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.