Why Most Fans Don’t Build Anything and Why That’s Exactly The Point

Here is a number the industry loves to repeat: 74% of Gen Z describe themselves as content creators. It gets cited in decks, dropped into keynotes, used to justify budgets. The implication is clear — we are living in a golden age of fan participation, and the brands that tap into it will win. 

Here is a number the industry talks about less: 90. As in the 90% of people in any online community who consume content without ever creating anything. It’s been called the 90-9-1 rule — roughly 1% create, 9% engage actively, 90% watch. It has held roughly true across forums, wikis, social platforms and gaming communities for two decades. 

Both numbers are real. And the tension between them is, in many ways, the most important strategic question in fandom right now. Are we genuinely in an era of the fan-builder — or are we in an era where a very small number of people build things and the rest of us watch? 

The answer, as it turns out, is both. And that distinction matters enormously for how brands invest in fandom — particularly in gaming. A conversation at SEG3 London 2026 kept returning to this tension: the gap between the participatory fandom brands want to believe in and the more complicated, more interesting reality of how fan communities actually work. 

The 74% creator figure comes from Google research across twelve countries and is worth taking seriously — but it needs context. In the same way that calling yourself a football fan doesn’t mean you play every weekend, calling yourself a creator doesn’t mean you’reproducing original content at meaningful volume. Liking, sharing, commenting, even just watching fan-made content — all of it gets folded into the category. 

Strip it back and the underlying signal is still genuinely significant: a substantial proportion of the most commercially valuable cohort identifies with creation even when their actual output is minimal or occasional. The aspiration is there. The identity is there. The behaviour is latent. 

The question is what unlocks it. And gaming, more than any other medium, has spent the last thirty years answering that question — largely unnoticed by mainstream brand strategy. 

Game studios have never expected every player to make a map, develop a mod or stream their session. They design systems where the creative minority produces content that enriches the experience for everyone else. The Roblox economy is the clearest example at scale: a relatively small number of creators build the worlds that hundreds of millions of players consume. The passive majority isn’t a failure of the system. It’s load-bearing. 

This is structurally different from how most brand campaigns are designed, which still implicitly assume a broadcast model — brand speaks, audience receives. Gaming inverted that model long ago. The community is the content. The creators are the engine. The lurkers are the audience that gives creation its meaning and reach. 

What follows from this is a strategic principle that sounds simple but is routinely ignored: you don’t need everyone to create. You need enough people to create that the experience feels alive for the people who don’t. And you need the conditions — the mechanics, the tools, the spaces — that make creation possible, visible and worth doing. 

The most precise illustration of the 90-9-1 principle from this year’s Cannes Lions Entertainment Lions for Gaming shortlist involves a very specific number: ten. That’s how many gamers were selected through Xbox, Sky Sports and Football Manager’s ‘Missing Managers’ campaign — launched to coincide with Football Manager 26, the first edition of the franchise to integrate the women’s game. 

The mechanic was precise by design. Female players proved their managerial ability by completing an in-game challenge in FM26 — tactics, squad selection, game strategy. Ten were selected to join a bespoke five-year coaching programme developed with The Powerhouse Project, receiving fully-funded UEFA coaching licences from C Prep through to Pro Licence level, plus work experience at Barclays Women’s Super League clubs. In a further loop, all ten will be added to the next edition of Football Manager as playable coaches — making their journey visible to millions of players worldwide. 

The results tell the 90-9-1 story in numbers. Ten people participated at the deepest level — real careers, real qualifications, real change. But the campaign generated a 101% increase in female managers created in-game by the broader player base, drove a 41% revenue increase for FM26, and made it the number one best-selling Football Manager on Xbox Game Pass. The 1% became real coaches. The 90% bought the game, created female managers in it, and were moved enough to change their own behaviour inside it. 

This is what designing for the creative minority actually looks like in practice. The campaign didn’t broadcast to an audience. It built a precise mechanism to find the people who would go deepest — and made sure everything they did was visible, meaningful and carried by everyone else. 

The mistake most brands make in gaming — and in fandom more broadly — is optimising for reach. How many players can we get into this experience? How many impressions does the activation generate? These are the wrong questions, because they treat the passive majority as the goal rather than the outcome. 

A branded world with ten million passive visitors and no UGC, no community rituals, no reason to create or share, will decay faster than an experience with a fraction of that audience and an active creative minority generating content, Discord conversation and organic recruitment. The former is a destination. The latter is a game. Destinations get visited once. Games get played. 

The mistake most brands make is assuming scale is the input. It isn’t. Scale is the output — if you design the right conditions. 

The next shift is already visible. AI and easier creation tools are collapsing the barriers between fan and creator faster than most marketing teams are structured to handle. Making a video, a mod, a remix, a piece of lore — the friction is dropping. The 9% who engage actively are beginning to create. The 1% who create are beginning to produce at scale. 

For brands in gaming, this is simultaneously an opportunity and a structural challenge. The opportunity: more of the latent creator identity that Gen Z carries will convert into actual output, expanding the creative layer that drives the whole system. The challenge: if brands don’t design the spaces where that creativity can live, be seen and be rewarded, it will happen around them rather than for them. Fan communities will build regardless. The question is whether the brand is part of the architecture or an afterthought. 

The age of the fan-builder is real. But it’s been oversold as a description of mass behaviour when it is actually a design principle. The question is never how do we get all our fans to create? It’s what do we build so that the fans who want to create can be seen, rewarded and loud enough to carry everyone else with them? 

Gaming has known the answer for thirty years. The brands finally catching up aren’t doing it by chasing the fantasy of the all-creating audience. They’re doing it by designing systems, mechanics and community spaces that make the creative minority visible, valuable and impossible to ignore. 

Most fans won’t build a thing. Brief accordingly — and watch what the ones who do can carry.