“You’re young – can you do The Facebook?” with James Croucher
The Community Lounge Season 1 Episode 1
Today my guest is James Croucher, currently working at tinyBuild on games such as DUCKSIDE, Sand, and the Hello Neighbor series.
James talks about running a community where everyone is a subject matter expert, what he looks for when hiring a community manager, and why he prefers serving the community on games that he actually plays.
Games mentioned in this episode: DUCKSIDE, Sand, Hello Neighbor, Train Simulator, Flight Simulator, Dune: Spice Wars, Northgard, Wartales, Deep Rock Galactic, V Rising.
Find James on LinkedIn.
The Community Lounge is brought to you by Feature Upvote: Painlessly collect feedback from your players. More insights, less noise.
Episode transcription
Steve McLeod
Today my guest is James Croucher, currently working at tinyBuild on games such as DUCKSIDE, Sand, and the Hello Neighbor series.
James talks about running a community when everyone is a subject matter expert, what he looks for when hiring a community manager, and why he prefers serving the community on games that he actually plays.
James, tell me about what you’re currently doing as a community manager.
James Croucher
I’m currently the senior community manager at tinyBuild where I’m working on a game that we’ve recently released into Early Access called DUCKSIDE, which is a PvP PvE survival persistent world shooter where you play as a duck.
I’m also heading up the community management for a game called Sand, which is a first person shooter extraction game based on a barren desert planet called Sophie, where you basically take charge of these giant tramplers, which are massive mechs that you can construct from the ground up to find loot across this planet, fight with other players, get into battles between the two tramplers or more, which is shaping up really nicely and we’re hoping to get that into a playtest soon.
And I’m also the community manager for a franchise that’s relatively well known called Hello Neighbor, which has a number of games in the series, which is Hello Neighbor 1, Hello Neighbor 2, Hello Neighbor: Hide & Seek, Secret Neighbor.
There’s a lot going on there.
Steve McLeod
So that raises the question, how do you manage to fit in time to do all of this?
James Croucher
I’m not entirely sure. I think there must be four or five of me. I think. No, I mean, DUCKSIDE is the main focus at the moment because we’ve just released into Early Access, so it was literally last week. We’ve had a massive response. It’s been basically an MMO. You have servers of up to 100 players.
So we’re constantly getting feedback, we’re constantly interacting with people, we’re constantly trying to push more people into the game and receiving feedback and bugs and all sorts of stuff. So that’s kind of the primary focus at the moment. Sand is probably what we’re going to be looking to next because that’s going into Playtest relatively soon.
And Hello Neighbor is kind of in a deep developmental period at the moment, so it’s a little bit quieter and a little bit easier to handle. Six months from now when you know Sand and DUCKSIDE are kicking on, and Hello Neighbor is wherever Hello Neighbor may be at that time. I can’t say how I’m gonna handle all of that at once, but we’ll cross that bridge when we come to it.
Steve McLeod
I think I have to say, whoever you’re working with, who came up with a DUCKSIDE pun, I love that. Like, that’s just the best name.
I didn’t get it at first until I said it out loud. And then I realised.
James Croucher
And it’s a ridiculously fun game as well.
Steve McLeod
I saw a trailer somewhere. It’s like a survival game, like Rust, but you’re a duck.
James Croucher
Exactly. That. That’s pretty much how we sold it as well. I think that’s essentially what is on the first line of the Steam page.
And we’ve gotten so much of the community of Rust kind of coming over and saying like, yo, this is just like Rust from five years ago, and I absolutely love it, but you’re a duck, so it’s even better than rust from five years ago. The response has been insane.
Steve McLeod
It’s a bit of a theme at the moment. These games are kind of silly, but otherwise normal. Games like the Goat Simulator and a couple of other games like that.
James Croucher
Well, I think we tried to kind of toe the line between what people might consider a meme game and a legit hardcore experience.
So it’s a game that’s quite easy to get into and to understand.
