community for stuff and giving us exclusives and and that’s great but it’s also still our

creator space so you’re adding value but you’re not owning this but with some of our engagement software and tools where

we can again connect gameplay to leveling and rank people up and badge people communities love that right

communities is you know super fans want to kind of bang the chest and show that

they’re the biggest super fan and we can then add that value um and that then

allows kind of customers to get better understanding of kind of the insights and engagement within those communities as well so there’s a really kind of

clear and um value share between the creator and the IP holder awesome oh

very cool to wrap up here if there’s one thing you could

tell that game publisher that person working in the game publishing who kind of wants to do

this but they they can’t cuz they don’t have the buy in or it’s just not

prioritized right now like what would you say to that person to kind of help

them guide them on their next step understand why why why community right very easy

because other people are doing it to think that that’s the thing that you should do but a community is not for

Christmas like you can’t just spin this up and then let it run you have to be a

gentle hand and guide for that community for its existence and that requires you being

clear on kind of why and and the journey that you want to take that community on

and if you’ve got that in place the next challenge may be um proving the value

and the ROI internally of of why you should go on that journey um and that’s

when you call Level amazing sweet and regarding next steps

so if anyone wanted to reach out what’s the best way to reach out to you Tom head to the Level website uh

ww.leveler.com more info on us there and you can check out the product and have a bit of a play

if it seems relevant um just drop us a line there and and we’ll reach out for a chat nice and level is spelled L E V LR

or you can just search I’m guessing Tom Gainer on LinkedIn and you can see profile there and because you actually

post quite a bit which is nice you see you know get some updates yeah feel free to connect um you know we’re talking a

lot about community this is really fast moving at the moment you know Discord is fast moving and it’s hard to keep up on

all of that information so you know we’re we’re kind of we’ve got a community newsletter in place and sharing lots of updates and myself and

while your team members are sharing stuff on LinkedIn so feel free to reach out um and we can share more fantastic

tom anything you want to leave people with 2025 is the year of community lean

in uh and hopefully we can go on that journey with you sweet amazing um what’s the next event you’re going to i’m

curious gdc of course yeah big old GDC amazing

lovely tom it’s been a pleasure and everyone at home thank you so much if you listen to the whole thing maybe like

maybe subscribe and share with a friend or someone on Discord all righty goodbye

everyone