Community is a compounding investment

Jay Rooney (Spawn Point Marketing) makes the case that community is the one thing the top-performing studios all do — and the one marketing activity you cannot catch up on three months before launch.

The starting point is brutal market maths: roughly 84% of indie and AA revenue on Steam goes to the top 10% of titles, leaving the other 90% of games to split the remaining 16%. The obvious question is what that top decile does differently.

Ad budgets, full-time marketing leads and showcase slots are out of reach for most teams. Community is not. It is available to any studio regardless of team size, genre or budget — and it is the one lever the successful studios pull consistently.

The catch is the economics. Community-building is the most time-intensive and least immediately measurable marketing activity, with returns that often arrive 12 months or more later. It produces no dashboard metric that goes up and to the right, so it is the first thing deprioritised in a milestone-driven roadmap.

Studios in the top 10% almost all had community infrastructure in place long before launch — not necessarily huge Discords, sometimes a few hundred highly engaged people — but built over months or years, not weeks.

Our takeaway at Lev3lUp: start today, not after the next milestone. Community compounds, and the weeks you skip are weeks of compounding you never get back — which is why a Discord server and community tooling sit at the centre of our Starter Pack.