And obviously the draw of being a duck is something that many people can understand – who hasn’t wanted to be a duck at some point in their lives. So we wanted to make sure it was a game first, but also that it had that kind of accessibility and that draw to it as well.
And we really nailed the core features. And the gameplay itself is super, super fun. And the players are loving it as well, which has been great to see.
Steve McLeod
You’re doing a good sales job on me. But we’re not here to talk completely about DUCKSIDE. I want to know about how you became a community manager. Do you remember? It was a few years ago, you said to me, before we started recording.
James Croucher
Yeah, we’re looking at about 13 – yeah, coming up to 13 years ago.
Yeah, all of that. That hurt my heart to say, but it was about 13 years ago. I’d just come out of college, my second year of college, and I was kind of at an impasse in my life where I had to decide whether I wanted to continue with my education or go into work.
And as a perpetually indecisive person, I decided to do both and started looking for an apprenticeship.
And kind of the criteria for the apprenticeship was I wanted the highest paying apprenticeship that I could find.
And the highest paying apprenticeship at the time was at a company that was called railsimulator.com that was based in the Chatham Dockyard, which is in Kent, quite a small area called Medway.
Steve McLeod
We should just add in here that you’re actually from Kent in England.
James Croucher
Yes, I am indeed. Yeah. I was born in Gillingham and, yeah, so I joined this company.
So I didn’t join this company. I went down for a few interviews and I was talking to them and I had absolutely no idea what they were.
From my understanding, this was some kind of professional train simulator product for people that wanted to learn how to drive trains and become train drivers or train operators. And I went down there and it quickly became apparent that there was actually this genre of games that I wasn’t quite aware of for hardcore enthusiasts of train simulators. And it was being distributed through a platform called Steam, which I had heard of and I kind of knew of at the time, but it wasn’t as big as it is now.
And I did a few interviews with them and I ended up getting the job. And I joined them as a customer support advisor with some QA stuff on the side whilst I was learning, essentially a degree in communications.
And I spent some time with them for a while, just as the customer support advisor. And then one week my boss came up to me and said, hey, our social media manager is going to be out for the next two weeks. You’re young – can you do the Facebook?
And I said, yeah, I am young and I do a lot of the Facebook. I can definitely give it a go.
And everything kind of snowballed from there. So I did that for a couple of weeks and things went very well and I tried some new stuff that we weren’t really doing at the time. I can’t remember exactly what it was, but I remember getting some praise that stuck with me because it was very early in the career.
And eventually the social media manager came back. I’m not sure whether he was quite happy to see that there was a bit of interest in keeping me on board the social media side of things because he had kind of built it up on his own at that point and made that a focal point of the company. But I ended up kind of moving into that more permanently and over the years expanded my role there, kind of running the social media pages, running the blog, communicating with players, running the Steam forums.
The company ended up expanding out into not just train simulator titles, but also flight simulation titles and fishing – sport fishing titles.
And I had a hand in kind of setting up the community across all of those.
Some I had a bit more of a hand in, some a bit less. One of the titles was a flight simulator from a company that’s very well known that Dovetail Games had acquired publishing rights to.
And I spent about six years there.
Steve McLeod
Can I just ask briefly, so it’s now gone back to that very well known company, Right? Or does Dovetail still create it on behalf of the very big company?
James Croucher
Oh, we’ll get there. We’re talking about it.
We’ll kind of move in that direction shortly. So yeah, I spent about six years there. I ended up the lead community manager for Train Simulator and we released a kind of new state of the art train simulator on Unreal Engine 4 just before I left.
And I kind of got to a point where after six years I wanted to try some new things. There is such a thing as too many trains.
By that point, I think we’ve released something like 250 products, which is about…
Steve McLeod
Wow.
James Croucher
Yeah.
Steve McLeod
Are you a train enthusiast yourself?
James Croucher
I wasn’t.
Steve McLeod
Did you become one?
James Croucher
Kind of, yeah. I gained this appreciation for train simulation and trains as a whole. To this day my girlfriend will just drag me up of train stations while I’m pointing at stuff going, that’s the class 465. Oh, that’s a class 03 shunter. Oh, that’s an SD40. That’s actually an American one and she doesn’t care. But for some reason it matters to me.
