
▸head of community/comms, unannounced @RiotGames game ▸🥃 hobbyist, 🍜 enthusiast, 🇨🇦 optimist ▸prev: @playSUPERVIVE, @VALORANT, @LoLesports, @LeagueOfLegends
Los Angeles, CA
Joined January 2011
- Tweets1.6K
- Following470
- Followers9.3K
- Likes2.3K
chris tom retweeted
I've spent 13 years reading internet comments every day. I've traded a small piece of my soul for some techniques on how to filter feedback from your community. Receipts linked below!
I'm fine btw
chris tom retweeted
If you missed it from yesterday, here are the ten steps I recommend for building cross-generational communities.
chris tom retweeted
Hi! Im growing my team! Looking for some real hitters who not only understand the creator economy, but carry a deep operational mindset as well as a love of gaming and Roblox culture.
I am pushing on how we build for scale, evolve our influencer marketing playbooks to meet our massive global community, and generally try to create more meaningful experiences and things for content creators.
If that sounds interesting to you, please apply. These positions will be based in San Mateo, CA.
careers.roblox.com/jobs/8187…
careers.roblox.com/jobs/8187…
BIGGGGG
Come work for me on @playriftbound. I'm hiring a Sr. Community Management Lead!
riotgames.com/en/work-with-u…
chris tom retweeted
Come work for me on @playriftbound. I'm hiring a Sr. Community Management Lead!
riotgames.com/en/work-with-u…
If you're interested, dm your linkedin (pls no pdf resumes, infosec will kill me) or dm me on linkedin @ linkedin.com/in/crtom/
Due to volume I can't respond to soft inquiries or generic informationals, but I do generally read everything so take that how you will.
chris tom retweeted
oh yeah an announcement of my own
excited to call @riotgames my new professional home
see you in the queues
Damn, Wardogs is pretty fun.
This is a delightful intersection of Tarkov and Battlebit that I didn't know I wanted.
You spend a lot of time begging people with cash to revive you and even more listening to military LARPers telling you to, "stay frosty," but still 8.5/10.
chris tom retweeted
My heart goes out to the 2XKO team. It’s a big blow to the fighting game community and game development in general to have this project stop active development.
Our projects are pretty delicately linked as our team at Aether Studios set out to achieve a similar goal for the platform fighter genre as the 2XKO team was attempting for the traditional fighting game community.
Before our Kickstarter, we pitched to publishers and investors and we even had Project L listed as a north star of what we were looking to do.
Now that we’re both on the other side of releases, it’s easy to come up with a ton of little reasons that were “oh so obvious” as to why it’s been hard to attract and retain players.
But at the end of the day, the current landscape for multiplayer games is brutal. You either bottle lightning, go out of business immediately, or like our projects, struggle to release frequent updates that can steer your project toward financial sustainability.
And you can say, “Why even attempt a live service then? People liked boxed games.”
Most multiplayer games today are live services even if they didn’t intend it. They might have a less grueling release schedule, but every successful multiplayer game including fighting games are either still in active development or had a multi-year DLC schedule that has now concluded while we wait for the next game in the series.
By the end of Rivals 1 development, it felt like we were running a live service out of a game that was meant to take just a few months to create in Game Maker. We were constantly running into issues trying to expand that game, and there were many times we wanted to give up development during the 10 years of updates the first game received.
So we looked at a game like League of Legends and later 2XKO to help guide our development plans for Rivals 2. We designed updates in a way that would generate income every month while also having bigger content drops for the less committed players to return to.
And it worked! But at a much smaller scale than a AAA game would need or even where we hoped we might be. We’re still operating at around 10x the Rivals 1 numbers had before workshop launched.
But a 3D game is much more expensive to build and maintain. We’re still struggling to stay sustainable. If we had the same burn rate as the 2XKO team, we wouldn’t even be close. It’s a good thing we didn’t stretch ourselves to launch on console right away, because our engineering burn would not be possible to pay the team and update and bug fix the game on multiple platforms with the numbers we have now. We would have had to stop development by now.
One difference between the two projects now is that Riot Games as a company will still exist after 2XKO ceases active development.
Aether Studios does not have that same luxury. If Rivals 2 falls then so does Aether Studios and so does my livelihood.
We have no other option and we will keep working until the wheels fall off completely.
I know people on 2XKO team who are in a similar position to me. They were there to make a fighting game. So the end of this project is the end of a dream.
