"In a virtual community we can go directly to the place where our favourite subjects are being discussed, then get acquainted with people who share our passions or who use words in a way we find attractive. Your chances of making friends are magnified by orders of magnitude over the old methods of finding a peer group."
- Howard Rheingold, The Virtual Community, 1994

Communities are important for the success of any multimedia information systems, today. Gaming is no exception, especially when it has become a part of our new media culture, entertaining people of all ages. The satisfaction of gaming community members can influence the success of a game and it is no secret why highest selling games have the largest communities. 

To keep up the community and the platform with the latest trends, features, and functionalities, it is important that you choose the right technology for your platform. Drupal is an easy choice. But why are gaming communities increasingly opting for Drupal as the platform of their choice? 

“The famous AR game, Pokemon, managed to give an unprecedented swiftness, leading to Nintendo’s stock value increasing dramatically and achieving $470 million in revenue in just 80 days.”

The Power Of Gaming: Why Gaming Industry Needs Community?

Not very often will we associate the word community with gaming. And yet, these community platforms are where the games really mature. In terms of engagement and shared values, a common cultural background plays an important role, which can be reflected by the spatiotemporal distribution of the gamers. 

The community of gamers can be identified either as a whole or part of video game culture. It comprises of people who play games and those are interested in watching and reading about it. 

Community support is important for both game development and community building. 

• User Acquisition: A shared goal, interest provides the reason for being a part of the community. A community is what builds a game, and community is what drives the game beyond its niche success into the blockbuster — shaping the success of ROI for an engaged, excited community is off the charts.
  
  Intense interactions and strong ties are not only important for online multiplayer games, they enhance the intensity and user experience too.  
  
  Over 53% of US teenagers play online games with people they know in their offline lives (Pew Research, 2015). Community support allows integration of offline friend circles into online communities.  
   
• User Retention: Gaming communities form a very crucial part in retaining the users as video games have grown into a subculture since their birth.

  Community services enhance competition within games, which builds up customer loyalty as a consequence. Games and gaming communities are strongly intertwined and experience permanent co-development. 

  Discussions on new features, the problems they encounter at playing, advice about gaming strategies via forums is where the retention starts at. 

  The modern games provide direct in-game communication, which is not restricted to a simple message exchange, but also involves further service functionality. 

• Improves Quality: Gaming communities are a place of intense interaction after all games are about shared experiences, rendered with extraordinarily interaction and ownership.  All successful games have communities. 

  

  And this where the changes come from. Remember the infamous Tracer butt controversy from 2016? Well, it was after the community chose to put their outrage did the gaming giant Blizzard Entertainment had to pull down the post to show the accurate representation of the values.

Why are Gaming Communities Opting for Drupal?

What does Drupal offer to the gaming communities that they are opting for it? Here is a list of why Drupal is the choice for the community platforms.

• Decoupled Drupal for Intuitive Game Live UI Experiences

Much like physical sports, video games demand a certain standard of ability where the player can enjoy from the very moment the game is started. Regardless of whether there is an explicit tutorial, players must instantly intuit what to do, what the basic rules are, what is good, what is bad, and how to go about doing the various things that can be accomplished.

The more the realism your game offers to the gamer, the longer they would want to play. 

With the decoupled experience in Drupal, you can create an interactive experience for the gamers by utilizing your site to completely control the useful in-program applications. While the front end can easily be coupled with other technologies such as jQuery, JavaScript, Node.js, and React.js. The backend in turn shifts to become the system of record, but the interaction happens real-time in the browser, back-and-forth. 

The headless site advancement can possibly release the imaginative influence of the diversion with intense gaming experience which is faster, more natural, intuitive and responsive at the gamers’ end. The end result is smoother and faster games played live. 

• Gameplay based customizations

Games allow players to perceive themselves in alternate ways in their imagined worlds. Player identification – with Avatar and Character – helps build the interest while also improving the gameplay experience and is important to maintain the identity in the possible communities as well. 
 

An example of this could be the website of League of Legends – built on Drupal – which is a team-oriented strategy game where the goal is to work together and bring down the enemy nexus located in the middle of the game. 

Drupal has tools and services for building user profiles, fostering the creation of virtual sessions, allowing communication with third party serious games, and storing and processing the game analytics. This is important since it helps the gamer take the game more seriously and relate to it on a virtual level.

• Scalability

Zynga – a leading developer of the world's most popular social games – website is built on Drupal. It claims to have 100 million monthly unique visitors, making it the largest online gaming destination on the web.

Scalability is Drupal’s middle name

Handling high volumes of visitors, content, and users is a tough job. But Drupal does it easily. As it is said, “scalability is Drupal’s middle name”. Some of the busiest sites across the world are built on Drupal. 

It is apt in handling sites that burst with humongous traffic, which means your gaming website can perform spectacularly even on the busiest of the days without breaking or bending. 

• Multimedia support

Visit the famous StarWars The Old Republic (SWOTR) website and the background has video snippets playing from the game. Multimedia support is not new to the gaming industry. To keep the engagement high, you need to support multimedia features like scorecards, videos, photos, audios among others. 

