I thought it was about time I started using this place not only as a depositry of work I’ve done over the years but also as a place for me to air my thoughts – and pondering on what subject I should tackle first, this jumped out at me – my methodology for working with the fans of series’ like Final Fantasy.

After all these years running UFFSite – aka the Unofficial Final Fantasy Site – I’ve had a lot of of contact with the fans of the Final Fantasy series. Running this site is a risk, as it could easily be seen as a conflict of interests for my other work – if I’m so invested in the fanbase and product portfolio of Square Enix, how can I be trusted to write a review of a game like Final Fantasy XIII? I gave the game an 85, but I wouldn’t blame anyone if they accused me of being so invested that I was too critical or so invested that I went easy on the game. For somebody who hadn’t given things as much thought as I that’d be a distinct, if not likely possibility.

UFFSite was founded on June 28th 2000. Back then it was UFF9 – the Unofficial Final Fantasy 9 Site – and only covered FF9, which wasn’t out yet. I wasn’t a part of the site until the back end of the year 2000, but those who founded it were clever in their attitude – they picked out the unreleased FF title and offered unrelenting coverage and translations from Japan. That built the site up quickly. By the time that I was taking control with two others – Mike and Phil – the site was massive – one of the largest Final Fantasy sites online.

It goes to say something of the resiliance of the site and its power as a ‘fan brand’ when UFFSite served almost 2.5 million page impressions to 1.5 million unique users in 2010 – its largest year ever – in spite of the fact the forums have quietened to a whisper and the site has no traditional information (guides, walkthroughs, maps, weapon lists etc) on any recent Final Fantasy titles. We have no sections for titles like Crisis Core, Dissidia, Versus XIII or Type-0 (nee Agito) – and while our blog-style news page still covers unfolding events about those games, the vast majority of our traffic comes in off the legacy pages for titles such as Final Fantasy VII, I and IX.

There’s a reason that UFFSite has dropped off the radar and become largely a legacy site with news postings – and that is all to do with the birth of RPG Site – which is exactly what it says on the tin. In 2006, Final Fantasy was lagging – and UFFSite’s page impressions were shifting to match that. The lack of a ‘proper’ FF in XI was part of the problem, and XII being delayed into Oblivion was another (it’d launch late in 2006 in the US and in 2007 in the UK – but development on it had begun in 2001!) In order to broaden our audience, we made the decision to launch a site dedicated to the RPG genre in general.

RPG Site has been hugely successful for us, and we’re proud of the prestige it has managed to achieve. Learning that the developers at Bioware have read your review, printed it out and used it when considering design elements for Mass Effect 3′s RPG elements is gratifying, and an amazing feeling – one we’d never have gotten out of Square Enix. That said, RPG Site’s success has left us with a bigger question: What do you do about a problem like UFFSite?

It’s a tricky situation, as you have to avoid looking bias. We don’t want UFFSite’s existance to colour the tone of every Square Enix review on RPG Site (and now on The Gaming Vault, our general gaming site) and so it requires the most gentle, softly-softly approach we can imagine. That was when UFFSite became a news portal and little else. Now, though, I know that approach was wrong. It took analysing some ‘best practice’ approaches to the fansite formula to make me realize that.

Two communites were vital examples to me in this – Sonic the Hedgehog and Koei. In both cases I managed to find a fan site which didn’t have the same predicament we were in – but one that, arguably, was even worse. Sonic Wrecks is the fansite of one ‘ArchangelUK’ – all innocent enough – until you realize he works for SEGA. As I understand it, he actually got his Community Management position thanks to his efforts to cultivate the Sonic Community as a fan first and foremost. I think he was first bought in on an advisory role – helping the PR team to understand the fanbase – and then moved into actually working on the team proper.

This is a wise decision by SEGA – if you want to touch the fans, employ one of them – but the way AAUK has handled Sonic Wrecks since being at SEGA is interesting. I know him from my dealings with SEGA as a Journo – and I’d never have known had I not searched the connection out, and were it not for “Summer of Sonic”, the hugely successful Sonic fan convention in the UK where SEGA and a few fansites including Sonic Wrecks and The Sonic Stadium take over a hotel for the weekend, get down some special guests and generally meet and bring the community together.

