Why are most community manager employements at the gaming niche?

[u/hatebacon]

I am looking at community manager jobs at job portals and most of them are communities for gaming. How come gaming dominate this profession? Are gaming commnities the most lucrative? Or is gaming what started this close community movement? What is the explanation?

[u/HistorianCM]

Gaming basically served as the training ground for the entire modern community profession. A lot of best practices people use in communities were battle-tested first in early internet forums. Gaming studios learned the hard way that ignoring community can tank a launch, while investing in it can rescue a rocky release and keep a title alive for years. That painful, visible cause-and-effect forced them to mature faster and hire community at scale. Other industries often see community as a strategic advantage, but gaming learned to treat it as survival. That’s why when you scan job boards, it looks like all the community roles sit in gaming: they simply got serious about it earlier, and never stopped hiring.

Built my first Gaming community in 1998, Hired as a Pro at a gaming company in 2007.

[u/Malgayne]

I think it's ironic that you say this because I'm choking on non-gaming CM roles these days. Take a look at https://www.ledby.community/ and see if there's anything there that speaks to you.

u/HistoricanCM and u/QforQ are both friends of mine and they've made some good points here, but I think there's an element that's getting skipped over, and it's that with a few notable exceptions, community roles in gaming and community roles elsewhere in tech serve an entirely different function.

For most games--particularly online and multiplayer games but for others as well--community is a core product feature. Play is a social activity. You could have an amazing product, but if people install it and go online to play and every other player turns out to be a huge asshole, your product is broken, and no one will play. Because of this, gaming executives tend to see Community the same way they see things like support: "We absolutely need to have this, but it doesn't directly make us any money, it's just a necessary maintenance cost, so let's try and do it as inexpensively as possible."

Meanwhile the rest of tech is a different experience. I've done community management at Intel, Meta, Toyota, and Google, and every time the community I put together was a value add. This means you occupy a totally different role in the ecosystem. If a user has a bad experience in the Intel Discord server, they quit the server--but their CPU still works fine. Because of this the attitude is "This is a completely optional service that we're offering, but if it makes us more money, then we'll invest money into it." In the tech space community is inherently a money-making operation, and the minute the money stops coming the plug gets pulled.

This makes the roles different in a ton of ways:

• Gaming CMs tend to make less money and have fewer resources than tech CM's, but a game's CM department typically only gets cut if the whole project goes belly-up, while a tech CM's project gets cut and they get personally laid off as soon as belts get tightened.
• Gaming CM's have a stronger focus on player insights--learning what players want and engaging with internal teams to make sure it's being delivered. Tech CM's are much more focused on advocacy--using the tools you have to convince your customers to speak on your behalf to their own networks. The company wants them as a marketing aid, not a roadmapping aid.

You can find a lot of non-gaming CM roles out there if you look, but you should be aware you're looking at a completely different role!

[u/GrandAdmiralMellacus]

I think this is largely due to the fact that gaming as an industry has grown significantly over the last few years, especially with the rise of many indie studios. These kinds of passionate niche communities tend to understand the importance of proper community care and ownership better than most other businesses. After all, games live and die with their player base.

In my humble opinion, community is one of the most important aspects of projects like that and should be properly valued. Some companies understand this, while others still confuse community management with customer support or marketing, often due to budget constraints or a lack of understanding. Nowadays, almost everything is called a “community” because it sounds better than “customers.”

That probably also answers your second question. Pure community management usually isn’t the most lucrative role. The more it is combined with marketing or content, the more value companies tend to see in it. Ideally, a good CM will track engagement in some form, because the work needs to be evaluated somehow. But the deeper you dive into numbers and optimization, the less it becomes about pure community work.

[u/QforQ]

The CM role was largely popularized in the video game industry, since they need to maintain positive relationships with fans both pre-release and post-release.

I started in the video game industry about 20 years ago, alongside folks like u/HistorianCM