Drupal is a highly versatile and customizable CMS. It has various modules available to support this need. The photo gallery module, media entity module, and easy to use templates to customize appearance are just a few from the list.   

Not just this the photo gallery module helps you customize images with templates, build you scorecards

• Mobile Responsiveness

Video games have once again found themselves more widely played and accepted, thanks to the increasing smartphone reach. Add to it one more feature, your game needs to be device responsive too with easy and intuitive controls. 

Drupal 8 is device responsive out-of-the-box. Which means your content adjusts well from the big screen of your desktop to the little screen. Image size changes, menu items shift to drop-downs, other items are pushed around to make sense of content and size of the device. 

But games are not just about the squeezing to a different size thing. They need to offer the same experience as in the native web application without taking away the intuitive design. This can be sorted with the Hammer.js module in Drupal. Hammer.js helps you enhance the user experience by providing cross-browser support and taking away a lot of complexity when implementing touch and pointer gestures. Leveraging it in Drupal is easier than ever due to the Library API of Drupal 8.

• Adding complex categories and catalogs

Gaming communities are a lot different from what the gaming websites offer. Since each game will have different sub-communities, it becomes a need to build those categories with design and category apt to the theme. 

Drupal provides a powerful taxonomy engine, allowing gaming companies to support intricate designs and complex categories and catalogs, without much ado. The flexibility of adding different types of products and content is ensured by content creation kit (CCK). CCK allows you to add custom fields to any of the content types using a web interface

• Discussions, Reviews, and News

Communities are all about discussing what is happening or happened. Therefore one of the primary community needs is for a easy content creation with different content types. The more the types, higher the engagement, more the users will interact. Blogs, events, FAQs, news are all important.

• Quick Search 

Communities are a busy place with a lot of activities happening at the same time. Content that might interest a user can get lost in the myriad of content. In Drupal, Solr is used to get more accuracy within less time. 

Drupal has Solr integrated for a quicker search. Solr is a highly reliable, scalable and fault tolerant search application which provides distributed indexing, replication, and load-balanced querying with a centralized configuration. 

• E-commerce Solution

Integrating commerce with the website is an old practice and most gaming companies leverage this opportunity to boost their sales. Klei – an Independent game studio – chose Drupal to create a seamless shopping experience for both mobile and desktop users.

According to The Jibe, "Klei needed a site and store that was as easy for them to manage as it was for their customers to buy: easy sorting, featured items, promo-code inputs, simple searching, and clear calls-to-action."

After integrating the online store with Drupal the team can easily add new products and games on the fly while also managing the promotions and highlighting featured items easily.

DrupalCommerce and Commerce Kickstart are two of the most popular solution that Drupal offers. With easy payment gateway integration, your online transactions are secure with Drupal.

Drupal vs. Wordpress 2018

Building a Community website

Building an online community, a network of people with shared interests and goals with target niche audience to be part of it with easy usability and navigation. 

Example: Pinterest Community

Winner: Drupal 8 

Why? For an extensive user management in your community, it would require custom fields, different content types, scalability, varied user roles and permissions among the others - all of which are easy to build in Drupal 8. In case you need a simple to-do community with limited features and functionalities, then maybe Wordpress will work. But then that format would be closer to a blog, anyway.

Building a Gaming Website

These are the sites featuring direct online gaming with single or multiplayer and can include games of any type from the different genre. 

Example: Zynga

Winner: Drupal 8 (Clearly)

Why? While you might think of Drupal as a preconfigured PHP framework, it is vastly more suited to developing an online game than Wordpress is. Drupal is fast, mobile responsive and scalable. It can handle as content as much as you want, as many people as you can think of - without crashing. 

And as far as WordPress is concerned, why would you want to choose a software built from a blogging background to create a game?

Building a Basic Gaming related Website

These are the types devoted to the world and culture of computer gaming. Will includes gaming news, magazines, FAQs, and resources. 

Winner: WordPress

Why? Although Drupal 8 more suited to handle the content, WordPress has a slight edge here. All the types mentioned here are related to publishing. Being a blogging platform (niche) WP can suit the needs better since its out-of-the-box configuration comes closer to your goals. 

Although in case there are varied features added like user login, reviews, managing multimedia content, and discussions then, Drupal is clearly the hero. 

Building a Media-Streaming Website

These are the sites that offer audio/video streaming services, such as podcast, television and film, sports, music, among others.

Example: AXN 

Winner: Drupal 8

Why? Drupal 8 can handle multimedia content much more flexible than WordPress. While WordPress can excellently handle content that's primary text, Drupal 8 makes all types of a media a first-class citizen. 

With clear taxonomy and easier role management, coupled with faster-load time, it won’t bend or break when streaming content live. 

Summing Up

Community platforms have become an easy measure to the success of any game since they serve a combination of purposes varying from technical to human factors. Further community satisfaction measures need to be considered in order to improve the product model and quality in future. 

Drupal mostly serves the needs of the gaming industry, is should be a no-brainer when opting for it. Drop a mail at [email protected] to connect with us if you are building your gaming website or community platform.