"Players like to feel listened to" with Joshua Mathews

“Players like to feel listened to” with Joshua Mathews

(You can also watch this episode on YouTube.)

Today’s guest is Joshua Mathews, Marketing and Social Media Manager at Doborog.
Josh has spent years in community and marketing roles across the indie games scene, working on projects ranging from Calvino Noir to Clone Drone in the Danger Zone and its VR successor Clone Drone in the Hyperdome. Before joining the industry, Josh built a following as a YouTuber spotlighting under-the-radar indie games — a passion that still fuels his work today.

We chat about how his early experiences making trailers and talking with developers shaped his approach to community management, why empathy and gut instinct can be just as important as analytics, and how players often find unexpected meanings in games. Josh also shares insights on managing diverse communities across Discord, what to watch out for when your loudest fans don’t always represent the majority, and how he balances professional marketing work with his personal creative projects — from Warhammer storytelling to Vampire: The Masquerade cosplay.

Games mentioned in this episode:

Find Joshua on:

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Transcription

Steve McLeod
Today I’m joined by Josh Mathews. Josh has worked in community roles for several years and is now marketing and social media at Doborog. That’s a Spoonerism for Robodog. Something you can say about the video game industry is you meet people with interesting hobbies that they are passionate about. And that certainly describes Josh. Perhaps we’ll hear about that during our chat today. Welcome to the show, Josh.

Joshua Mathews
Thank you for having me. I’m really excited to chat and be here.

Steve McLeod
I think I’d want to start with your current role because it doesn’t have the word community in it. So explain to me what that role is and how you came into it.

Joshua Mathews
That is quite a recent change for me. Up until a couple of months ago, I was Community Manager at Doborog. And I think it is part of the reality of working in a small indie team where you have to work on social media. You have to work on copy, adverts, production, everything like marketing plans. The whole shebang really. I think it came to a point where I was talking with the creative director, the CEO, Eric, and we were like, well, what title best describes my responsibilities? And you know what, it ended up being that we, that was kind of a hole in things that needed doing. And yeah, my responsibilities changed. But the reality is that I’ve been Community Manager and social media manager for the last, what, five years maybe? I can’t remember properly. But it’s, yeah, it’s wearing a lot of hats is how I would describe indie work.

Steve McLeod
One thing I’m learning about in my conversations with Community Managers is it’s a very poorly defined role. And I think especially in a very small indie studio, how big is the studio by the way?

Joshua Mathews
Hmm. So we’ve got what eight or maybe nine full-time employees, a mixture of people from all over the world, fully remote. We work from Brazil, the USA, France, Sweden, England. And we do that and coordinate over Slack, obviously, but also, yeah, and a bunch of contractors as well for things like art and music and engineering and external companies that we work with. So it’s not like the credits list is small when you look at the end role, but it is certainly the core team. Yeah, quite small.

Steve McLeod
One of the amazing things about playing indie games is you know they’re a small team and the credits just go on and on and you’re wondering where do all these people come from?

Joshua Mathews
Yeah, making a game is hard and it needs a lot of people with a lot of talent that you just don’t have access to if you want to try and employ them full time. So yeah, we work with Future Friends. We have previously worked with Robot Teddy for business development, for marketing, like Neonhive. Uh goodness, just so many incredible like Makeshift if you’d want to do merch. There’s just a huge number of people that have skills that it just makes so much more sense to talk with an outside company than try and do it all yourself.

Steve McLeod
I’m going to use this as a little chance to drop a plug for my company. Neonhive. I can’t remember if they have been a customer or are currently a customer. If it’s good enough for Neonhive, you should consider them too. Okay. Back to you, Josh.

Joshua Mathews
100%. I would say I really rate all of the people at Neonhive and yeah, if they’ve used it then they know what’s up.

Steve McLeod
So are you working on actively released games or on games in development? You personally.

Joshua Mathews
Yeah, this year in, what was it, February, we released the VR game Clone Drone in the Hyperdome, which is a imagine voxel robots that you get to destroy with lightsabers. You chop them up. It’s physics-based. It’s very kinetic. It’s very fun. And that is an expansion of our first game, which was on PC and consoles, Clone Drone in the Danger Zone, which is very much the same concept except it’s a third person action brawler. Yeah, slash ’em up.

