Why Gaming has Communities, And The Rest Has Fans Only

In the gaming world where no clear boundaries exist, such as neighbourhoods, cities and country borders, or even language, gaming communities are bound by other things, and economically increasingly significant in the multi-billion gaming industry.

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Source: r/community

What’s a Community, really?

Communities are everywhere. In my own view (I’m no behavioral expert), a community is a loose or tight-nit collection of people who gather around what they value and protect. You may not even know each other but through signalling, language and expression you immediately recognise those who are part of your community. You need a place or platform to be together. Another common and important factor is that it’s self-orchestrating. Nature at work.

Communities are built not just on shared interests, but on shared action and ownership. They form because people want to belong, contribute, and evolve together. In gaming, communities aren’t just made up of people who like a game. They are the game. They write lore, organise tournaments, create mods, run Discords, host roleplay servers, develop training guides, and yes, sometimes even keep games alive after their official support ends.

In sports or music, fans are mostly consumers and collectors. In gaming, the community is made up of players, creators, and co-builders all coming together in their homeground, the game.

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Image source: PC Gamer

Empowering Gaming Communities

Communities can be beautiful and scary at the same time. They’re wonderfully immersive but can reject you like an alien species, too. In gaming, as Jan Moerland beautifully pointed out in his post Community Modding in Games, games that have active communities, e.g. through supported modding, have more activity and a longer life span. So actively empowering gaming communities is a successful strategy.

A game’s lifespan depends on how embedded it becomes in the lives of its community. With ELO we firmly believe that the more the community feels trusted and empowered, the more likely they are to invest time, money, and creativity back into the game. In other words: a thriving community means a thriving game economy.

Below I have included a few well-known game titles where arguably the community got bigger than the game itself. These games are in different genres, and likely had different approaches to growing their community (from very hands-off to very hands-on).

Removing barriers and decentralisation of ownership

Empowering your gaming community should go as far as decentralisation of ownership, and that’s a good thing for everyone. The purpose of web3 in gaming is very simple: it enables shared ownership in a creative, fun and time-consuming project. Right now, it’s about finding that right balance, managing expectations, timelines and experience that may not necessarily be in the game itself. I dare to say, for a gamer it’s a great time to be alive. And even better for the next generations.

In live service games especially, this decentralisation becomes an advantage: it means the community participates some of the creative and engagement load. It builds its own momentum, creates its own economy, and acts as a multiplier for growth.

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Image source : Pocket-Lint

Four Different, Very Empowered Game Communities

So, that’s a little theory but you’re probably well familiar with some of the examples below. The point is that, irrespective of the game genre, there are clearly successful executed strategies whether on purpose or by ‘allowed accident’ (and we will look in failures, too).

1. Minecraft

The ultimate sandbox for co-creation. Minecraft’s community has built everything from Hogwarts to working CPUs. Mojang’s support for mods, custom servers, and creator tools has turned Minecraft into a decentralized creative platform. Aside from the game, it’s grown to become a social platform and a content engine YouTube no doubt must have been very pleased with (less so parents maybe).

2. League of Legends

Riot Games’ League of Legends, evolved from a mod itself, has cultivated highly structured competition and expressive storytelling. Despite that modding is not supported, League’s community is vast between esports, lore, music videos, cosplay, and creator collabs. Riot typically strictly steers the LoL universe, but Riot seems to get more flex ‘letting things happen’ (e.g. community co-streams) and have had since long a fairly accessible data API.

3. Animal Crossing

Nintendo’s Animal Crossing may not look like your mainstream game. A cozy, life-sim game that became a social platform during the pandemic. Players hosted weddings, fashion shows, protests, therapy sessions in-game and even staged a real protest. Although there aren’t allowed modding options (Nintendo holds tight on its IP, feels like iOS vs Android), the community created a soft-power movement built around comfort, creativity, and care.

4. Counter-Strike

Despite its character as a Terrorist vs Counter-Terrorist game, Counter-Strike can be seen as a prime example of a near hippie-like community game. With its grassroots LAN culture, skin trading economy, and decades-long esports legacy, Counter-Strike’s community has helped define what competitive gaming and a thriving ‘laissez fair’ game ecosystem looks like. Valve’s approach to modding through Steam Workshop and server hosting empowered players to build an ecosystem that thrives on autonomy.

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Image Source: IGN

How Games Can Empower Their Communities

Here are just a few ways game studios can move from community management to true community empowerment:

• Open up APIs or mod tools to invite co-creation from data to in-game assets
• Architect and support community-led infrastructure, like wikis, tournaments, and community hubs
• Think of ‘user-orchestrated-experiences’, not just UGC
• Set up a framework for decentralisation and self-custody
• Collaborate with creators for world building and culture
• Design sunset strategies that allow players to host or preserve discontinued games.

At ELO, we work with studios and brands to create these kinds of empowered ecosystems. We believe the future of game success isn’t just about retention curves and DAUs. It’s about how much the players (or should we say participants) feel they belong, and ‘vested’ they feel into the game and its community.