A while back, we looked at data to answer the question, “Does a community need a community manager?” and the answer is yes, it does. Without a manager, a community is like a ship without a captain, sometimes it can’t even leave the port. Today, we’re looking at data to answer a different but not less important question:
Does a company even need the ship (i.e. a community) at all?
Last year, I had the chance to work with a great project called SolPlex. Its managing director was kind enough to allow me to publish a small study on how their Discord community affects in-game activity. The main questions were:
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Does participating in the Discord community affect the number of actions players take in the game?
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Does participating in the Discord community affect how long players stay in the game?
So, let’s dive into what we found.
Note: This research was conducted by Pavel Klykov. Thanks are due to him for the analytical part.
First, a few notes on the data
The community we studied has been around for over a year, since the first beta version of the game launched. The game itself (the porduction version of it) went live in April, 2026. At the same time, we had data only for one month, from late May to late June. The dataset included over 400 players and about 1,500 Discord users. Among these people we identified three groups:
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Group 1: Players only (no Discord account): 310
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Group 2: Players with a Discord account but inactive on it: 69
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Group 3: Players with a Discord account and active on it: 58
Note: We defined “active on Discord” as any player who posted four or more messages.
Does participating in the Discord community affect the number of actions players take in the game?
TL;DR: Active community members take an order of magnitude more in-game actions.
Over the study period, on average:
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A player without a Discord account performed 104 in-game actions.
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A player with an inactive Discord account performed 437 actions.
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A player active in the community performed 3,535 actions.
(These differences are statistically significant!)
Based on these numbers, we can say that community activity and in-game engagement are connected. What’s more, players who have an account but aren’t active in the community still show higher in-game activity than those without a Discord account at all.
Does participating in the Discord community affect how long players stay in the game?
TL;DR: Players who are active on Discord stay in the game more than 5× longer.
On average:
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Players without a Discord account spent 5.5 days in the game.
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Players with an inactive Discord account spent 22 days.
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Players active in the community spent 29 days (which covers the entire period for which we have data).
Note: Average in-game time is calculated as the difference between a player’s first and last recorded activity.
What does this mean?
If your game doesn’t have a community yet, consider starting one. If you already have one, great! Just remember that launching is only the first step. For a community to deliver real value, it needs ongoing work. We’d be happy to help you do that effectively!