The gaming industry can take lessons in communication with your community from Colossal Order. They have made Mondays great again with a steady release of Dev Diaries detailing new features and mechanics for the highly anticipated Cities Skylines 2. The developer is in the final stretch of the developer diaries, with episode 9 focusing on economic functions and features of your upcoming city builds.
Each release leads to the game launching on October 24th with what appears to be a very polished game. That’s something new—a functioning game on its release date.
The developer diaries are done in 3-4 minute snippets followed by deeper dives by the more prominent YouTube channels who either have access to the beta or know enough to infer what the features mentioned could mean for the game.
Accompanying the YouTube’s dev diary is a lengthy blog post explaining each of the new mechanics presented in the video. You can check out the Economy dev blog here.
Watching Colossal Order lay out the features in an engaging way to its core fanbase is refreshing in an environment where AAA developers and publishers either ignore or become outright antagonistic to their respective communities. Not everything Cities Skylines 2 presents is being met with open arms. Still, the open lines of communication and engagement have earned the company a ton of goodwill as it approaches its release date.
Companies across all industries should take note of community engagement and the sheer amount of free publicity it generates by drip-feeding blogs and videos detailing new features.
