Community management is a field within games that cultivates the relationship between audience, developer, and product. It brings intentionality and design to the natural ways people form communities, and while the role varies per studio, community management is intertwined with choices developers make every day!
- Community management is actually many disciplines wearing a trench coat pretending to be one job.
- The work a community manager does depends on the studio’s budget, previous hires, and valuation of community management work.
- Out of necessity, community management work is often reactive and exhausting. If community management is reframed as community design and intertwined with development work, it can become proactive and more sustainable.
- Investing in community management is investing in a joyful audience and lifelong customers.
What is community management?
Simply put, community management is managing the intricate relationships between people and product. Managing a community involves a lot of communication and boundary setting. It involves defining and reinforcing values held by studios. It involves getting to know players and advocating for what’s important to them to developers. Community work happens across the industry and across multiple disciplines — in Discord servers, on social media, in emails, in actual games.
The many roles of community managers
The purpose of a community manager is to take nebulous human interaction, specialize in it, and focus it. Being one is a lot like being the protagonist from the children’s book Caps for Sale: a humble person doing their best with sixteen hats stacked on their head. Which hats a community manager wears depend on the studio’s budget, previous hires, and valuation of community management work in general.
A community manager’s potential job responsibilities could include (but are not limited to):
- Traditional marketing (designing a user funnel, paid ad spend, branding)
- Social media marketing
- Advocating for the player experience
- Copywriting
- Video editing
- Streaming
- Managing influencer relationships
- PR
- Moderating (Discord, Steam Forums, in-game social environments)
- Customer service
- Sensitivity reading
- Data analysis
- Event planning
- Graphic design
- Trust and safety
- Feature design
- Project management
It is difficult to capture the complexity of community management because every job is a little different, just like every community is different. Community managers are the face of the brand, the voice of the players, the voice of the developers, the first line of defense against harassment, and usually the first targets of harassment. They are often excellent shitposters and relentlessly agile. They know far too much about the darker parts of the internet because they have to, and the work is often thankless.
Throughlines of the work
To say community management is one specific thing is to try to explain all of human interaction. There’s a lot in there. But across studios and disciplines and games, some consistent throughlines in community management work include:
- Interacting with the audience
Examples: replying on social media, spending time in Discord, answering emails, tabling at conventions - Representing audience sentiments
Examples: pitching merch ideas, contributing to design meetings, sentiment reports, planning announcements - Communicating game news
Examples: patch notes, updates, and announcements, customer service, answering questions, writing FAQ’s, writing press releases - Cultivating the vibes
Examples: setting boundaries, communicating studio values, banning people, designing fan interaction strategy, sensitivity reading - Making stuff
Not the technical term, but creation of art, ideas, memes, events, and interactive media is essential to participation in online communities.
What falls under any individual’s job description will change from studio to studio. Larger studios will often have a separate marketing or PR team, meaning a community manager can focus primarily on building community. They also tend to have formalized pipelines for audience sentiment and feedback for developers. On the other hand, many indie studios have only one person to do all of this work, but it’s usually easier for that work to have an impact because of team size. While many job descriptions have overlapping skills and themes, each and every community management job is bespoke. What you do with that flexibility can change the path of your community — and your career!
Management or design?
Community managers and their work is often seen outside of the development cycle. They manage the bottom of the user funnel. They deliver news and decisions to the audience. They filter fan responses.
However, community management work is inextricably intertwined with game development. Developers influence their audience constantly, so while management is an accurate way to describe community work, every new game or update presents an opportunity to improve and do more than just maintain.
Design is all about building intentional interaction between a user and a product. Community management is a design field. A positive community, a healthy relationship with an audience, and a welcoming environment can all be intentionally made to meet the needs of those within it.
At the end of the day, a community is going to establish norms, values, and behaviors no matter what. The practiced hand of a community manager determines what those are and who gets to establish them. Understanding community management as design work and empowering those designers makes engaging with fans proactive instead of reactive. It means a healthy relationship can be built on respect and intentionality, and it means your community manager won’t get burnt out in a year and quit the industry. Probably.
What does good look like?
As mentioned, metrics for success in a game’s community management will vary depending on the job description and specific communities. The goal of these tables is to provide an overview of behaviors to pay attention to, not comprehensive metrics for success or failure. You will notice overlapping signs from Trust and Safety) because the goals of community management and trust and safety are often inextricable.
For players and communities
| Success Signs | Warning Signs | |
| Individual | Able to use platform tools like mute and block Self-regulates and self-moderates based on community expectations Understands social contract of the space Accepts moderation and boundaries of community owners High resilience | Repeats behaviors that make other users uncomfortable Polices other users as a way to participate in the community Crosses boundaries to feed parasocial relationships Exploits loopholes and vulnerabilities |
| Group | Self-moderation Abundance of unique contributors to community Resilience to griefing and trolling Disseminates accurate game information across community | Insular sub-groups that gatekeep space within larger community Behaves as if developers / leaders are antagonists to the community Easily disrupted by problematic users |
| Community | Tolerates change High creative output Positive studio reputation Positive subjective feedback Reports of feeling safe High representation from diverse identity groups* Low barrier of entry for new users | Low retention of new members Low community self-management Low engagement Reports of unsafe environment for certain identity groups Nazis |
* The concept of diversity should be understood contextually. While valuable in many settings, it’s not always the primary goal for groups formed to support and empower those with marginalized identities.
For community managers
When evaluating success in community management, many look to the community itself. How are the players feeling? How much harassment is happening? That’s important, but without a healthy community manager, that success is often fleeting and comes at a great cost.
Burnout and exhaustion are ever-present dangers in community management, so facilitating a symbiotic relationship between healthy community and healthy community manager is the only true path for success. Here is a brief overview of signs to look for when evaluating success as a community manager:
Success signs:
- High resilience to conflict
- Comfortable setting boundaries with audience
- Clear community goals and values
- Prioritizes community health over an individual community member’s needs
- Willing and able to change parts of the community’s design for long-term sustainability
- Regularly communicates accurate game updates and changes to the community
Warning signs:
- Unable to determine risk
- Every moderation situation feels like a crisis
- Unable to sleep or log off
- Unable to determine true audience sentiment vs. loudest audience opinions
- Regular thoughts of closing community spaces
- Only ever able to make reactive decisions
Why is community management worthwhile?
This one is pretty simple.
People usually want to make games to bring value and joy to another person’s life. A well-run community means happy players, higher audience retention, and a symbiotic relationship between fans and developers.
People also need revenue to keep a studio open. A well-run community means lifelong customers, brand advocates, word of mouth marketing, helpful feedback for future games, and a community that won’t alienate new players. All of this means a higher likelihood of financial success.
If you like bringing joy to others (and making your game more profitable) consider investing in community management.
Now what?
For more information about starting a career in Community Management, the following blog post offers a good introduction: https://www.victoriatran.com/writing/becoming-a-video-game-community-manager
For more on burnout, see Avoiding Burnout in Values Driven Work.
To learn more about measuring community health, see the Big Idea Introduction to Measuring Community Health as well as the Method From Pillars of Health to KPIs of Thriving.