Steve McLeod
So I think you’re the first person I’ve talked to on this podcast who’s worked on a VR game. Is there any difference in being a Community Manager for a VR game as opposed to some typical Steam game?

Joshua Mathews
I would say yes, in that VR players are actually much harder to reach. They are very selective in what they play and what they spend their time on. It is quite a niche product, and being able to invite them into your space is a little bit harder because a lot of the time they are on much, I suppose, much more spread out, so it is more a case of reaching them through influencers, YouTubers, TikTokers, and trying to find a way to connect with them rather than finding them on Discords or Steam forums and things like that. They will come to you, but also connecting with them is a little bit harder, in that people are careful where they spend their money nowadays. And I would say that that is something that we’ve had to think about quite carefully in that. So Danger Zone, our audience tends to skew quite young, whereas the people that have the VR headsets and are interested in sword fighting skew a little older. And so we’ve found connections through actually a little bit more niche things like Sword Talk, which is a bunch of creators that really enjoy historical European martial arts, which is sword fighting in real life, and then getting them to play the game. And then, yeah, there’s that kind of a very specific link. And then finding people that make videos about other sword fighting VR games. There’s this kind of external community that we tapped into a little bit for our game.

Steve McLeod
Nice. When you mentioned about the people who buy the VR equipment, skewing knowledge, I have to admit that when I bought the VR equipment a few years ago, it didn’t take long before it just sat on the shelf. So it was exactly what you described. I had the money to buy the VR gear, but I didn’t have the time in my life to actually… it’s very immersive. I like to play games to relax, and I find that a VR game, it’s not as relaxing as sitting on the sofa with a console or something like that.

Joshua Mathews
Yeah, it’s a bit more of a workout.

Steve McLeod
Yeah. I mean, the games are brilliant when you see them. just the first time you experience VR, I think it takes your breath away. But then finally, as I found, I just kept on going back to the console.

Joshua Mathews
Yeah, it’s difficult to make a game that seems less like a gimmick and more like an experience you want to go back to, which there’s a lot of games out there that do that really well, like Gorilla Tag and Beat Saber. Yeah, just things that you are excited to go play, and then they give you a very solid experience that kind of sticks in your mind.

Steve McLeod
Let’s go back to the beginning of you and your path into community management. Where did it start? How did you get into community management?

Joshua Mathews
I’m not exactly sure how common it is, but I feel like a lot of Community Managers start out as people who enjoy making things, whether that’s on a social media platform, one or the other, or moderating. But I started out as a YouTuber. I focused on making reviews of indie games that no one had heard of. Just imagine back in the day when no one had heard of Minecraft, no one had heard of Project Zomboid or… what’s the spaceship one where you make a spaceship?

Steve McLeod
Kerbal Kerbal space program.

Joshua Mathews
Kerbal Space Program, exactly. I was making videos of all of those things before anyone had heard of them. And that’s my little brag there because… I think that is a bit of a niche, a bit of a skill, a spark that I started with where I was really, really excited to make videos about these things just because I enjoyed them. I wanted to share that. And that is, I think, quite important in a Community Manager. I had a lot of opportunities to go to conventions like EGX, Res, and I got talking and interviewed a ton of indie developers like solo indie devs, small teams. And eventually I was, I got in contact with a couple of the people in the Arch creatives in Lemington Spa. And I’d talk to them about being interested in getting into the video games from kind of outside journalism. I was writing things, making videos, but I wanted to work with a team a bit more directly, whether that was, I don’t know, sponsorships or actually being part of the creative process. And they helped me set up, I can’t remember what it was called, but it was an apprenticeship basically at the time. And I worked in Leamington Spa with three indie teams making tiny, tiny games through this government program to make things cheaper for them, but also to kind of give me a head start and a bit of mentorship along the way. And that lasted for, I think, year and a half. And yeah, they taught me all sorts of things. They gave me opportunities to make trailers. The first trailer I ever made was for a game I released with the Arch creatives called Calvino Noir, which was a side on story noir detective game. And then I also got the opportunity to work in mobile games as well with Lumo’s Cat, which I don’t think works anymore. Calvino Noir does, Lumo’s Cat doesn’t, because it’s like several iPhone iterations ago. But yeah, just kind of learning the very basics of how to talk to people online, where to bring them in, how to connect with them, what to, what was important to talk about for a game. They kind of guided me in all of those things and gave me opportunities to make it up myself as I went a little bit, but also what they did and didn’t like about what we were doing together. And that was invaluable. They helped me go to Develop. I met a bunch of other Community Managers, which I also think is invaluable. Whether you do it on Discord, whether you do it in real life, talking to other Community Managers, they will tell you what works, what doesn’t, what they’re thinking about, horror stories, the whole nine yards. And that also was a fantastic resource. And I have to kind of give a shout out to, I can’t remember her surname, but Hannah, I believe it’s Hannah Flynn, from Failbetter Games, she helped me through those very early years with inordinate compassion and grace, which was a huge boost to my career.