I ended up, ended up leaving the company after a few years.
I had a fantastic time there and the products were great, the community was awesome. But it felt like I’d kind of reached my natural endpoint of the company.
And I’d gotten a call from a company in France about potentially joining them and I was keen. I like France, I like wine, I like cheese.
I like weather that’s, you know, it’s not a high bar, but better than English weather. So I went out there and I went and met up with them and handed an interview with them and they were like, so we’re working on a project. We can’t tell you what it is, but it kind of suits your career so far. But we can’t tell you where it is. And it’s with a big partner and it’s the revival of an existing title that’s seen a lot of popularity in the past, but we can’t tell you what it is.
And I was like, okay, can I guess what it is? And they were like, no, but we’re going to talk to you about like kind of what you’ve done and see whether you’d be a fit for it. And I had an interview out here in Bordeaux. I absolutely love the city.
And I was like, you know, I really want this. And a few weeks later they contacted me, they said, we’d like to give you the job, we’d like to come in.
I came in June of 2018 after six years at Dovetail and they put up this big screen TV and they said, this is the game you’re going to be working on. And showed me a very, very early trailer of the most incredible looking flight simulator I had ever seen in my life with some of the most amazing graphics – it looked prerendered to me – and it ended with Microsoft Flight Simulator.
And I was mind blown.
I’d kind of gone into this relatively blind. I had a good idea that was kind of where they were going, but I had no idea the scale of what the game would be like.
I spent a couple of years there at Asobo working on the Microsoft Flight Simulator community development plan.
Steve McLeod
What does it look like being the community developer for Microsoft Flight Simulator?
James Croucher
A lot of it was just kind of planning. So I’d spend a lot of time looking at what was going on in the flight simulation space as a whole at this time. So you had stuff like X-Plane, you had the Microsoft Flight Simulator X which was being published by my previous company Dovetail, which had kind of started building a community around it once again and looking at what they were doing, looking at what the community were hoping for, looking at what platforms they enjoyed, engaging with each other on, interacting with developers, seeing how the developers were interacting with their players too, seeing which social media platforms they were most inclined to use, where they were most active and stuff like that, and the kind of systems that we could put in place or initiatives ahead of time that we could have on launch of say betas or alphas, playtest release and a lot of that kind of stuff. And I actually didn’t see it through to launch.
I ended up staying only about a year and a half because I found myself in a position where as a community manager that kind of liked being in the mud doing the community management stuff. Being a community manager for a game where you don’t have a community, it wasn’t quite suited to my sensibilities.
Steve McLeod
Gotcha.
James Croucher
So I ended up leaving Asobo and joining Shiro Games.
Steve McLeod
Where it was also in Bordeaux, right?
James Croucher
Yes, it was about two buildings down from the Asobo building, so I could still meet up with some of my old colleagues at lunch.
Steve McLeod
Had you started to be part of the wider game development community in Bordeaux and is that how you managed to make the switch?
James Croucher
Yeah, I mean, to a degree. I have a lot of connections in Bordeaux and a lot of friends that work at different companies. Bordeaux, I wasn’t aware of it when I moved out here, has a pretty deep game development kind of community as a whole.
There’s a lot of developers out here. There’s Motion Twin, there’s Shiro Games, there’s Asobo too, there’s Ubisoft, obviously. I think there’s a ton of other ones that I apologize to them for forgetting them. And there’s a big focus on game development out here as well. There’s like game development schools and whatnot that kind of feed into this system.
But I joined Shiro Games and ended up jumping into basically a new game they were creating called Darksburg, running their existing game, Northgard. They’d seen a lot of success with Northgard, which was like an RTS Viking 4X style game, and spent four years working there as a community manager and community director, working on some fantastic games. We released Wartales, we released Dune: Spice Wars. I think you’re aware of both of those.
