From Audience to Belonging: What Gaming Gets Right That Everyone Else Is Catching Up To

Yesterday, I sat in on a panel called “From Audience to Army: Building Brands People Want to Belong To.” It was part of The Global Entertainment Marketing Academy of Arts & Sciences Shared Spaces series, hosted by 100 Thieves. Ryan Johnson , Erin Ashley Simon and Emily Mei joined Bryanna Goecke, 100 Thieves’ Chief Commercial Officer, to talk about how gaming built community before the rest of entertainment noticed. I expected a gaming panel, but I left with a theory I’ll use for every brand I work with.

Emily Mei asked if your fans would still spend time together if you disappeared. If they would not, you have an audience. A community forms around a shared belief. Many brands build for the wrong thing.

People buy what the product makes them.

Someone wearing Nike over Adidas is showing you who they are by the brand they select. The same thing happens in K-pop fandoms, sneaker culture, and in games like Call of Duty or Valorant. People buy for themselves and if your marketing focuses on your brand’s story instead of the identity your customers want, you miss the point.

Give them a name and a job.

Two things kept coming up.

1. Name the group. K-pop fandoms have names. Sports fans have team identities. Gaming orgs have their own labels. A name gives people a place to belong.
2. Give them something to do. K-pop fans organize events, buy billboards, and fund projects themselves. When people spend their own time or money, they stop being spectators, and that’s a huge shift that matters.

Creators are translators. Don’t expect them to want to read your very possibly cringey brand-provided script.

The panel discussed failed brand partnerships. Brands hand creators scripts and insist on specific language and tone, but it usually backfires. A creator translates your brand into a language their community already uses. When brands dictate the words, audiences notice. The panel advised working with creators as partners who protect the relationship.

Small trust beats big reach.

In gaming, someone with five thousand followers can have more influence than someone with five million. Gaming never had the amplification that sports or music got from ESPN or radio. Every streamer built trust from zero, one viewer at a time. The panel kept coming back to influencers of influencers, smaller creators whom other creators trust, even with low follower counts. Reach is easy to buy, while trust is earned in public, slowly. Gaming earned it that way.

There’s no such thing as marketing to gamers.

Sports has about thirty teams to choose from. Gaming has thousands of titles released every year, each with its own norms, slang, and unwritten rules. A Call of Duty fan and a Valorant fan may only share the word gamer. One panelist said you have to speak to the room. That level of fragmentation is coming to every other industry as niche digital communities keep multiplying, and the timing of this panel made it pretty apparent.

The song and the game aren’t the products anymore.

I wrote about this exact shift a few weeks ago after listening to a Music Tectonics episode called “How Will Music Be Monetized in 2030,” recorded at the Grow the TAM summit. Máuhan Zonoozy, formerly of Spotify, made this point: individual songs are close to worthless financially now because there are so many of them. Hundreds of thousands get uploaded every single day. What people actually pay for is the story around the artist, who they are, what they stand for. He pointed to K-pop as the clearest version of this, where fans buy into an entire world beyond the music.

That’s the same thing the panel was describing from the gaming side, just in different words. A K-pop fan buying ten thousand copies of a single CD isn’t paying for the music twice but is buying a raffle ticket for ninety seconds of face-to-face time with the artist. Access to the world is the product. The song, or in gaming’s case the match itself, is an entry point.

Ty Roberts, also on that Music Tectonics panel, gave a concrete example of an artist who built that world rather than renting it: Yungblud’s platform, YBHQ, which he called “his own Netflix.” Concert streams, short films, games, even tarot cards, all under one roof he owns. Roberts’s line has stuck with me since: “simple is boring.” A generic template applied to every artist the same way just makes every artist look the same, and in a market this crowded, sameness is the fastest way to disappear.

Elizabeth Moody made the observation on that same panel that ties both conversations together cleanly: music is behind gaming here, too. Gaming figured out years ago that people will pay for small, in-the-moment things, skins, season passes, cosmetic drops that mean nothing outside the game, and everything inside it. Music hasn’t built its equivalent yet, but the instinct underlying it is identical to what this week’s panel spent an hour describing. Fans want a place to belong, and something small and specific to spend on once they’re there.

What this means if you’re building any kind of brand.

Whether you’re marketing an artist or a gaming org, this lesson holds:

Stop asking how to reach more people and start asking how to give the people you already have a name, a task, and a reason to show up in person.

Gaming figured this out because it had no traditional media machine to lean on and had to build trust one viewer at a time. Everyone else is catching up to a game gaming’s been playing for over a decade.