Steve McLeod
Everything I’m discovering about the game, the video game industry is that it’s people helping people. People are very supportive of each other.

Joshua Mathews
Absolutely. Yeah.

Steve McLeod
Yeah, it’s really nice to see. So when you said you met with Community Managers in real life, was that at develop like a side gig, like a side event at develop or at some somewhere in Lemington spa or…?

Joshua Mathews
You know what? I think I just started following and talking to people on Twitter at the time and that doesn’t work anymore. But it might happen on Blue Sky.

Steve McLeod
That’s so sad. I’m so disappointed with the way social media has just collapsed as a way to build community and networks.

Joshua Mathews
It’s grim. It really is. There’s a little bit of that in other places like Blue Sky but I think those days are mostly over, unfortunately. But yeah, think connecting with other Community Managers is still possible, and I still try and do it at any opportunity, but it’s, yeah, it is a lot harder now.

Steve McLeod
Just a little spoiler alert is that I’m thinking of arranging a side event at Develop Brighton next year for Community Managers. It’ll be something sponsored by my company and the whole nusual thing of free drinks and whatever. I don’t know exactly what it will look like, but advance notice.

Joshua Mathews
Very nice, very nice.

Steve McLeod
Because I think that’s something that’s really missing from events like develop is there tends to be nothing for Community Managers. Maybe one or two talks at best, but no real area or…

Joshua Mathews
Yeah, yeah, I think you’re right. It’s a slightly forgotten craft, but no less, no less useful.

Steve McLeod
I want to go back several steps. You told me that one of the things you learned during your apprenticeship is how to communicate about the game or what things are worth saying when you’re trying to promote the game. Did I get that right? Is that one of the things?

Joshua Mathews
Yeah. Yeah.

Steve McLeod
So do you want to tell us what some of the things are worth talking about with the game when you’re trying to build a community or promote the game?

Joshua Mathews
Yeah, it’s a really interesting concept that what you find interesting about a game will not be the same thing that people find interesting about the game. I think a great example is recently I worked on Still Wakes the Deep and when that came out there was a kind of unexpected influx where I was trying to communicate very important things about the game, like, there’s a great sense of physicality about the character. Or there are really deep, interesting working-class stories from all of these well-written characters that you can talk to a bunch. On Tumblr, a bunch of the people there were just like, these two characters are gay, and we think they’re in love. And was just two random side characters it started and then they started making fan art and all of these things. I’m like, okay, it doesn’t need to be that deep. It really doesn’t.

Steve McLeod
And were the side characters actually gay or was this just something people read into something that wasn’t there?

Joshua Mathews
I think it wasn’t really written with that intent, but I guess that’s one of the things about art is that people read into these things in their own ways through their own lenses, and that stood out to them. And these two characters, they were in the same bunk, they were very friendly with each other, they were quite affectionate, and there was a scene where one of them died and the other called out to the other. I guess they read that as romantic, which is really interesting. And I thought, yeah, these people have built their own connection with the game, and we need to nurture that. And so we spent ages just talking with them, reposting their stuff, answering their questions, going to the rest of the dev team. And to actually answer your question, when I was picking things out for the games, like you’re not always going to be… the game isn’t always for you, so you’ve got to just find things that are like really stand out to you as interesting, or at least listen to the creative director about things that stand out and that you can talk about with confidence, with detail and depth and I guess some kind of flare, passion. Even if it’s not necessarily a game that’s for you. Because you will always end up working on projects that aren’t your thing. And I think that’s good. To be able to hone that skill. Yeah, just picking out those things can be tricky. But it’s sometimes a gut feeling. This comes up a lot where a lot of the things the community manages do are measured on KPIs, like number of views or number of comments or sentiments. And because a lot of what we do exists in a very social sphere, it’s not always clear-cut. And we can write reports that are pages and pages long about how people feel, why people feel that way, and what we should do about it, which is probably some of the best ways that we can communicate that to the rest of the team. But I really feel like solid numbers do not always tell the story and one of the skills that is important to a Community Manager is their gut. And so being able to act on that and being able to communicate what that feeling is that you’re getting is also quite important.

