Community ROI: The New North Star for Game Marketing Leaders

48% of game studios say Discord directly drives revenue.
That’s no accident, and it’s no longer surprising.

In the age of live service games and always-on engagement, having a Discord community isn’t a “nice-to-have.” It’s a strategic growth lever. And yet, for many studios and publishers, one critical question still hangs in the air:

How do we actually measure the ROI of our Discord community?

For executives seeking to scale sustainably, the answer is more than academic. It’s the key to justifying investment, allocating resources, and building long-term loyalty that outperforms traditional ad spend.

Let’s break down how leading studios are defining — and proving — the value of community-led marketing.

For executives seeking to scale sustainably, the answer to that question is more than academic. It’s the key to justifying investment, allocating resources, and building long-term loyalty that outperforms traditional ad spend.

Let’s break down how leading studios are defining, and proving, the value of community-led marketing.

Why Discord Community ROI Is Hard to Measure (But Getting Easier)

Historically, marketers could track ROI from ad campaigns or influencer partnerships with clear conversion funnels. Discord communities, on the other hand, has often felt “soft.” It influences multiple outcomes; engagement, retention, word-of-mouth, content creation… but doesn’t always follow a linear path to purchase.

That’s changing. Better tooling, smarter analytics, and stronger alignment between community and business goals are making it possible to put hard numbers behind community success.

A recent stat says it all: Only 1 in 5 gaming marketers can confidently measure Discord ROI today — but the other 4 are actively working on it.

The Metrics That Matter

If you’re an exec or community lead building your measurement stack, these are the core metrics worth tracking:

Metric	What It Means & Why It Matters
Active Community Participation	What % of your Discord members are actually engaging? A healthy benchmark is 10–30%, with higher rates indicating strong momentum and visibility into player sentiment.
Community Growth Rate	New member acquisition signals organic reach and fan-driven discovery. Studios like Epic track server growth ahead of launches to gauge campaign success.
Retention & Returning Users	Do members keep coming back? High return rates often correlate with better game retention. Warframe found community-active players had notably higher 30-day retention.
Sentiment & Satisfaction	It’s not just about chatter, it’s how players feel. Tools like Levellr track positive/negative sentiment, often predicting reviews, NPS, and ARPU outcomes.
UGC Volume & Reach	Mods, memes, guides, and fan art reflect deep engagement. Studios like Valve and Bethesda treat UGC as a signal of longevity and cultural impact.
Referral & Influencer Impact	Community is the engine of word-of-mouth, which drives 20–50% of game purchases. Tracking referrals and ambassador activity links growth to advocacy.
Community-Attributed Revenue	Players in community channels spend more. One study showed daily chat participants had 20x higher LTV, 4x more sessions, and 60% longer playtimes.

Community vs. Ads: A Smarter Bet?

Let’s put it into perspective.

For execs used to paying for performance, community may feel intangible, but the compound returns over time are undeniable. When players love your game enough to talk about it, create for it, or bring friends into it, they’re doing your marketing for you.

And unlike ads, that kind of loyalty scales.

The Executive Playbook: Turning Metrics Into ROI

To operationalize this, leading studios are:

• Benchmarking participation and sentiment before and after updates, launches, or events

• Tracking UGC spikes and correlating them to player logins or store sales

• Measuring 30/60/90-day retention for players who are active in Discord vs. those who aren’t

• Attributing revenue to referral codes, ambassador-driven growth, or community-only product drops

• Using tools like Levellr to centralize insights across Discord

Ultimately, the community flywheel doesn’t just drive engagement, it reduces churn, increases LTV, and creates resilient brands that can outlast even the noisiest competitor.

Making ROI Measurable: How Levellr Bridges the Gap

One of the biggest historical blockers to community measurement has been the inability to tie community engagement to individual player outcomes. It’s been easy to see that a community feels healthy but harder to prove which players are driving value, or how their behavior is influencing spend, churn, or retention.

Levellr fixes that.

Through unique API integrations Levellr helps studios bridge the gap between community and gameplay. By linking Discord user IDs to player IDs, studios gain clear visibility into:

• What titles individual users are playing

• How often they engage in Discord

• Whether that engagement leads to higher session length, retention, or ARPDAU

• And critically, how that behavior compares to players not active in the community

With this connection, we help studios track real outcomes like:

• ARPDAU (e.g. Discord users have an ARPDAU that is 3.5x our average player)
• Session length (e.g. Discord users have 1.5x longer sessions than average)
• Retention (e.g. D1>D7 retention on our new patch was 35% higher for players in our Discord)
• Conversion rates (e.g. Discord users are 5x more likely to make in-game purchases)
• Churn rate (e.g. users who join our Discord server are 30% less likely to churn)
• Social interactions or sharing metrics (e.g. users who join our Discord have 2x as many friends)

This is no longer guesswork, it’s actionable, attributable insight. And it turns Discord from a fuzzy community platform into a strategic data source for player value.

TL;DR for Execs

If you’re still treating community as a “support function,” you’re leaving growth on the table.

Community is:

• Your fastest-growing referral channel

• Your richest source of feedback and loyalty

• Your most cost-effective content pipeline

• Your best predictor of long-term player value

And now, with the right tools, it’s measurable.

The smartest studios aren’t asking if community has ROI.

They’re already calculating it.