Prior research has demonstrated that firms collaborating with user communities benefit from the extreme-value solutions that can emerge from communities’ broad exploration. This theoretical logic has coalesced around user communities that produce their own innovations. But this same logic may be less applicable to collaboration with communities that offer market feedback on innovations developed by firms. In these cases, we argue, firms derive value from the degree to which the feedback is representative of the broader market’s preferences. Accordingly, we highlight an overlooked negative consequence of a widely recognized characteristic of user communities: self-selection. Due to the voluntary nature of participation, user communities attract members with atypical preferences, which may not mirror the broader consumer base. Feedback from such communities may thus produce biased signals of market demand that, when incorporated into a product, diminish its commercial appeal. Our analysis of quantitative and qualitative data from experimental PC-game development indicates that developer firms that are highly responsive to feedback from (unrepresentative) users tend to release less commercially successful games. We also investigate why developers heed feedback from unrepresentative communities, underscoring the challenges of effectively utilizing communities to develop commercially viable products.