Hinterland is a studio focused on creating thoughtful places for our players, and that starts with the experiences we craft in our games then extends out into the real world where players interact with each other in forums, across social media, and in person.
We are looking for a veteran Community, Communications, and Marketing expert to help lead the way for further growth in our existing Hinterland community around The Long Dark, as well as for future communities we will build around new and unannounced projects.
Every developer and publisher has a different way of defining their roles and titles. For us, the Director of Community is a studio-level role reporting directly to the CEO. Whoever holds this position will be the most senior member in the studio responsible for the following key areas of Community, Communications, and Marketing:
- Continued growth and nurturing of our current player community (to date, over 8M players worldwide, and growing ~1M/yr)
- Community strategy for emerging regions (ex. South-east Asia, South America, etc.)
- Strategy and execution of our primary community channels: forums, social media, newsletter, YouTube, etc.
- Mastery of communications and digital marketing strategy and execution across a variety of digital stores, capitalizing on the key tools and strengths of each platform, including: Steam, Xbox Store, PlayStation Store, Nintendo eShop, etc.
- Relationships with media and streamers, and effective communication of the studio’s key messaging across our various projects and business areas
- Craft and execute effective marketing campaigns for The Long Dark and future Hinterland projects, with an emphasis on brand awareness and user acquisition.
- Editorial oversight (including content strategy) for our upcoming community hub, which will become the main platform for our community and the world at large with a range of content including articles, videos, etc.
- Product design and merchandizing collaborations between Hinterland and valued craft partners, as a physical extension of our game brands
- Strategy and supervision of the Hinterland online store, including merchandizing and logistics
- Spearheading PR for the studio including helping raise awareness of our projects and ensuring they are considered for appropriate awards, etc.
- Protecting and preserving Hinterland’s brand and brand voice in all external-facing communication, editorial, and community content.
Additionally, you will be directly responsible for the supervision, mentorship, and career management of a small team of marketing, community, web, and graphic design staff, who will support you in executing your goals for Community nurturing and growth at Hinterland.
You will carry out the high-level vision for community, brand, marketing, and communications as defined by the CEO, and will be responsible for collaborating closely with your fellow directors in the Operations, Platform & Publishing, and People & Culture teams to achieve your goals. You will be the primary strategist behind our community and communications outreach for every product update, release, and new product launch in the studio. This includes everything from release notes, to social posts, to store copy, to public relations to tradeshow presence, to trailers.
Everything you do in this role is in service to strengthening our relationship with our players and increasing awareness of Hinterland and its endeavours, and this is very much a “behind-the-scenes” role where your priority is to shine a light on our games, our studio (where appropriate), and most of all, our players. We are looking for someone who feels passionate about creating the opportunity for positive and meaningful interactions to occure between players, and derives joy from seeing a game and its community grow and prosper. Direct interactions with our players -- either on platform or in person -- will be handled through your team, so this is not an ideal role for someone who wants to be front-and-centre with a player community.
The successful candidate will have 10+ years of experience across community and marketing roles at a successful independent game developer or publisher. It is critically important that you have demonstrable expertise in both community and marketing roles. Excellent communication skills are paramount for this position. We are particularly looking for someone who is passionate about advocacy and social enterprise, as Hinterland not only creates world-class entertainment, we are also trying to improve the world along the way.
ABOUT HINTERLAND
Hinterland is an equal-opportunity employer. The studio is comprised of a multi-national, multi-ethnic team. We value a diversity of backgrounds. We also value veteran experience and a strong work ethic that supports the studio’s culture and values. Our work ethic and production methodology is built around a “Getting Stuff Done” paradigm. We embrace a flexible working environment that affords our team members the opportunity to enjoy family time and exercise self-care. We balance this out with very high expectations about the quality of output from everyone on the team. We offer a variety of perks, but do not believe perks are the same thing as culture.
(Also, everyone who joins our team gets a pair of slippers. They are nice slippers.)
