Do you have examples of popular games with surprisingly underwhelming SR communities that had integrated speedrunning tools? Do you know any lesser known games that used tools like these to their advantage to cultivate a hefty SR community?

I'm referring to tools like, leaderboards, recordings/playback and ghosts.

My fear is that speedrunners are less likely to ever talk to each other if the game shares your scores and runs automatically, and forcing them to use external tools is more likely to create a community that engages them socially. This comes from a GDC talk by (I think) Jake Birkett, who noticed that his games had worse virality if he included a networked high score leaderboard.

It honestly depends on the game and the quality of those features, but in general I would say no. For example, Sonic Mania has leaderboard support, but no way to playback someone elses time demo (Only the runner themselves can), so that community relies on video proof on an external leaderboard instead of the in-game one.

But even if those score tracking tools are accurate and verifiable with video proof (EX: Trackmania? ), I think a good and active community can always take place. Most players will want to share and discuss strats, interact with other people who engage in the same hobby, etc. So personally I don't think it makes much of a difference.

Thanks for the insight. I assume that if a game had built-in video playback for runs you would all still require video submission, right? A game's highscore server can possibly be hacked, and manual video submission would be an extra layer of security, right?