Sarah Johana, Head of Marketing at Toge Productions showed the importance of a community in helping indie games find their audiences.

In her talk at Level Up KL 2023, Sarah showed that outreach was actually split between two positions- with Social Media handling outreach, and only then passing on to the Community Manager to handle loyalists and advocates.

When it comes to outreach, Sarah used Kriegsfront Tactics as an example, showing how Toge Productions used the momentum from the Front Mission remakes to get interest in Kriegsfront Tactics.

She highlights framing the game as a good way to get players Front Mission fix at a lower price or while waiting for the game to release.

While that is a form of communication, a good chunk of the talk was differentiating the job of community management from simple outreach- she highlighted the Toge Productions Discord server, which regularly communicates with fans.

“Loyalty goes both ways”, she stresses, stressing that it’s important for a community manager to see fans as people and not just faces to sell your product to.

She said that with A Space For The Unbound, Toge Productions would even let fans on the server beta test parts of the game.

“[They need to thing] ‘Turns out by being a part of the community, there’s some more [benefits] that I can get’ “, she explains.