Steve McLeod
Do you have a, do you have an example of when you’ve used your gut to make a decision or choose a direction to move?

Joshua Mathews
None that aren’t under NDA.

Steve McLeod
Good answer. Good answer. On this topic of what you want to draw attention to is not something that resonates with the players, I was just chatting with my friend this morning who composes music for video games and they’ve just released a new build of a game under development that’s with like play testers or beta players or something. And he was complaining that this latest build had fixed up some problems with the music or the sound effects or how they work together and nobody noticed and nobody commented on it. And that’s all he could notice in the game and nobody else seems to care. And I was thinking, well, it might seem to you like they don’t care, but I think if people don’t notice these things, it’s probably because they work so well. They’re so meshed that then like when they’re bad, they draw attention when they’re good. People just kind of embrace it as part of the whole ambience of the game.

Joshua Mathews
Yeah. And honestly, part of that is that these are the kind of things that if you tell your Community Manager, they will go out there and find out what people think about the music.

Steve McLeod
Yeah? How would you do that?

Joshua Mathews
Honestly, if it’s just something as casual as the audio engineer is like, I worked really hard on this and no one’s talked about it. It can be as simple as the Community Manager popping up in general chat in Discord being like, my God, the new music, has anyone seen this? And if there’s dust swirls in the Discord, then either it’s working fine, or no one cares. Players are fickle. But someone, if you have an established community, someone will be in there and someone will have noticed whether they’re talking about it is an entirely different aspect. Bringing it up, being like, “Oh my God, I love this thing about the game”. Someone will reply to that. Yeah, Community Managers are just there to hype up the game sometimes and very, very subtly.

Steve McLeod
One of many hats,

Joshua Mathews
Yeah, exactly. You’re in there, you mention a thing. This is also quite important and linked to this is the Community Manager in one sense, I hate the term, “thought leaders” in that a Community Manager can and will bring something up from a particular perspective or a particular aspect of the game and say something and that will filter through to the rest of the community. They will listen, hopefully they will listen and they will reinterpret those sentiments. It’s, because you are also part of the community, right? And if it’s something that resonates with the community that they can and will reflect on those things that you bring up. Music. You can get feedback very easily. There’s so many different ways to get feedback. You can just slip into the Discord and be like, “What do you think of this?” Because yeah, the players like to feel listened to.

Steve McLeod
“Players like to feel listened to”. That could be a good title for this episode. I want to ask you more about Discord. Now, listeners, I do brief guests in advance of what questions I’m going to ask. So I have to make a disclaimer here. I haven’t warned Joshua Mathewsabout this at all, but Discord, as a tool for Community Managers, what do you find the good points and the bad points of it? Let’s see how good you are at speaking without a chance to prepare.

Joshua Mathews
Hmm. Well, Discord, should say for the Doborog Discord, that is not my domain. That is the domain of my incredibly talented co-Community Manager, Carissa Verdela. She works with the international community. She works specifically with our Discord and our support. She, everything Doborog Discord is, is her success. That being said, I have worked with other Discords, my own YouTube Discord, my own podcast Discord. I’ve worked with all sorts of them. And the great things about Discord are that it is extremely versatile and you can funnel people into the kinds of conversations, the kind of content that you want on there. So if you want people to list bugs, you make a forum channel. If you want people to turn up to events, you create a voice and video event channel. If you want just general chatter, you make memes channels, make text and pictures, and you know specific things about, I don’t know Marvel films. If you want external brands and IP that would make sense with whatever you’re building on the Discord, you can do that; it’s extremely versatile. The bad thing about Discord is that its moderation functions are pretty all-or-nothing. People have to bring in bots, and even the paid bots aren’t particularly good. I’m just going to say they’re not particularly good. I don’t like most of them. They do the most important things. You can ban, can time out, you can set timers, you can send anonymous messages through these bots without revealing the moderator that is taking the action that’s needed. But ultimately, it’s not that flexible. And there are a lot of problems with people getting their accounts hacked. There are lot of problems with just, I guess, general gamer culture, shall we say, which tends to skew far right.

