Video game consulting company Hit Detection has hired George Jones as its chief consultant. It may be a small matter in the grand universe of games, but the move says something about where games are going. As we’ve noted before, it’s the community, stupid. Game advisers are changing with the times, bringing aboard people who know something about building a content creation community around games.

Hit Detection provides advice to big game publishers about their games before they’re published. Its influence is hidden from the public’s view, but it’s nice to think that the company plays a role in making sure that games don’t suck before publishers sell them to the public.

N’Gai Croal, a tech and video game critic who left Newsweek, started Hit Detection in 2009 to offer his insights to game developers. He expanded his consultancy and last year hired André Vrignaud, a former technical strategist at Microsoft’s Xbox division. Now he’s bringing aboard Jones, who was previously director of content programming for games at Wikia, the user-generated web community. He also served as senior vice president and creative director at GamePro, editor in chief of Computing Gaming World and Maximum PC, and the founding editor of Cnet’s Gamecenter.com.

“George is an expert in community media,” Croal said in an interview with GamesBeat. “Community informs all of what we do.”

Jones said in an interview, “Once we started talking about this, it was a no-brainer. The publisher needs a feel for how people are playing a more active role in game development, shaping the story and helping. The question is how to best manage that. It’s an exciting time for this.”

Croal said that publishers have long organized their marketing and advertising activities around a “media-first strategy.” They focus on a small community of game writers critics who preview products and review them. The collective analysis is measured by a game’s Metacritic score. But in the waning days of the current consoles, Metacritic scores are declining.

Now publishers have tools that can help calibrate the demand for a game, such as crowdfunding on Kickstarter. And if the game critics are becoming tougher, it might make more sense to shift marketing and advertising efforts directly at the community, Croal said.

Croal said his company will help publishers navigate the transition at a time when publishers are “right-sizing themselves” and are more willing to tap external experts for help in making games.

“It’s fascinating to see free-to-play games like League of Legends and World of Tanks develop a massive community,” Croal said.

At the same time, you see Nintendo cracking down on gamers who post videos with Nintendo characters on YouTube. Is that a wise move? Valve, by contrast, embraces those who build content related to its games by releasing tools such as the Source filmmaking software, Croal said.

“Valve understands extremely well the power of allowing people to remix and build value on top of their brands,” Croal said.

Jones said, “The shift is happening. I learned that  at the broadest level at Wikia, where there is a community for everything. Publishers are finally understanding what these communities want, and the need to manage these communities can’t be overstated. We are still midstream in this transition.”

As the new consoles are coming out, the platform makers are embracing community. Sony has a “share button” on its controller for the PlayStation 4. Microsoft is expected to talk more about its plans for sharing at the upcoming E3 game trade show in Los Angeles.

“Social is clearly important to what they are doing,” Croal said.

Jones said, “We are hurtling toward this unknown future. Content creators are coming from the community.”

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Wikia is raising $11 million to support its massive network of pop culture wikis, where people can collaboratively publish video game, entertainment, and lifestyle content and form communities around shared interests.

Wikia’s mission is threefold. It is designed to unloose the power of knowledge as influence, enable personal and collective creativity, and distribute rich, original content. Although founded by the creators of Wikipedia, Wikia is a separate business dedicated specifically to lifestyle topics and pop culture. And unlike Wikipedia, Wikia is a for-profit enterprise that makes money off advertising.

The platform powers over 200,000 wikis with millions of pages of content. The Wikia Video Games hub is the largest network of gaming sites in the world. It contains more than 65,000 game wikis and 2.48 million pages of content. The company cites The Elder Scrolls, Call of Duty, Mass Effect, Fallout, and Runescape as the most trafficked titles. The entertainment section is also growing fast, with “super communities” coming together around A Game of Thrones, Harry Potter, and The Hunger Games.

Today, alongside closing an $11 million deal, Wikia announced that the forum feature is now available, which will facilitate discussion on the sites. The investors on the fielding are Jeffrey Blackburn of Amazon, which led Wikia’s Series B of $10 million in 2006. Also listed are previous investors Bessemer Venture Partners and Institutional Venture Partners. Angel investors in Wikia include major Silicon Valley names like Marc Andreessen, Ron Conway, Reed Hastings, and Mitch Kapor.

This brings Wikia’s funding to $25 million. Wikia is based in San Francisco. Read the SEC filing.