Geared, one of our partners who we launched the PlayHaven Community Platform with, has seen some pretty incredible success with building a community.  How did Geared’s fan community go from 0 to 4,500 fans in just two weeks?  Let’s take a look at Geared’s implementation.

Step 1. Build an awesome game.  I gotta give Bryan (the mastermind behind Geared) all the credit here.  Geared is super fun, casual, and fits the iPhone controls perfectly.  You can read some of the player reviews here and here.

Step 2. Bryan claimed Geared’s fan community on PlayHaven to lay the foundation of his new community.  Bryan used to receive a ton of Emails from his fans. Whether they were requests for help or  simple suggestions, hundreds of Emails a day overwhelmed him.

Bryan then begin redirect all his fans to Geared’s community page so they could help each other, and also provide himself a central location to gather feedback from all of his fans.

How Bryan encourages his fans to join his community from his blog

Step 3: Bryan gives his fans super easy access to the community… right from the game!  One of the greatest benefits of PlayHaven’s Community Platform is how simple it is to bring your entire community into the game itself.  There’s no SDK integration required at all.  Our in-game community is essentially a web application that runs inside the app itself by utilizing Apple SDK’s UIWebView class.  Using UIWebView, you can also make the in-game community feel just like part of the game itself, check out how Bryan implemented it in just a few minutes:

With the in-game community implemented, Geared’s fans have instant access to the full blown community.  They can receive news directly from Bryan, ask & answer questions, and access all the strategy guides straight from the game.  And most importantly, the community is becoming more and more vibrant on a daily basis.

At the time of this post, Geared’s fan community has 4,446 fans, and it all happened in two weeks.  Who will be lucky number 4,500??

This entry was posted on Wednesday, November 11th, 2009 at 4:41 am and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.