Steve McLeod
Huh, yeah. I think we all know what you’re talking about.

Joshua Mathews
Yeah, unfortunately, some of it skews far right and that can end up in your Discord very easily. So you have to be so vigilant.

Steve McLeod
Far right, but also it can, I think, skew juvenile, right? Adolescent. But the things that some people haven’t yet learnt, you just can’t say these things. Whether you them in jokes or not, they’re just not right to say.

Joshua Mathews
Yeah, it’s like you’d say these things with your friends, but you can’t say these things in a public forum. And for Doborog, we have a lot of young players, like young teenagers to like, I guess, 13 to 24 maybe? And we have to kind of figure out how old these people are to figure out how lenient we’re supposed to be when we’re moderating. Because we can learn them, we can teach them, sorry, these things. And a lot of the time they will listen because they don’t know better and they do need to learn the etiquette of wherever they’re joining. And maybe they would make this kind of mistakes in a consequence free space with their friends, with their family, but that doesn’t necessarily happen out on the internet. So yeah.

Steve McLeod
Do find with Discord you manage to reach the majority of your community?

Joshua Mathews
Hmm. Recently, I had to do kind of a audience breakdown and I think we have, we have three main segments, which is… we call them the kids, which is the younger audience. They skew mostly mask and are really enthusiastic about robots and swords and all and Star Wars and all of these things and they love that. And we definitely capture them because they have a lot of spare time and they love chatting with their friends on Discord and they organize their own stuff. We also have the artists who tend to skew a little bit older and they skew sometimes into like queer demographics, marginalized demographics, and they create a lot of fantastic things. We want to encourage that. We share their work quite readily. And we capture those a lot. What we don’t capture is the older crowd who are like mothers and just more casual players that we don’t have as direct of a connection with in Discord.

Steve McLeod
That’s very interesting. So it can be that your community discussions and feedback could skew towards making you, if you’re not careful, you could give too much weight to one demographic.

Joshua Mathews
Yeah, and it has happened. We have to have discussions about this kind of things internally all the time, about what is a loud voice versus what is one that’s worth us listening to.

Steve McLeod
And what is the difference between a loud voice and one that’s worth listening to? How do you tell the difference?

Joshua Mathews
For our team, is a balance between what is in… Like, there’s several things. What is important to be fixed about the game? Like, is there something that’s breaking everyone’s experience? What is our creative direction? What is a fun and interesting thing that the community is saying? It doesn’t matter for that how many people are saying it. And then also how happy people are while they’re playing versus what are they saying? Because they could be complaining about, I don’t know, the hammer and the way that the spear works in our game. But the reality is, an even amount of people are still using it in our statistics and in the backend.

Steve McLeod
Slightly proverbial steam review where they’ve played for 1000 hours…

Joshua Mathews
And they hate it.

Steve McLeod
And they’re like giving a scathing review. Like clearly you actually liked this game a lot. Yeah. Hey, I did say at the beginning that I hoped we would get enough time to hear about some of your interesting stuff. We are getting low on time. But tell me about your, you’re still doing YouTubeing now. You’re still a YouTuber and you’re on TikTok and so on. Tell me about the type of stuff you’re producing there.

Joshua Mathews
Yeah, I adore just making things. The process of making things is quite soothing to me, which is great because I get to do it for work. And I also have a bunch of stories and games that I am personally passionate about and I love making things for. So I make a bunch of Warhammer and Vampire the Masquerade videos and I, this is kind of a hobby, I would say. It’s a personal brand, which makes me very easy to find on the internet. And it also helps my career in that if someone sees my Instagram or my YouTube channel, they’re like, this guy has the skills that we need. But the reality is it’s for me, it’s a hobby that I do as and when I can in between other things that are probably more important. But yeah, there is that passion and it does hone my skills and I just love talking with people about whether it’s Warhammer or tabletop role-playing games. I show my passion by putting those things on the internet. And maybe it’s the autism that I have, but it’s just having an outlet for that is really just, it’s brought me an inordinate amount of friends and opportunity. I do feel quite privileged to have the spare time to be able to make these things, whether it’s cosplay for a vampire character from Bloodlines , or whether it is the spare time to edit and animate a tabletop role-playing game about Warhammer or whatever. These are things that I… It’s a creative outlet. and there’s a lot of overlap in my work, but it certainly feels like my own thing and having that is a constant joy in my life.

