Fiene Ziegler’s Accidental Path from Cultural Studies to Player Community Management at InnoGames

This is basically how I started coming into the gaming industry, because I also volunteered in my free time during university. When my studies actually finished, I was offered a job as community manager for the game that I was supporting at the time.—Fiene Ziegler

InnoGames’ Community Management Specialist Fiene Ziegler was on track to be a lawyer.

“My dream as a kid, for a long, long time was actually to be a lawyer,” Ziegler told Player Driven’s founder and podcast host Greg Posner in their November 2024 exchange.

“I was always a stickler for rules,” she continued. “Even as a child, it already manifested…and lawyers do make a lot of money. So that was, like, my go to.”

“Then things changed because of university admissions in Germany at that time. It wasn't that easy, actually, to get into law school at that time. I switched to cultural science. And that was a study where I had a lot of free time. I know not every university course offers this. I had a lot of time. Gaming 12 hours a day, stuff like this.”

“I think it was around…2008 when I started playing this Asian MMORPG.”

Ziegler didn’t say the game was MapleStory, but she told Posner it was from Korea, and Nexon’s 2D side-scrolling MMORPG was popular in Western markets in that timeframe. Either way, by the time she graduated from college, Ziegler has transitioned from being a player and a community volunteer to a paid community-focused employee.

“I basically supported the German community and had a team of volunteers as well,” she recalled. “We did a lot of in-game events, mostly during the weekend, bigger events that we did for our community, raising a bit of social media.”

“A lot of moderation on the forum farms” as well, she added.

“I actually designed, I think, an Easter event that then got into development.”

She and her colleagues had been communicating on TeamSpeak, and she’d asked, “Hey, what can we do? What kind of cool events, what options do we have?” One thing led to another and Ziegler’s Easter-related event idea made it into an update.

Not that it was all fun and games.

“Whenever we got a new update, we were the sole QA for it” in Germany, Ziegler told Posner. “I always needed to check translations. And sometimes we only had Korean documentation for the features. So, testing a feature that goes out 48 hours later…that we only have Korean documentation for…that's ‘fun’!”

“I think the longest day was, uh, we started at nine [AM] with server maintenance and I left the office at 1AM to catch the last train, and needed to start at 8AM again.”

Awww, her first crunch…and, no, she wasn’t a fan.

“I decided to then, actually, look for other jobs because being responsible for a title that you also burned for as a gamer, that you have passion for, but that is slowly dying on the development side” was tough.

“This was, for me, the time to decide to move to a different company,” and that company turned out to be Hamburg-based InnoGames.

“I hadn't really played InnoGames’ games before that,” she confessed.

“For me, [it’s] a healthier relationship to be responsible for projects that I do not burn for, because that can really get into your mental state, if things don't go well, if updates are released that you, as a player, do not support.”

Ziegler has been at InnoGames for 9+ years now. When she chatted with Posner at the end of 2024, she was a senior community management specialist. About a year ago she was promoted to expert community management specialist.

InnoGames was founded in 2007 and currently employs around 350 people in Germany and many, many other countries. In the 2016-2020 timeframe, Modern Times Group (MTG), the Stockholm, Sweden-based digital entertainment company, successively bought increasing shares of the company. All told, MTG spent nearly €279 million (>$300 million) to acquire roughly two-thirds of InnoGames.

InnoGames is best known for Forge of Empires, a city building strategy title that runs on mobile devices and Web browsers. You may have seen the commercials: Players start trading and building in the Stone Age, keep upgrading through the present day, and the last ~20% of the game delivers a sci-fi space exploration-type experience. Think of it as a casual, mobile, free-to-play version of Sid Meier's Civilization.

Forge of Empires debuted in 2012. In 3Q 2023, InnoGames announced the title had crossed the €1 billion lifetime revenue mark. The two largest player bases were in the U.S. and Germany, followed by France and the UK. Total global player registrations at that point were >130 million, a rare and impressive feat.

InnoGames also makes and supports several other titles that have similar DNA (F2P, mobile/browser games, etc.). Elvenar is a fantasy-themed city builder. Tribal Wars is a notable strategy MMO with a medieval theme. (This title should ring a bell for Design Desk fans, since a recent guest, Oscar Clark, told us he obsessively played it for 18 months).

