WHY COMMUNITY
MANAGEMENT NEEDS TO STOP BEING THE STUDIO SCAPEGOAT
By Eden Chen, CEO and Founder, FirstLook & Pragma I
t’s a brutal time to be on a community team in the games industry. Way too often, when a live-service game stumbles or a highly
anticipated launch falls flat, the community managers are drafted as the studio’s shield. When a game is thriving, community is a
buzzword everyone in the studio loves. But the moment sentiment turns, player retention drops, and the Discord gets toxic, community suddenly becomes an isolated problem belonging to a single, overworked department. This reveals a fundamental flaw in how studios
operate. Community isn’t a department you can silo. It’s a holistic function that, more and more, reflects the health of your entire studio.
PLAYERS DON’T SEE YOUR ORG CHART Players don’t separate their experience into departments. They don’t think, “that was a design decision,” or “that was marketing,” or “that was community.” They just experience the game from onboarding to progression, UI clarity, patches, and your responsiveness to game-breaking bugs. These all blend into one question: Do I trust this studio? Let’s make this crystal clear. Trust is built or eroded by hundreds of small decisions
18 | MCV/DEVELOP July/August 2026
over time. When community is treated as an afterthought or a clean-up crew, studios find themselves perpetually reacting to fires instead of learning from their players.
WHY THIS MATTERS IN TODAY’S MARKET We’re operating in an environment where launches are harder, attention is fractured, and UA cost is astronomical. Many studios are discovering the hard way that massive top-of-funnel marketing visibility doesn’t translate into sustained engagement. High- profile projects with massive budgets fizzle out in weeks, while quieter, systems-driven games build ironclad loyalty through deep player investment. In this landscape, community is the clearest
leading indicator of whether your game has actual staying power. When players invest time, come back,
participate, and bring others along, you’re seeing something real. That type of commitment is a player’s direct response to a positive experience. Which means community is about the
conditions that make players want to stay. Strained, toxic communities almost always
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