Steve McLeod
Fantastic. Over breakfast this morning, I told my young daughter that I was going to be chatting with a vampire today and I showed her one of your YouTube videos and she’s, mean, she’s learned to roll her eyes at most things I say, but it was fun showing her that, to show her the passionate, the passion of some of the people I get to talk to in this podcast. We have one last very important question. What game, Joshua, what game have you been playing lately?

Joshua Mathews
Recently, I have been playing a couple of different games. I’ve just hopped onto Battlefield 6 with a bunch of friends, and I haven’t played a Battlefield game since Battlefield 2142 back in, what, 2012 or something? And it feels just like that. It’s amazing just to turn on the positional audio and hear my friends screaming in the distance and we’ll get it into a group. And that’s amazing. I’m trying to finish Expedition 33, which is incredibly emotional.

Steve McLeod
Okay, how far are you through that?

Joshua Mathews
I am into Chapter 3 now, or Act 3. So I’ve gotten all the twisty bits out of the way and now I’m… I’m waiting for the apparently heart-wrenching conclusion. So that’s great.

Steve McLeod
Is everything as good about it as they say?

Joshua Mathews
You know, I have my criticisms, but as a whole, it’s just an incredible experience. It’s so much fun. The story is amazing. The gameplay just exactly what I wanted out of a JRPG as a fan of paper Mario. Yeah, it’s, it’s everything I love. And I love to get like, as I said, I love to give shout outs to tiny indie games. So I’ve also been really loving Easy Delivery Co.

Steve McLeod
Easy Delivery Co. That sounds completely cozy and indie with just that name alone.

Joshua Mathews
Exactly. Then that is the vibe. You’re a little Animal Crossing-esque character and you drive one of those Japanese delivery trucks with the flatbed back and then like the squished front and it’s like lo-fi music and PS1 graphics and you just bomb it around this snowy mountain village delivering like plant pots and boxes and you watch them fall out the back of your van. And yeah, it’s fantastic fun.I just really love it.

Steve McLeod
I shall check it out. What I really like about games like this, assuming that what I imagine in my head is what you’re describing is the type of game I feel I could code. I could create if I really had to, know, these games that you kind of feel like they’re achievable if by you and your friends, whereas, know, one of the big AAA or AA games, you look at that, you know, it’s a work of thousands.

Joshua Mathews
Yeah, there’s… people’s fingerprints are easy to see in that kind of game. Yeah.

Steve McLeod
Yeah, I like that expression. Okay, Josh, that’s all we have time for today. Thanks again for being on the show.

Joshua Mathews
No, it was great fun. I really enjoyed talking, so thank you.

Steve McLeod
And we can listen to get in touch if they’d to learn more about what we’ve discussed today?

Joshua Mathews
Oh yeah. So for professional Community Managers, you can message me through LinkedIn. And I’m more than happy to help people out with questions if you’re just starting out, if you are looking to get into the career like Community Manager or marketing. Joshua Mathews on LinkedIn. If you want to follow me doing things like role play or vampires, then you can find me at jershmugersh on TikTok, joshftl on Instagram, or StrangeAdventures on YouTube, because what is consistent branding?

Steve McLeod
Sometimes it’s hard to do and sometimes it’s just why bother. Look, I’ll have links to all of those in the show notes and also to, I think to these VR games you mentioned, I’ve also have in the show notes. In fact, we always mention, we try to add links to every single game mentioned in every single episode because I think, I mean, it’s that what we’re about, this is about games, right?

Joshua Mathews
Yeah

Steve McLeod
Alright, thanks again Josh, bye!

Joshua Mathews
Bye.

Steve McLeod
Bye everyone.

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“Players like to feel listened to” with Joshua Mathews

Transcription