The way in which he disconnects the two is important, though. As a community manager, he has constant contact with the Sonic fans and promotes SEGA products in a professional manner, but he’s also seen by the fans as a friend. It’s a tough balance to strike, but he’s managed to do something amazing in that he’s managed to keep the friendships with the fans and the fansites that were forged before he joined SEGA. He’s also managed to fight off – or avoid entirely – any nastiness or jealosy from other site owners at him landing what is undoubtedly to them a dream job. All at once he’s a figurehead for the fan community, a voice of authority for the SEGA and Sonic brand amongst the fans and a fan himself, with opinions and thoughts on the games he promots that he actually does express on his podcast – albeit after the games have been out for a while. It’s a great balance.

He’s a trusted source, and while a company denial of a particularly big rumour might be met with skepticism from the fans, if AAUK denies it they believe him because they trust him. That’s important, and I’m sure in years to come the approach he has taken with the Sonic Community here in the UK will be looked  upon as a key example of how to handle the community of a large, ever growing franchise. Ultimately, it all comes down to the fact he’s still a fan. Even his Bio on Sonic Wrecks reveals his true desire – to be important enough to be remembered by the Sonic Community properly. “99% of all the cool community stuff and competitions to do with Sonic is as a direct result of his work,” his Bio says, continuing “it might even garner him a place on the Sonic Retro wiki sometime.” Still a fan.

Similar to AAUK there’s Chin Soon Sun, formerly of Koei Dynasty Warriors fansite Koei Warriors. Chin is a similar story to AAUK – he’s a fansite guy hired into the company he had such a passion for – but he made the decision to step down from  Koei Warriors, the website he created, when he landed the job. He handed it on to others, and now lists himself cutely on his Twitter Bio as being “retired” from that position, now the Community Manager of Tecmo Koei Europe. Despite leaving, Chin, like AAUK, keeps himself deeply involved in the day-to-day movements in the Koei fan community. He blogs about the games often on his personal blog, and his twitter is choc-full of him talking with fans about the games. He’s always deeply involved, and like AAUK, he’s not just Managing that Community like a puppetmaster but he’s also a member of that community – sleeves rolled up, getting stuck in, taking a hands-on approach, being a friend to the fans, but remaining professional.

I don’t work for Square Enix, but reviewing these two and the way they’ve gone about things reinvigorated me with new ideas for the future of UFFSite and the approach we should take. For me it is important I don’t put the journalistic integrity of the other network sites at risk with any actions we undertake on UFFSite, but now I feel we can finally foster the same sort of connect/disconnect that the likes of Chin and AAUK have achieved with the fanbase. We are the only English language fansite out there to have regular day-to-day contact with Square Enix’s PR and Marketing teams, and I count several members of those teams as personal friends as well as professional acquaintances.

We’ve got a redesign of UFFSite coming up that’ll remake both the front and back ends of the site. That’s a start. I also fully intend to start trying to pull something Summer of Sonic-ish together for the UK Final Fantasy Fan community. I still have that domain name for Final Fantasy Festival, after all, and the upcoming Distant Worlds Concert in London this coming November seems the ideal time to arrange a large-scale fansite fan meet-up. I know the webmaster of our French brothers and sisters at FF World is heading over.

We’ll also be shifting UFFSite from opinion to more fan-based stuff from now on. We’ll present the news and the facts and the walkthroughs and stuff like that, but we’ll be inviting top, clever fans in to contribute other aspects of the site – Editorials on matters big and small, from the quality of recent games in the series to a question like, say, how the hell did the Tseng survive getting stabbed by Sephiroth and then having the Temple collapse on top of him in FF7? Much like Kevin and Chin, I, the staff, and the site in general should act as moderators and facilitators for the fanbase – we should be a guiding hand, but we should also let them decide what to do. UFFSite is a site for them – it’s a site that they should decide the destiny of. They are the members who drive it.

Square Enix are themselves offering up some community tastings of their own, but right now I feel their vision doesn’t really intersect with ours much. While the vision is definitely there within individuals, with that company it is often about persuading the Japanese side of the company to sign off on something they see as risky. We all know about the “closed mega theatre” antics that company pulls, and the Japanese side largely believes in a hands-off approach to marketing and community – and that is going to take some time to change.