I hope they find something awesome to do next, and they are in a good spot personally. Because there were so many right decisions made on that project. But at the end of the day, you need to attract and retain players for the business to work. And that’s our job now when making a competitive multiplayer videogame.
woohoo, a rare 𝗶𝗻𝗳𝗹𝘂𝗲𝗻𝗰𝗲𝗿 𝘀𝘁𝗿𝗮𝘁𝗲𝗴𝗶𝘀𝘁 role is open on the Riftbound team!
this human gets to pave the way for Riot and its relationship with TCG creators/influencers through programs, relationships, and ecosystem development. throw in!
riotgames.com/en/work-with-u…
chris tom retweeted
Our second game is OUT NOW: store.steampowered.com/app/4…
Cat Crisis is an online co-op game about being cute little cats rescuing even cuter kittens. Hide from terrifying dogs, pet frightened kittens, and rescue them to save all catkind! Play Cat Crisis with up to 4 players (or more)
chris tom retweeted
I get that a lot of people follow me for "teehee funny internet guy dunks on bad guys", but I want to make something extremely clear about what has to come after that. This is something I talk about with people a lot.
The main reason I am here on Twitter talking with all of y'all is to make the game better. Part of that is listening and learning and connecting the community to the dev team in the ways that I'm able to, and I'll continue to do that as much as my time allows. But a big part of my day job is specifically focused on player behavior and toxicity, so I want to talk about that specifically right now.
League is too good of a game to let a small number of jerks ruin it for everyone else. Our best guess is that less than 1% of people who play League are just going to be jerks no matter what, and our view is that we should get better at getting those people out of the game (and we've been doing that for the last year, and that work will continue).
It is also obviously true that more than 1% of people currently playing League behave in ways that aren't great. Our view is that those people are NOT going to be jerks no matter what. They will be responsive to incentives and social norms and pressure.
I've talked with quite a few people who have said things like "I question why it's worth it to follow the rules when I see people break the rules without consequence." And when I see and talk to people who occasionally act out in ways that are antisocial, what they tell me is that they aren't always like this, and that they don't recognize themselves in the way that they're acting at their worst. Those people are 100% capable of change - both for better and for worse.
Part of why I'm out here doing a bunch of stuff in public is because we want y'all to see that we're actively working on improving these behaviors, and also: we're more effective if we do that together. This is meant to do three things:
1. We want to give energy to people who get tired of watching jerks do jerk things, and who get tired of reporting them and who get tired of doing the work of emotionally regulating themselves instead of ruining games or typing whatever comes into their mind. We want them to know that the good world they want to live in is the one we - the entire dev team, all of Riot - want to create.
2. We want to send a clear signal to jerks that their choices are not consequence-free and that we are working to make that more and more true every day.
3. We want to make it clear for people who are in the middle - not perfect, but they do their best - that being better is worth it. That being part of a community that treats each other with respect and fairness is work, yeah, but it's work worth doing, because the reward is that your community has shared values like respect and fairness, and you then get to expect to be treated with respect and fairness by those around you.
Part of doing that work is shifting social norms around the acceptability of doing antisocial things. We've seen people do that more and more, which is great. We love that. Ultimately, communities must enforce the norms that they want to be held to.
The next part is harder, and this is where writing this all is coming from. Part of what MUST happen in that process is that communities have to be able and willing to encourage and support the people who do reform. If people don't reform and keep doing shitty things, sure, dunk on them, call them out, whatever. But if someone is going to say "hey, yes, this was shitty, I'm going to do different things now", and then they actually change how they treat others? Encourage them! Social pressure works both ways.
We all, collectively, get to decide what community we want to live in every day, and our actions contribute to that. They shape who we are, and they shape the realities of the people around us, and they affect how the people around us think about what they can expect and whether doing the hard, right thing is worth it.
We want more and more people to see that there is lasting value in doing the hard, right things that make the League community a better place.
Replying to @Agurinlol
people need to reinforce what they want to see more. if apologizing to people and changing your behavior gets met with “so humiliating, what a loser”, don’t be surprised if people decide that the best strategy is to deny everything and quadruple down
change must be possible
more thoughts:
* R&D can be scary but you get to try new things rather than status quo
* no shame in not knowing things but DO be excited to learn
* small team + deeply embedded on dev (1team1dream)
* not remote (sorry - it's important for career mentorship + strategic alignment)
about me:
* launched VALORANT and SUPERVIVE, likes capital letters
* friendly; loves to debate and happy to be wrong
* wants you to be passionate and independent and able to do your best work and live your best life
* reads cover letters (lol)
the role: riotgames.com/en/work-with-u…