“Anyone that's played any mobile game in the past 10 years has probably seen an ad for Forge of Empires,” Posner acknowledged during the podcast. “The last thing you want to do is finish your job, to go home and start playing Forge of Empires on your phone again because you just got away from the company.”

“Exactly,” Ziegler responded. “It helps build you a healthy distance to the product that you're managing. Because, from experience, I know if you do not have the separation, it really drains you.”

“I actually play, like I mentioned, Forge of Empires very, very actively because this is just also the requirement I have set for myself. If I'm responsible for our product, I need to know it inside out. If I, on a personal level, like it or not, that doesn't matter.”

“Game design, QA, product, they also come to me, ask me about Forge things, especially when it comes to certain game features because I'm also a competitive player,” she continued. “I also play Forge of Empires competitively in one of the bigger guilds.”

While Forge of Empires can be played entirely single-player, the game does support competitive and co-op player modes. In Guild Battlegrounds, for example, in-game guilds compete to capture territories on a common map, and earn points/rewards. There’s also a PvP arena. (The game’s Wiki includes a breakdown of such topics and much more.)

The experience can get pretty complexed and nuanced. In fact, given the connections between her role, what the design team does, and what the broader player support and marketing team does, Ziegler has been hitting the books again.

“I'm actually studying again,” she told Posner. “I'm studying economics. I think this is something that I would have also liked to explore right from the beginning more, to go more into either marketing or economics.”

“It would have made more sense” in retrospect, she said. “Culture studies I just studied because plan A didn't work out.”

As the old saying goes, “Life is what happens when you are busy making other plans.”

At another point in their conversation, Posner asked Ziegler about her dream holiday destination.

“My dream holiday is basically what I did last year,” she responded.

I was on a road trip for three weeks from Hamburg to the Nordkapp in Norway. And I traveled solo with my dog and just camped wherever I landed at the end of the day. It was a great feeling of freedom and now I'm really hooked on road trips.

The Nordkapp is a 300+ meter cliff at the northern tip of Norway (and Europe) that overlooks the Arctic Ocean.

Not exactly Bora Bora…and that’s quite a haul to and from Hamburg.

At another point Posner asked Ziegler about the movie she most recently watched.

“The Lord of the Rings series,” she answered. “Like the whole six movies from The Hobbit. I love the hobbits.”

“I haven't watched the hobbits,” Posner responded. “I didn't hear great things about them.”

“I know that opinions go in different directions about The Hobbit movies,” grinned Ziegler, “but I enjoy all of them greatly. And yeah, it's a comfort movie that I watch at least once a year.”

That fits with someone who’s idea of a “great adventure” is to drive >2,700 kilometers to camp beside a barren craig well inside the Arctic Circle!

The balance of this profile will look at the tools and processes that Ziegler and InnoGames use to manage the player communities of games like Forge of Empires, Elvenar, Tribal Wars, etc.

Next week, we’ll conclude our augmented rewind of this Player Driven podcast by reviewing how Ziegler and InnoGames use external social media platforms like Facebook and Discord to help attract and retain players.

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Tools of the Trade: How Ziegler Herds Dozens of External Community Manager “Cats”

After a certain time, you just know the drill, how certain communication works. So, you just apply one template, exchange the text and assets, and reuse it, right? Especially also with ChatGPT or general AI automation and so on. It's way easier nowadays to just create a lot of communication in an easier way.—Fiene Ziegler

One of the first questions Player Driven founder Greg Posner asked InnoGames’ (then) Senior Community Management Specialist Fiene Ziegler was about her day-to-day activities.

“Community management specialist is a title that we established at InnoGames to differentiate us a bit from our external community managers,” Ziegler answered. “We do also have a team of externals on Forge. It's roughly 40 external community managers that we basically manage as specialists.”

“There are freelancers that support our different language versions because, for Forge, we have 26 language versions,” she continued. “We have, at least, depending on market size, one external community manager. Since they're not direct employees, they need someone to coordinate everything between them and the development team.”

It’s perhaps worth underscoring that Ziegler’s role primarily involves managing and coordinating this team of global freelancers.

