Paul Wedgewood, Splash Damage, talking about Player Engagement:
“You’ll have seen this recently with games like Mass Effect 3 — we really think that the future of video game development and content marketing is going to rely on you being able to take a general idea for a universe and bring it to lots of different platforms so people can enjoy it in different ways and at different times,” he says.
“It’s frustrating to be obsessed with a fantastic free-to-play game on PC, and then not be able to do anything when you’re on your iPhone, or in a browser, and so on.”
This is why forums matter so much. My brother and I share an interest in video games though, in my opinion, he takes it to a level that I simply cannot. Joining clans, producing training videos…
There are lots of ways to make this easier for players to interact with your game (their friends, their clans, their loadouts) and the game world (the factions, the supply chains, the narrative) when not in front of the main console.
If your game is good, players will seek out ways to interact with it. The trick is to make it possible for them to easily create their own ways to interact. You can make it easy to record games, to produce screenshots, to post their own content within the game (like the Spray command in Valve games), the individual customisation of characters, creation of emergent virtual currencies (the ‘hats‘ thing). Let them love you.