In that time, I feel fansites like UFFSite can chisel themselves a niche which Square Enix themselves will struggle to hit with their current approach – while still remaining above-board and legal. Unlike some of the stuff SEGA have done, Square Enix’s approach still does feel a lot like a marketing department rather than fellow fans, which leaves space for us. Square Enix definitely are changing their game up, and in this respect they should be regarded as rivals as well as friends to us.

They should be watched – and worked with – closely. When it comes down to it, we are in the same business in the end. They’ve just hired the awesome Jem Alexander to contribute to the blog, and he used to do a bang-up job on the Playstation Blog, so I’m interested to see what they do with him – but I also think the approach for Square Enix’s portfolio – or at least the Japanese side of the portfolio – needs to be drastically different to the approach on the PS Blog. That style will work great for titles like Tomb Raider and Deus Ex, though.

Jem is really talented and I’m excited to see what he does over there, and he’s joining a team that’s already clearly hugely dedicated to the cause of taking Square Enix Members Europe and making it an example for the rest of the company. With the right steps that site will one day be viewed as a prime example of digital marketing done right, though I still believe the Japanese product portfolio in particular could use some proper community love, as I argued on UFFSite not too long ago. Hopefully that day comes – studios like Crystal Dynamics, IO and Eidos Montreal have their own community guys – it’s crazy to my mind that FF, KH, Tactics Ogre and other AAA Japanese franchises don’t have someone to cultivate that base in the West.

Back to UFF – by inviting the members to contribute, it gives them a reason to return. Right now, we avoid some of the things Final Fantasy fans love on UFFSite. There’s no soundtrack downloads, for instance, and there’s certainly no ROMs of older FF games or anything like that. Those things are, frankly, disgusting on other sites. We want to encourage fans to buy the soundtracks and support the efforts of Square Enix Music and the composers who toil on each game. We want them to track down old games on ebay, and not pirate them. We can hold our heads high and say we have the moral high ground, but ultimately this isn’t easy for us – not having such things damages the ability of the site to perform. Even if UFFSite is a better, more regularly updated, higher quality website than its rivals, some fans will eschew us in favour of them in order to get their free FF MP3s or ROM downloads.

This means content we do produce has to be high quality and thought provoking and also appropriate for all ages – we have to understand that while we’ve gotten older the kind of fan who looks up and visits fansites tends to be younger – between around 13 and 16. We need to accomodate for the older fans but also remain friendly and keep the site content from being either too deep and complex or too adult and sweary.There are other, legal areas where we can claw back users, too – I hope to get our friends at Square Enix to dig through their archives and give us some high-res renders and artwork we can release. A lot of this stuff would’ve been released to magazines back in the day for their content – but now the day of those games has passed I’m hoping we can release those PSDs in a high quality. And it’s legal! Hurrah.

That approach should also mean UFFSite is doing its job. A thriving community in itself is an amazing, strong advertisement for a brand. Word of mouth is powerful marketing indeed – if not the most powerful – so UFFSite can be seen as a powerful marketing tool by Square Enix. To be clear, it isn’t a marketing tool – it’s a privately owned site that is more interested in fans than anything – but being seen as such is an important issue of perception for us. The more importantly we are viewed, the more content we can secure direct from Square Enix that will help the site to grow and forge a seperate identity from both RPG Site and the other Final Fantasy fansites out there.

So it’s doing everything it was designed to do – it’s informing the fans, it’s strengthening Final Fantasy as a series, and hopefully thanks to our contact with Square Enix it can help to facilitate dialogue between Square Enix and the fanbase – it can be something of a middle-man. We’ll also expand the UFFSite coverage out to cover more Square Enix titles. Eventually, I hope the site can stretch as far as Tomb Raider, Kane & Lynch and so on. It’ll start with the easy stuff, though – Kingdom Hearts, Star Ocean and so on.

Those who want the critical edge and verdict on Final Fantasy and Square Enix titles can head to RPG Site, and they’ll get it in detail. While there’ll be tough questions asked and a critical eye cast on older releases, with newer stuff our intention is to largely let the fans make the critical judgements on UFFSite – we’ll largely step back. We’ll provide the news and subjects to discuss and an exciting, interesting, intiutive environment to interact with other fans – and hopefully that, combined with our efforts and Square’s help, should drive the site to even higher levels of success than it sees currently.

I’ll probably have even more to say on this subject as we continue to develop the site. Comments, thoughts and such are always welcome, so please do drop ‘em in below.