Why community management has become a core growth function in game development

• Small studios often spot player trends faster due to close community engagement,
• In-game tools and social content help reach and retain more players.
• Active communities can influence product direction and long-term success.

Yuriy Makhanov is head of player experience at AppQuantum.

Strangely enough, it’s often smaller studios that better understand the value of community. With fewer resources to acquire users through marketing, they feel every shift in player sentiment more acutely. But regardless of team size, community can be the make-or-break factor for long-term success, especially in today’s competitive landscape.

At the end of the day, it’s crucial to know what end users think of your product. Players are inherently hyper-engaged. Opening a channel of communication with them creates a constant stream of insight. And the best way to do that is by nurturing an active player community from day one - on social platforms, in media, and wherever your players already live.

There’s very little structured information on how devs can actually make this happen. So let’s talk about how to build effective, scalable, and resource-efficient community management, whether you’re an indie team or a large studio looking to optimise for the long haul.

Who needs community management?

If your goal is to launch a hit, cash out, and coast on the profits, then community probably isn’t a priority.

But that approach is getting less and less realistic. Hits are rare. Building and supporting a game over the years, sustained by a loyal audience, is much more achievable. That kind of long-term success takes a lot of expertise, departments, and senior-level talent. But even without a publisher, and even with a small team, you can start building your community early.

Discord, for example, is a great way to engage players right from the start. It’s the best tool for direct, real-time communication. That said, it’s not a fit for every genre, and it won’t work if you only post once a month. There needs to be content, and there needs to be moderators, ideally recruited from the community itself and rewarded with in-game currency or other perks.

In some ways, community management overlaps with support, but it also covers PR: social media, forums, and direct engagement. For small teams of 10–15 people, the latter might even be more important early on. It’s one of the cheapest and most effective ways to collect game feedback.

Larger studios don’t always react to surges of negative feedback from players right away; they tend to focus on product metrics. That’s not to say player feedback doesn’t matter to them, just that big teams usually work within an established system of workflows and priorities.

Smaller studios are much more agile. And when a project is just getting started, building a player core that’s willing to test, crowdfund, and provide feedback can be critical.

In terms of team effort, you only need one or two people to kick things off: set up social media, launch a forum or subreddit, collect feedback, ask questions, and relay it all to the product team.

Another key part of the job? Filtering feedback.

Feedback is the most important thing. But not the only thing

Unfortunately, if you handed over the entire development process to your players, you’d get a product no one wants to engage with. Not because players mean any harm, but because they don’t have the full picture. One common case: players criticise monetisation features, even though those are what fund ongoing development.

That’s why all community suggestions should be reviewed by someone who understands both the product and player perspective. A community manager should at least have a basic understanding of product development and growth.

Collecting feedback creates a natural funnel. Some questions come up more often than others, and unhappy players can be incredibly valuable for gathering alternative views on new features. Let’s say you want feedback on a new Battle Pass. 

A community manager can gather input directly from players, possibly even incentivising the discussion with in-game rewards. This helps assess whether the feature delivers real value and what could be adjusted to boost adoption. This kind of feedback directly impacts metrics and often gets implemented.

I’ll put it this way: some of today’s biggest hits wouldn’t be what they are without strong community support - through social media, influencers, and other channels. At some point, most companies reach a stage where socially active players become crucial to the project’s long-term direction.

Take action-RPG Warframe, for example. The dev team regularly says their community department is one of the most important in the studio. And many players put out thinkpieces saying they wouldn’t normally be into online games, but Warframe won them over because of its community.

Even a massive hit like Clash Royale continues to stream and stay active on socials, not because they have to in order to maintain product metrics, but because it matters.

Why? Because great products need great people to work on them. And great people are hard to find. A vibrant community and strong online presence can also boost your studio’s HR brand. I’ve even seen players go from community moderators (paid in in-game currency) to full-time team members.

Community also ties closely to product positioning. Any game, even solitaire, can support a community. But for games with a single, limited mechanic, it’ll take more creativity: deck-breaking tournaments, leaderboards, merch for top players, and so on.

If your game is built around short play sessions, it might make more sense to focus on social media and bring in an SMM manager to lead the charge. But even if you’re releasing a one-time premium title, you’ll still need a dedicated channel to talk to your players.

A major benefit of community work is loyalty that’s built to last. Once user acquisition drops off, the game will rely on organic traffic and the player base you’ve built over years of engagement. Community-building is a long-term investment, and it pays off.

But that also means your product must meet higher standards. It has to be deep, content-rich, and well-crafted.

This is especially true for casual and hybrid titles like Idle Outpost, where strong communities can be a serious growth driver. Based on my experience, casual players often spend just as much as midcore ones. Casual games often attract a more mature, financially stable demographic. 

While midcore players typically seek strategic depth and take pride in mastering mechanics, casual players are often willing to spend on in-app purchases to progress faster or earn exclusive rewards during events. This makes them just as valuable from a monetisation standpoint, and even more receptive to community-driven engagement when it’s tied to meaningful content and progression.

