A ton of fantastic speedgames often get overshadowed by the more popular choices, so I was wondering if anyone had any tips on growing a game's speedrun community.

• Add basic rules so the discord / forum / community place doesn't become a sh!thole or a place where people just spam non-stop
• Try to interact with others, as in : ask what everyone thinks when changing rules (on the community place or leaderboard), adding categories, or suggest things
• Stay open-minded in general especially for the above things ^
• Try to keep things simple : personnaly in my case that's about everything related to the community ; routes should be simple to read, or atleast have some visibility stuff (colors, italic, bold parts) to make things easier to understand, rules should be simple to understand as well, and the community place overall should be easy to navigate (text-channels on discord should be straightforward, users shouldn't be spending 90% of their time thinking "what is this channel for ? should i post here at all ?")

There's definitly more to be said but that's all i know

Though one extra thing i like to do is checking on twitter about the game itself and interact when people mention it (for example sharing patches that makes the game playable on emulator, share some unknown facts, etc) It's a small thing to do imo and it's not really related to the speedrunning community itself (more like the game's community as a whole), but i think it's good, especially considering some people that have played the game before could join the community, as well as people that never played before, but heard about the game instead (which is why having a simple and easy to read route is very important imo : veterans should be able to see what's special about the route, and newcomers should be able to understand the basics : how the game & route works, and what are the priorities when it comes to saving time)

Overall this can be a lot of work, but i think it's worth spending time on these things : someday it'll pay off Also it'll get easier once people join the community, the hardest part is the beginning because you might have to do everything yourself

Short answer: you can't.

Long answer: "Growing the community" is an unrealistic goal. You can increase visibility and ease-of-access with things like documenting glitches and strats, creating guides, and running the game a lot and promoting it where appropriate, but at the end of the day if nobody wants to run it, nobody's gonna run it, and there's nothing you can do to change that.

Communities grow naturally. You can improve the natural growth so more people who might be interested see it and stick around, but you can't create growth where there isn't any.

Thanks for the help, I speedrun several games with small communities and one game I plan to speedrun in the future basically has no speedrun community, so both yal's answers are decently helpful.

What works the best: Pick up other games that are similar genres that you have a genuine interest in. Be active in their communities. 80% of the people who played my main speedgame casually, and 100% of the other speedrunners of it came from communities of other games I ran.

What helps to a lesser extent: Be passionate about your game. Run it a lot, stream it and/or post your runs to platforms like Youtube, submit it and run in any marathon you have time to do. Create discords (for yourself and your game), make sure those discords have good emotes and are otherwise good to stick around in. Create a speedrun.com page, make sure it doesn't look like hot garbage, that category divisions/rules make sense, and make sure that you are a good moderator for it. If it's on Steam or a similar platform, write a good review for the game (this helps the developer so more people can find the game through their algorithms). Attend GDQ, ESA, and similar in-person events.

One thing I haven't found a solution for: many people really do not like to be last by too large of a margin! :( As in, the majority of people I've seen stick around in smaller communities either 1. do not care about their placement/are more casual speedrunners, or 2. have been able to get "not last" extremely quickly. A lot of people get discouraged when they get a time that is not actually that bad, but see that it's say 20 minutes worse than the worst time on the leaderboard and do not actually submit their runs, and then quit shortly after.

The more you try and invest yourself in this, the more disappointing it seems :D