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Video: Shark Punch's Jiri Kupiainen on building community

Build it and they will come... hopefully

Video: Shark Punch's Jiri Kupiainen on building community

At Pocket Gamer Connect San Francisco 2015, Jiri Kupiainen, founder & CEO of Shark Punch, gave a talk on the best way to build a community around your game.

"People don't engage their communities unless it's easy", he said, adding that most companies treat their users like "livestock" instead of engaging them on a human level.

Good examples and blind followers

By engaging with users during development on forums, and answering questions and responding to feedback, he said that "we set up a good example and the community followed", and now the users are answering questions amongst one another.

However, Kupiainen did warn that if you have a strong community from the start, "they become completely oblivious to the key issues", such as a design decision that the majority of players don't like.

You can see all our videos from Pocket Gamer Connects San Francisco 2015 in this YouTube Playlist.


Editor

Ric is the Editor of PocketGamer.biz, having started out as a Staff Writer on the site back in 2015. He received an honourable mention in both the MCV and Develop 30 Under 30 lists in 2016 and refuses to let anyone forget about it.