Steve McLeod
This is a little bit of self promotion here. Both I think Dune: Spice Wars and Northgard use Feature Upvote for managing player.
James Croucher
And Wartales, I think, and Wartales.
Steve McLeod
But enough of that, back to you. I don’t want this to be about me.
James Croucher
I worked there for a while and things were great. Kind of built the community from the ground up there.
When I joined, my manager basically said, you have a clean slate to do what you want here. So I introduced a lot of initiatives, changed the way we did a lot of stuff. A lot of that’s still in use today.
Stuff like Feature Upvote.
And after about four years, we’d gotten to the release of Dune: Spice Wars 1.0. Wartales had just released into 1.0.
I could kind of foresee that the next couple of years could be back where I was at Asobo, where I’m just planning for the future.
So I decided that, you know, now’s a good time to kind of move on. I kind of don’t want to just be treading water for a couple of years. They’re in a good place, they’ve got a good community team, they’ve got a good marketing team and ended up joining tinyBuild around this time last year.
Steve McLeod
Is tinyBuild also in Bordeaux?
James Croucher
tinyBuild is not in Bordeaux. tinyBuild, I think one of their main offices are in Amsterdam, but they have a lot of remote work jobs so I work remotely. I’ve actually got a tinyBuild hoodie just kind of jamming behind me here, which obviously you can’t see in a podcast, but it’s bright orange, which also leads me to believe that we’re probably mostly headquartered in Holland, at least that’s where I know most of my colleagues are.
And I joined initially as the community manager for the Hello Neighbor project.
And this was, yeah, about a year ago. And then they introduced me to Sand, which we’d released a prerendered trailer a couple of years ago at the summer games show, which saw a really positive response.
And then earlier this year after coming back from Christmas, my boss mentioned a game called DUCKSIDE which I hadn’t really heard about at that point, which was strange because it sounded like it was pretty deep in development.
And then in January, a couple of days after that, my boss says, hey, we’re doing a playtest of this DUCKSIDE game. And I was like, okay, let’s check it out. And DUCKSIDE was what I mentioned earlier. We had a prototype of this game where basically you play as a duck. Very early prototype of a persistent world PvP PvE shooter where you play as a duck. And considering, as I understand it, the game had been in development for about a month at this time. It was incredible.
And my boss was basically like, you’re cool being the community manager of this, right?
I have about a hundred rubber ducks of various shapes, sizes, styles and designs sitting next to me.
Steve McLeod
You’re just the perfect person for this job. Wow.
James Croucher
I was like, was this game made for me? Sent her a picture of them and.
Steve McLeod
She was like, okay, you’re a rubber duck enthusiast.
James Croucher
Well, no, the problem is. So this is going to get on a little bit of a tangent away from community management, but I feel like I need to make it clear if people are listening to me about this.
I was bought a couple of rubber ducks a long time ago, maybe around the time when I started in the games industry. When people come into your house and they see you have a couple of rubber ducks, they think, oh, this guy likes rubber ducks, I’ll get him a rubber duck. Eventually you become a person that has 10 rubber ducks and everyone is like, this guy loves rubber ducks and I will only buy him rubber ducks. And it just snowballs from there until you have 100+ rubber ducks. I love the guys. I’m happy I have them.
Steve McLeod
But yeah, being English and too polite to tell people exactly – I don’t actually want more rubber ducks.
James Croucher
I don’t have a lot of rubber ducks. Yeah. So this is going to be me until the day I die. I’m just going to have an ever expanding group of rubber ducks that will take over my entire house.
Steve McLeod
One day there will be a Wikipedia entry about you and it’s going to say, his love of rubber ducks knew no end. I mean, you’ve got to stop this now.
James Croucher
That’s going on my tombstone. There’ll be a rubber duck on there.
Steve McLeod
So going back to DUCKSIDE, it was perfect for you, you know. Yeah. You have rubber ducks whether you want them or not.
