Expanding Gaming Tier List's Reach via Community Feedback

Developing a Community

Gaming Tier List is a fantastic website dedicated to tier lists, guides and game reviews. One of the difficult things about deciding what to cover is understanding what is popular with the community of players who need a tier list, guide or review for a game. There's quite the disconnect between something being popular and something not being intitive enough to need outside guidance.

The Problem

There's a considerable number of popular games with massive audiences. Yet, there's not neccessarily alignment with what a content author may likely want to write. For example, a game like League of Legends is incredibly popular, but there's also a considerable amount of content already available. It's not a game that needs more content. Turning to a different game, World of Warcraft's current retail version is far more accessible than the years when ThottBot was needed. Gear comes naturally in your favor, there's far less need to theorycraft every detail. The audience for retail WoW isn't nearly as large as classic or progressive classic servers.

Likewise, there's games that release and no one really needs any help at all. They're either too simple or too niche. There's no need to write a guide for a game that no one is playing and no one needs help with. It's a frustration that many game sites have.

Community as a Solution

Turning to community feedback is paramount to delivering world class content that satisfies. It's not enough to just make content for the sake of meeting a quota or producing content to keep some algorithm happy. It's about making content that people want to read and all of the rest of it you can consider later. The site was doing well, but it was definitely needing some new verticles and some new games to cover. The community was the answer. They suggested Dave the Diver and Five Nights at Freddies Security Breach (both the original and ruin) as games. Traffic spiked several fold and maintained a higher average after the initial spike.

The secret was following what was trending with those who were excited about the product. Producing content around that excitement before any other outlet was a massive advantage. You can't neccessarily keep a large diverse pool of survey data on hand that's live, but you can build your property alongside others who are excited about the same thing. Their insights, discussion and suggestions open a bounty of additional opprutinity that you can't source elsewhere.

Conclusion

Website staff are a limited pool for content ideas. Researching through community development can be valuable by providing a source of direct feedback. Not only from the audience of your website but for product owners, communities can provide feedback on the development and design of a product. It's not enough to launch a beta and send a survey. You need passionate people who are excited about the product to provide feedback in a group setting. That setting has to be safe, non-toxic and an open discussion.

Gaming Tier List has flourished from working hand in hand with our community. Our success is proof that community development is viable and can produce powerful results with little investment.