“This is, basically, our job,” she told Posner. “We coordinate the teams, we update them, we give them the schedules, we set up the whole communication strategy for upcoming features, and give the general direction of where we are heading from a communication perspective.”

Unlike two other Player Driven guests who’ve mainly focused their efforts on internal player support, trust, and safety pipelines and processes, Schell Games’ Laura Hall and Netflix Games’ Christina Camilleri, Ziegler mainly focuses on external-facing pipelines and processes, which are, in many ways, closer to the player base, and also extends to cover potential players.

“I have a colleague that I'm working with on the project,” Ziegler added. “My day to day is, basically, in the morning when I come in, I check in with them, like, if they have any kind of questions for us.”

“We have Jira for reporting that they can also do, but sometimes you just have some issues that you need to…put a bit more highlight on.”

Jira is popular project management, workflow, and bug tracking tool that’s developed and supported by Atlassian.

“Both of us,” continued Ziegler, separate “our work between the projects that are upcoming—for example, new events, new features, updates to existing features—and then we, basically, prepare, ourselves, the whole communication strategy for it. And including social media, customer service guidelines, knowledge base, Discord, whatever.”

This is “what we first prepare for beta release because we have a beta server where you can test those features beforehand. And then we update it for live releases, and make sure we have a good communication strategy.”

Greg circled back to ask a question about the ~40 external community managers she’d mentioned, “What's the normal channel you communicate with these teams on?”

“Internal communication, we also use Slack,” she responded. “For the externals, we have a tool called Mattermost, which is kind of like an outsourcer, similar to Slack. So, it's a similar chat tool that we just use for the externals. And we also have the whole Atlassian suite, so Confluence, Jira, and so on.”

Mattermost is developed and supported by the eponymous company. While it originated as an in-game messaging tool, it now serves clients in many verticals and bills itself as a “leading sovereign collaboration and AI automation platform.”

That sounds fancy.

“When I start a project,” Ziegler continued, “I set up an Epic in Jira with all the subtasks that I need to do, set the deadlines [and] check the schedule until stuff needs to be kicked off.”

In Jira, an Epic is a large, high-level objective or body of work that acts as a container to organize and track smaller tasks like stories, tasks, bugs, etc.

“This is, then, basically, my task list that I work with,” said Ziegler. “Usually, I try to do most of the stuff ahead.”

Ziegler said she also has “a weekly meeting with my colleague that I'm working with. And then we do, basically, a process check. ‘Hey, how are we with this project? What is upcoming? Who takes care of what?’ And we're also in daily contact with each other and synching on, and juggling tasks, because now I'm also responsible for the whole social media content creation.”

That sounds like a full plate.

“I'm the one that breaks Jira,” responded Posner, grinning. “I'm not process oriented like that, so I give you tons of credit.”

“I don't often find people in the CS role that are going in, doing Jira updates,” he continued, “because mostly the engineering team works on Jira, the product management team works on Jira. I love that you're all united in that single platform. When you deal with your external community managers, I think they're volunteers, is that right?”

“The community managers are freelancers that we hire,” Ziegler clarified. “These, then, have also voluntary moderators that they hire for their specific tasks. For example, forum moderation or Discord moderation, and stuff like this.”

“We are not directly managing these” people, Ziegler said.

“I used to work for a company that measured reach and engagement,” Posner recalled. “I'm curious how do you do that.”

Ziegler nodded.

“We use Agora in general, but we are currently also working on getting all of the data into Power BI so that we can also create dashboards ourselves, especially what we want to do for Forge right now. We set up all those fancy strategies, but then you define the KPIs for the goals that you want to reach.”

Agora bills itself as a real-time engagement platform that offers an SDK and APIs so that developers can build interactive videos, and text and voice chat directly into their game projects.

We now want to, actually, create BI reports where we can easily see how much on track we are with our strategy, how much of the goals that we wanted to achieve have [we] already achieved, without pulling the data somewhere, putting it into a format, and doing the same thing over and over.

“We want to have automated reports,” Ziegler said. “We're not quite there yet.”

Neither are we!

Come back next week to learn how Ziegler and InnoGames have approached the issue of promoting player engagement and attracting new players by leveraging social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, Discord, and TikTok.