James Croucher
Exactly. Yeah. And I mean, I think a lot of my time in the games industry, up until this point, I was working on games that I very much enjoyed and I very much respected, but not necessarily games that I would play myself in my spare time. Whereas that’s something I found as I’ve joined tinyBuild with, with Sand, with DUCKSIDE, with the Hello Neighbor games. All of these games I’ve found myself playing in my spare time and enjoying. And what I played a lot of the games that I was community manager on in the past. I didn’t have that personal connection to them that I’ve had with some of these titles that I’m working on now.
Steve McLeod
So tell me how that makes a difference when you’re actually a big fan of playing that type of game that you’re a community manager for?
James Croucher
Well, I think, I think there’s positives and negatives to it because when you’re a fan of the game, there’s almost, there’s almost a bias sometimes with like, I don’t want that to be changed, but all of these people want that to be changed and I have to kind of push that side of me away and say, stop talking.
These people want that. Let’s put it out there. Let’s see how people will react if we make those changes. And maybe you’ll like it when it happens as well.
So you need to kind of like separate you as a player and you as a person who’s working on behalf of the community as a whole. Because I am no different to that one person that’s saying, no, this is wrong, whilst 50 people are saying this is how it should be.
And that makes it a bit tough. But I don’t think it’s not really caused any issues for me at all. It’s actually caused – It’s been a lot easier for me because I can see through the eyes of the community much easier than I could with a game that I maybe like Train Simulator, where I don’t understand that the SD42 doesn’t have 67 mile per hour uphill abilities when it’s hauling hundreds of tons of freight on the Marias Pass.
Steve McLeod
I mean, it sounds like you do now.
James Croucher
Whenever I was working on Train Simulator, I was just like, all right, you guys know more than me, I cannot argue with you.
But with DUCKSIDE and stuff like that, it’s a lot easier to see where people are coming from. It’s a lot easier to kind of have empathy for what people are saying, given the feedback on. Because I enjoy this game I played in my spare time. I played it with my friends as well.
And that makes it challenging, but it also makes it a bit more enjoyable and it makes it easier for me to kind of side with the community and understand where the community is coming from on certain topics.
Just be able to kind of visualize the best way to improve things through their eyes, through my eyes and on the side of the company because I’m playing every field really in this instance.
Steve McLeod
When you’re a big fan of the game, do you take things a bit too personal or you might take things personal? Whereas with Train Simulator, which you weren’t really a player of, you couldn’t get offended if somebody didn’t like something because it wasn’t – you weren’t invested into it.
James Croucher
I mean, I. So with Train Simulator, the thing is, the community are extremely knowledgeable. I don’t think I’ve ever met a community more passionate about the games that they play than the Train Simulator community.
Steve McLeod
Oh, I like that. I want to try this Train Simulator out just because I like the idea of such a community being so strongly connected to what they’re doing.
James Croucher
They just, they know everything. That’s the thing. I remember we’d like, I couldn’t argue back about anything. I couldn’t say something back to them because they, like I said, they knew better than me. I remember we released like a work in progress image once and almost the best community to get feedback from as well. Because these guys aren’t. There’s nothing subjective about what they’re saying to you. It’s all objective because they know for a fact that the GWR class 36 or whatever has 37 rivets down the side of it instead of 36.
And we released like, we released a work in progress image where we’d modeled a new train and it was a work in progress. And yeah, there were, there were a certain number of rivets on the side of it. I can’t remember exactly what train it was. And the community – we had like 50 comments immediately saying that’s not how many rivets are supposed to be on this train – it’s supposed to be 37. And we were like, oh, okay, well, we’ll change that.
Steve McLeod
But as a software creator myself, like I die for that level of attention to detail from my audience.
James Croucher
Absolutely.
Steve McLeod
Where it’s not that just them saying this thing needs to be improved or this is not.
James Croucher
I don’t like this.
Steve McLeod
Yeah, they’re actually telling you very precisely as experts.
James Croucher
Exactly.
Steve McLeod
I would like that.
James Croucher
It’s really important within the simulation kind of genre as a whole. I think because it’s a simulation, it’s supposed to be as close to real life as possible.
