Comment: Last weekend, Hollywood got a lesson it didn’t see coming. Kane Parsons, a 20-year-old who started posting Minecraft videos on YouTube when he was nine, opened his debut film, Backrooms, to $118 million in its opening weekend worldwide – the largest opening in the history of A24 Films, and the biggest debut ever for an original horror film.
Simultaneously, 26-year-old Curry Barker, one half of the YouTube sketch comedy duo That’s a Bad Idea, watched his low-budget film Obsession outgross Star Wars: The Mandalorian and Grogu at the box office. Together, two first-time directors with no Hollywood pedigree outperformed one of the most recognised franchises in film history.
A24 wasn’t entirely surprised. It had noticed something the rest of the industry was slower to absorb. These creators didn’t just make films. They built communities first.
Parsons’ YouTube channel had accumulated 224 million views across 22 videos before a single studio called. His audience didn’t discover Backrooms. They had been waiting for it for years. As Warner Bros boss Michael De Luca observed, these creators arrive at Hollywood having already received “a billion test screenings”.
This is not a novelty. It’s an emerging pattern. And New Zealand is sitting right in the middle of it, without quite realising what it has.
China ran this experiment 15 years ago
It started in China, when in January 2008, Chinese regulators cracked down on user-generated video content across the country’s nascent internet video industry. Dozens of Chinese YouTube clones – firms that had been built on amateur user content – were suddenly forced to pivot towards professionally produced material.
I tracked 146 of these firms through that crisis in a peer-reviewed study published in 2016. The findings were unambiguous: the firms that survived and thrived weren’t the ones with the best professional content or the deepest pockets. They were the firms that had already built large, active communities of amateur creators. When the regulations changed, those communities morphed and re-emerged as a ready-made pipeline of talent, ideas, and loyal audiences that the firms could convert into professional content operations.
Having spent years working in the technology industry before moving into academia, I immediately recognised this pattern. The most durable digital businesses weren’t built on superior technology or content – they were built on community gravity. My research confirmed what industry already knew: the community is not a byproduct of the business. It is the business.
What a user community is and why it matters
A user community isn’t just a large number of followers. It’s an active ecosystem of people who create, critique, remix, and evangelise around a shared interest. They post content, argue in forums, build wikis, produce tutorials, stream their experiences, and recruit their friends. Crucially, they do most of this for free, because they are genuinely invested.
Building a user community depends on certain conditions: open platforms that let users create and share; responsive developers or creators who listen and iterate publicly; incentivising structures that reward contribution without commodifying it; and enough patience to let the community develop its own culture and identity. Communities don’t scale through advertising. They scale through belonging.
The economics make obvious sense. A community-first operation has lower customer acquisition costs, higher staff retention, built-in quality feedback, and an organic talent discovery mechanism that no casting call or development slate can replicate. Nobody scouted Kane Parsons. He was grown, by a community that watched every video, shared every frame, and showed up on opening weekend.
This dynamic isn’t limited to film. The same pattern can be seen in digital entertainment, in games, streaming, music and podcasting. The platforms and creators who invest in community infrastructure consistently outperform those who treat their audience as a passive consumer base.
NZ already has a world-class example
I’ll be transparent: I’m a devoted player of Path of Exile, the free-to-play action RPG built by Auckland-based Grinding Gear Games. We players call ourselves “exiles”. Many of us have invested thousands of hours into a game that costs nothing to download.
This didn’t happen by chance. Grinding Gear Games has built one of the most sophisticated community relationships in the global games industry. They host open development dialogues with players. They respond to forum posts. They balance the game publicly, explaining their reasoning.
They treat their community not as a marketing channel but as a creative collaborator. The result: just last week, concurrent players on Path of Exile 2 topped 520,000 on the platform Steam. In a notoriously competitive genre dominated by studios with vastly larger budgets, a New Zealand company is consistently at the top of global charts. Grinding Gear Games reported $105m in revenue last year. This isn’t because they outspent the competition, but because they out-committed them to their community.
They are not alone. New Zealand’s gaming industry just hit $1 billion in annual revenue, two years ahead of schedule, growing over 20 times faster than the global average. Two Kiwi developers recently set global player records on Roblox, a platform built almost entirely on user-generated content. We are, almost without knowing it, already running the playbook.
We’re backing the wrong end of the pipeline
The Government’s current support is focused on production: rebates for game development expenditure, grants for prototype and production stages, and funding through the Centre of Digital Excellence. These are investments in the output end of a process. I’d argue their value depends more on the input end – the community.
The research is clear. Platforms that build communities first and convert them to professional content outperform those that skip straight to professional content. Every time. If New Zealand wants to maximise the return on its digital economy investments, it needs to take the community layer as seriously as it takes the production layer.
Concretely, this means:
- Fund community infrastructure, not just studios. Grants and rebates that reach individual creators, streamers, game modders and community managers.
- Treat esports and streaming as economic activity. New Zealand has a growing competitive gaming and content creation scene that is invisible in our economic development frameworks.
- Connect the talent pipeline explicitly. The pathway from amateur community creator to professional studio hire or independent commercial creator should be as visible and supported as any other vocational pathway.
- Position New Zealand as a community-first digital economy. Our scale is an advantage here. Small, high-trust, highly connected communities are exactly the conditions under which this model thrives. The YouTubers described above didn’t beat Hollywood by making better films than the studios. They did so by building deeper relationships with their audiences than the studios. New Zealand understands that instinct. Grinding Gear Games has been living it for over a decade. We just haven’t turned it into a strategy yet.