Avetis Zakharyan, co-founder of Rockbite Games (Idle Outpost, Sandship, Deep Town): “The community is literally an extension of our team. That’s not just a nice quote, we read almost every review, discussion, and suggestion. But the stream of suggestions is sometimes so massive, we get upset it's impossible to get all of these things done in a reasonable amount of time.

Even before the first tests or clear direction, community enthusiasm gives us a huge energy boost. When players discover and share Easter eggs, it genuinely feels like we’re playing the game together.

We love adding small details, but without an engaged community, they wouldn’t have the same impact. Back in the Deep Town days, even before the full beta, a passionate community started to take shape. We teased content, posted videos, and their incredible reactions inspired us to add more references and details ahead of schedule.

There are Reddit threads where fans analyse (and sometimes even debate!) the Deep Town storyline. We never revealed everything at once, which added real depth, something you don’t usually see in mobile titles - those ‘whoa’ moments where you realise things aren’t what they seemed. I’m not gonna spoil anything, but let’s just say that’s the vibe we aim for.”

Some loyal players even make purchases just to support the devs. Those are the people you want to keep close. Give them test servers, game builds, Q&A sessions - anything that shows you’re listening. Experience shows that players are happy to help if they feel like they’re part of something.

Even those who refuse to spend help out in their own way, by pointing out issues that seasoned game designers might miss because they’ve been staring at the project for too long.

Where to start, and how to move faster

Start with the player. Who will be playing your game? For a mostly female audience, Facebook and Instagram might be your best bet. For male, English-speaking players, Reddit can also be a good call. Ultimately, it depends on the game.

Use the genre and audience to select the platforms they frequent, and drive traffic there. But here’s the catch:

Social platforms are external resources. Ideally, I’d recommend building your own news hub directly into the game’s architecture. Not every studio has the capacity to do that early on, but it pays off long-term.

An in-game news hub becomes your communication backbone. 

Traditional forums have already migrated into games. If you think ahead and give players a place to read updates, follow roadmaps, and interact with you inside the game, that’s a huge win. It’s the only guaranteed way to reach everyone.

External channels only touch a fraction of your active player base. Most players won’t even know you’re on social media. But if you have an in-game tool to talk to ALL of them, you’ve already won half the battle. Use pop-ups, notifications, whatever it takes to say: “There’s new content, a sale, a reward waiting, come and get it.” That kind of reach changes everything.

What if you don’t have a news hub yet? That was exactly the case with Lumber Empire. 

The project was picking up steam fast, and the team had to prioritise gameplay development. There simply wasn’t enough time or resources to build a proper news hub. So, as the community team, we asked for a quick workaround: the ability to insert custom messages and clickable buttons directly into in-game pop-ups. That way, whenever we needed to send a community message or call to action, we could just drop it into a pop-up. With minimal effort, we got something that more or less catered to our needs.

The pop-ups weren't even the top priority, they showed up last in the queue, after all the offers, promos, and sales. But the conversion rate was surprisingly high. In just six months, our Facebook page grew from 150,000 to over half a million followers. Before that, most players didn’t even know Lumber Empire had a Facebook page. 

All it took was a simple pop-up: "Hey everyone! We’re live on Facebook. All the latest news, updates, and changes are right there - click the link and follow us."

So if you’re planning ahead, try to bake social tools like a news hub into your project from the start. But if you can’t yet, don’t wait, just use pop-ups. They’re fast, simple, and incredibly cost-effective.

What about more advanced content?

The next level is video. YouTube, livestreams, short-form content on socials. But before jumping in, ask yourself: what are you going to talk about? Your game needs a strong visual narrative, something dynamic and easy to follow. If you've got that, then YouTube is your playground. A lot of teams got their first real traction there.

I’d start with Shorts, they’re cheaper and easier to produce than full-length videos. AI can help, too: plug in your assets, pick the music, drop in some text, and you’re ready to go.

How do you get players to your YouTube? Ideally, from inside the game. Once again: in-game social tools are key. We’ve been growing the Idle Outpost YouTube channel this way. Back in March, we had about 2,000 subscribers. Three months later? Almost 100K.

We’ve also started streaming. You don’t need a huge budget, just a decent PC or laptop, a phone or camera, a lav mic, and a script. That last one is crucial. But remember: streaming needs a hook. Don’t just go live to “hang out.” Leave that to influencers. If you’re a product team, stream around real news: updates, new mechanics, new content. Streaming is a great way to visualise your new features for the players.

The update might be two weeks away, but show it now. That’s what pulls players in.

Final thoughts

In my opinion, every game touches the community sooner or later. The only question is when you start. Delay it too long, and you miss opportunities. In practice, community management takes fewer resources than you think. With the right tools, or by partnering with the right people and getting their expert opinion on the subject, it’s possible to engage effectively without stretching your team thin.