And to have these just subject matter experts that know everything about. It’s the same on Flight Simulator. They know what they’re talking about. They’re the best community to have because there’s nothing subjective about what they’re telling you. It’s all based on actual facts.
Whereas if you’re working on a game like DUCKSIDE or…
Steve McLeod
…very few people have experience of being a duck.
I want to move the conversation more to your experience in general as a community manager. You told me before we started recording that you’ve got some experience training and hiring community managers. Tell me a bit about what you look for when you’re trying to find somebody who be a good fit for a community management role.
James Croucher
Yeah, absolutely.
Well, the main thing with being a community manager is it’s your personality. Almost always you’re going to be engaging with the community on a daily basis, you’re going to be the person that represents the company. You’re going to be the person that is the voice of your game, of your company. You’re going to be the person that delivers the good news, you’re going to be the person that delivers the bad news.
So it’s very important the way that you kind of present yourself, especially in the early interviews.
I don’t particularly like the over-corporate approach to stuff. I like to be personable, I like to be friendly. I like people to see me as a human as opposed to just a name on the screen that represents the company that I work for.
And I think it’s easy to see how someone is going to be as a community manager based on the way that they talk to you as well.
And for me, when you’re bringing someone into community management or training someone in community management, personality is key because that’s what’s going to shine through.
So I’m always looking for people that are personable, are friendly, are open to talking about stuff that isn’t necessarily about the game itself, but they’re talkative, they’re passionate, they’re passionate about something because if they can bring that into their community management style and the way that they talk to players, then that’s absolutely perfect.
Whereas if they’re kind of corporate and you know that they’ve thought up their words beforehand and they’re kind of a little bit sheltered and introverted, that’s going to come out as a community manager as well. Those people can work. I mean, that’s not to say that you shouldn’t hire people like that. People come out of their shell, people are nervous during interviews and stuff, but you can normally see that spark when you’re talking with someone for the first time.
And also the flexibility. When it comes to actually training a community manager, their flexibility to kind of adapt and try different things and try new things and challenge you as well. Because I’ve been doing this for 12 years, I’ve kind of followed very set ways of doing things for a long time, I’ve always tried to be flexible and change with the times and understand why people use TikTok.
Steve McLeod
I don’t understand why people use TikTok.
James Croucher
I have no idea. But we got to do it because that’s where the audience is.
But I like to be challenged and I like to see people come in and kind of say, hey, I want to try this out, let’s try this new area out. If there’s a place where people are talking, if there’s a place where we can get people talking or there’s a place that we can build a community, then let’s try it.
And I think a lot of people, especially in community management, are quite happy sticking to the status quo and staying where they are and doing what they know works.
Whereas I’ve worked with, especially at Shiro, community managers that have been happy to come in and say, hey, I want to try this, I want to do this.
Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t. But it’s better to know and move away from it if it doesn’t work.
If it does work, then we’ve got a brand new platform where we can engage players and work with the people that we have playing our game.
Steve McLeod
That brings me to the next question.
You say you try not to be set in your ways and keep up with the times. What resources or places or forums do you use to keep abreast of how to do your job better as a community manager?
James Croucher
I personally just try and keep an eye on what’s going on in the world. So I use a lot of Reddit, which kind of aggregates a lot of the key posts, the key goings on in the industry, both from…
Steve McLeod
Any subreddit in particular?
James Croucher
Well, for just like general game news and stuff like that, pcgaming, games.
And then you have the more gamedev, gamedeveloper subreddits and stuff like that, where people are talking about pretty much what they’re doing, what they’re making and all of that. And you can also keep on top of the controversies and the big successes and things like that.
And the best thing for me to improve yourself as a community manager and to kind of better your understanding of what to do and what not to do is to look at what people are doing that’s causing outrage and look at what people are doing that is getting a good response.
Like for example, Deep Rock Galactic, I think have one of the best community teams and maybe development teams in the world at the moment. And they blew me away with their approach to community management.
They pushed me to want to get onto Reddit as a whole based on how they approached Reddit.
