A few quick thoughts on awareness. We can probably break down our total addressable audience for FEE3 in these 3 tiers. They go from largest to smallest, and least likely to most likely to be engaged with the event. Think of this like a funnel, or upside-down triangle, in terms of size.
Each tier likely has a different level of interest and engagement, and FEE3 provides an opportunity to help these groups move further down the funnel into more engaged groups. This is good for the community’s growth and health long term.
Names could probably be better, but I’m thinking of this on the fly:
Tier 1: Fire Emblem fans who are unaware of hacking
This is the largest group. Chances are people in this group are relatively young. They are big enough fans of the series to watch youtube/twitch content or visit the reddit, but don’t have much familiarity with hacking at all or aren’t aware of its existence. They likely have never heard of FEU or visited the site.
This represents the “blue ocean” of potential growth for us. The closest way we can engage this group is through 1) organic growth of our FEU channel so that it is more likely to show in their feed as “related” or “recommended”, and 2) through direct promotion by FETubers with larger, casual audiences. The pins on r/fe and the threads on Serenes Forest are helpful (frankly, it’s table stakes), but we’ve seen little engagement there, unfortunately.
To address this audience, we’d really need larger names in the community to shout out the event in a more meaningful way to help drive awareness. Whenever a larger FETuber picks up a hack, there is usually a flood of interest in that thread or discord. I can see an FEE3 promotion acting as a multiplier here. Unfortunately, most FETubers do not like to play hacks and have been weirdly cagey about promoting the event, so it’s a challenge.
I hope this can change, but for now, our best bet is continuing to get more organic growth and supporting newer Youtubers who play hacks to help their channels expand their reach.
Tier 2: Fire Emblem hack players
This group are people who know hacks and have played a few. Maybe they know some of the more well-known [complete] projects, but don’t have a pulse on the community’s latest offerings. They probably have visited FEU to download projects, and may have a log-in or a discord account in the FEU server.
This group likely knows about FEE3 in some capacity. Chances are, they mostly want to play hacks that are [complete] and selectively engage with the event. They likely ignore hacks that are early stage, of perceived lower quality, or that don’t present well in the event or in their thread.
Because this is an engaged audience who has some awareness, the best thing we can do is continue to remind them of the event and put on higher quality showcases to keep them coming back. By elevating video and thumbnail quality, we can probably draw their attention more to get them engaged with a higher percentage of projects.
Not really sure how else we would engage this group further besides making it as easy as possible for them to find projects and participate in discussion.
Tier 3: Fire Emblem hack creators
This is the most engaged group. These are the folks who take up staff and organizer positions, create hacks or other assets, and are highly engaged in hacking circles. This group likely has a pulse on most of what’s being shown, and FEE3 provides them an opportunity to catch up on projects they follow or see others they haven’t looked at yet.
This group is likely going to watch most/all of the videos. This is basically anyone who is on FEU that’s ever made a thread in the projects section, joins and talks in the discord, etc. They’re our primary audience and where we likely don’t need to put much effort in engaging from a viewership standpoint.
However, making it easy for this group to participate and making the event not burdensome to orchestrate is important in ensuring people don’t fall out of this group.
All in all, I think we do Tiers 2 and 3 pretty well already, and reaching the Tier 1 audience is the greatest challenge and opportunity. However, I don’t think we need to re-orient the entire event to engage this group, but instead need to get better about sharing the event and growing FEU’s potential viewership base.
Anecdotally, we know there’s a large section of Tier 1 that likely doesn’t care to watch hacking stuff or play hacks (unfortunately), so simply reminding them the event and hacking exists is a good enough step for now. Because we don’t have a good grasp of the total % of this audience that would care about hacking, I’d rather we not treat them as a target audience in how we develop showcases, but treat them as a target audience in how we promote showcases. There is of course, a larger group above this, but this group are people who play FE more casually and don’t engage with it on the internet, so it’d be foolish for us to try and engage them in a scaled way.
I hope this rough exercise is helpful in illustrating this. Please note that the tier numbers don’t reflect quality or importance, but rather a way to illustrate least engaged → most engaged.