One of my favorite things to do in my free time is playing video games.
I’ve been a gamer my whole life.
I remember when I was 9, my parents bought me my first console.
It was Sega Mega Drive II, and was a reward for finishing my school year with straight A’s.
Good times.
I would get up at 4-5am just to get the TV free for playing.
It was my only chance to get some game time before everyone else woke up, lol.
A lot has changed in the gaming world since then, and believe it or not, I’ve learned a lot just from gaming.
For the past few months, I’ve been back to playing Cities Skylines.
It’s a city building game, kind of like Sim City was back in the day, but this is the next deal.
And the game is great, anyone who likes to build stuff, organize and plan should try it out.
But where the game really shines is once you slap on community mods and assets to it.
The original game had tons of things people didn’t really like about it, wasn’t realistic or just missed some things you’d usually see in a real life city.
Good thing for everyone though, is that the developers made the game open for mods, and the community full of city building enthusiasts started creating everything they were missing.
It made the game more enjoyable and real.
And a lot of these mods were introduced as the core of the game later on.
Yes, so the community made the game even better.
And this is not the only game.
Skyrim (one of the most popular games in recent years) also is even better with mods.
GTA V – even better with mods.
I could go on, but I’ll spare you the details in case you are not into games that much.
The point is, some products can really benefit if you let the community get involved around it.
These guys are usually the ones most passionate about the product.
They have the skills, the ideas and probably know more about it than you do, I’m serious!
And what if your product can’t really be “modded” by your community?
Then remember to listen what they tell you about it, what they’re missing and any ideas they come up to make it better.
They are using the product every day and they are your market.
Let them tell you what they want to buy from you and then just give it to them.
Cheers,
Zoran