Steve McLeod
Tell me about this, this sounds interesting. What do they do with Reddit?
James Croucher
You’d go on their subreddit and they were just there and that was it.
So people would be posting stuff, people would be asking questions and there was just always a member of the team in there. It wasn’t necessarily the community manager. You’d have like the lead dev, you’ve had game designers, you have QA and they’d just be in there talking to people. And that made people want to come back if they knew that they were being heard and they were being talked to and that this team actually cared. And Deep Rock Galactic is an absolutely fantastic game as well.
These guys seemingly can do no wrong, but they would just have people in that subreddit constantly. And that drove people to come back there in the hopes that maybe a game developer would see the art that they’d made or the clip that they’d created from the game, or would see the feedback that they’d put towards them. And they almost always would. There’d be someone from whatever area of the company engaging with the players, talking to the players, and they built a huge Reddit audience, a Reddit community off of the back of that. And that was something I really tried to replicate with, especially when I was at Shiro with. What we were doing was just keep that engagement, keep that interactivity, push our developers to have some conversations with players as well. Because it’s all well and good having me come in, but people know that I’m kind of that interface between the community and the developers themselves. However, when you have a developer coming in and saying, this is the reason we haven’t done this, it holds a little bit more weight than when it’s me saying this.
Steve McLeod
Do you see any problems with, not everybody is able to participate in an online conversation in a way that’s pleasant. Like some people in your team might inadvertently spark some type of unintended anger.
James Croucher
Yeah, well, I mean, there’s a reason community managers are community managers and developers are developers a lot of the time.
And the fact is, if you’re in, especially if you’re working on a game that does invite some toxicity or has some negative kind of feedback towards it, it’s easy to be a developer, go on there and just want to kind of scream at someone, “hey, no, we’re not breaking the game. This isn’t our intention.”
But I’ve always tried to, when I’ve talked to developers about, like, would you be comfortable being a relatively prominent role on our discord or on Reddit or even on Twitter?
Do you feel like, here’s what you can do, here’s what you can’t do. Avoid this. Avoid this. If you ever find yourself in a position where you want to scream at someone or argue with someone, send them to me, I’ll close out the conversation.
Because, yeah, we’re kind of trained to do this. We’ve been building ourselves up towards this point for years, media training and all that kind of stuff.
But it’s much easier when you have a very happy, very fulfilled community like you have on Deep Rock Galactic, than on some other games that you’re kind of seeing a lot of negativity around. In those cases, I certainly wouldn’t say to the devs, hey, go on there, because you’re just exposing them to vitriol and hostility and conflict, which is going to invite them to maybe respond with that in kind.
Steve McLeod
That’s very good advice.
James, we’re almost running out of time. I have a final question. What game have you been playing lately, apart from DUCKSIDE? A game that you’re not involved in creating?
James Croucher
I’m playing at the moment with my partner, V Rising, which is absolutely fantastic. I think you’re aware of that game as well, if I recall.
Steve McLeod
I am, yeah. V Rising is also a Feature Upvote customer, but it’s about you, not me.
James Croucher
So we’ve been playing a ton of that. We just got to about 85 hours and we’ve got the final boss left.
I think my girlfriend is really trying to not play it right now because she doesn’t want it to end, but we’re loving that.
Steve McLeod
That’s the best thing you can say about a game when you’re sad that it’s over.
James Croucher
Exactly. Yeah. We just finished Baldur’s Gate 3 as well, which was absolutely phenomenal. One of the most incredible games I’ve ever played.
Steve McLeod
And finally, where can people get in touch with you?
James Croucher
You can find me on LinkedIn.
I don’t have a Twitter anymore.
Steve McLeod
Smart man. I’ll put your LinkedIn profile in the show notes if people want to ask you more about your opinion on some of the stuff we’ve been. Thank you very much for being on the first episode of the Community Lounge, James.
James Croucher
You’re most welcome. I’d love to do it again sometimes. Thank you for having me, Steve.
Steve McLeod
Thank you. Bye, everybody.