👀 What is GameDevNetwork?
GDN is a Discord community I started in 2017 as a small peer-learning hub for new game developers.
Today, GDN is home to ~50,000 game developers from around the world, with the goal of helping people progress their careers within the games industry.
I have applied the lessons learnt from building GDN to support the growth multitude of other games-related communities; including during my time at Unity, where I lead the development of a community server that now sits at over 120,000 members and is one of the most valuable support mechanisms of the company.
🌱 Origin/Growth
The inspiration to start GDN came from having attended many in-person hackathons and loving the sense of energy/community that came with building cool stuff! I loved it so much that I wanted to re-create that electricity within a games-specific context.
I shared the community on social media and as we hit our first 100 members, began running regular virtual game jam events in order to give members an opportunity to put the lessons learnt from the commuinty into practice.
We have continued to experiment with our structure, community aims, and events over time - a key lesson from this I would emphasise to new Community Managers is that communities are dynamic, it is vital to continously monitor the needs of your members - our community has transformed constantly throughout the years, and each bracket (100/1,000/5,000/10,000/50,000 members) all introduce their own challenges. This is continuous fluidity is one of the aspects that make running a growing community so exciting, and a constant learning experience.
🔥 Moderation
A question I am often asked is how we moderate our community, and are then often suprised that we are just a team of 6! There is