"We raised $50K for charity with a video game" ft. Community Manager Greg Cummins

“We raised $50K for charity with a video game” ft. Community Manager Greg Cummins

(You can also watch this episode on YouTube.)

Today’s guest is Greg Cummings, Community and Content Manager at Far From Home, a Polish indie studio behind the survival game Forever Skies. Greg’s journey into community management began while working full-time in retail and being a dad; he built experience through unpaid work as a content creator, streamer, and unofficial community moderator for PlayStation Access before landing his first industry role in 2021.

We chat about managing communities across time zones with a team of moderators, how Far From Home turned negative reviews into a comeback story by listening to their players, and their inspiring charity work that’s raised over $50,000 for Whale and Dolphin Conservation. Greg shares practical advice on building trust with your community, managing your time effectively, and why negative reviews from engaged players are actually valuable feedback.

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Transcription

Greg Cummings
It’s good to know, especially with early access games, we build our games with the help of the community. Like we call ourselves as a community-led developer and something like Feature Upvote is just exactly what you need for that kind of thing. So you don’t make those kinds of mistakes.

Steve McLeod
Greg, let’s do a formal introduction, although I hope we can keep that little snippet of our conversation. So, so.

Greg Cummings
Sure, yeah. No problem.

Steve McLeod
You’re a Greg Cummings, you’re currently Community and Content Manager at Far From Home, which is a Polish studio, but you are, as you told me, you’re in the United Kingdom and it’s a role you just officially started like maybe last week.

Greg Cummings
Yeah. So it’s, so I’ve been Community Manager at Far From Home since like September, 2021. So just over four years. and you know, in the world of game dev, especially indie game dev, you wear a lot of hats. So, you know, I’m community manager, but I also work with marketing, I do social media, I do content creation as well as managing our community.

So the title change now to Community and Content Manager is just sort of like, there’s a few new sort of role changes, but it’s mostly acknowledging what I do more accurately. Yeah.

Steve McLeod
That’s nice. And they doubled your pay at the same time, right?

Greg Cummings
Maybe. It would be nice. would be nice.

Steve McLeod
But it really touches on such an important point is that community managers are often kind of jack-of-all-trades. They have to do lots and lots of different things. It’s not just about being on Discord all day.

Greg Cummings
No, it’s not. You really do have to manage your time, like really effectively because you are right. It’s a lot of it is spending time talking to players and sort of engaging and listening to what they have to say.

But at the same time, you also have to manage, like I say, manage time effectively because there are other things that need doing this into the studio, whether that be simply recording something for TikTok, or that could be getting a couple of GIFs together for a blog because you’re about to do an update. There’s, there’s all kinds of things going on all the time.

So you really have to manage your time effectively because community management can mean many different things. And it differs from studio to studio.

Steve McLeod
Oh yeah, yeah, there’s not really a standard definition, is there?

Greg Cummings
No, you, you, when you look, when you’re applying for a community manager role, I’m sure we’ll get onto this. You do sort of really have to, I know it sounds cliche. A lot of people say this, but you do have to tailor your CV for specifically what they’re asking for, because some people, especially for large studios, it is, you will hire yourself a community manager, maybe a team of community managers even. And then you’ve also got social media managers, content managers, et cetera, marketing managers.

But in smaller studios where you’ve got a team of like say maximum of 30 people, that’s pretty much just one dude. You know, one girl, and just, yeah, maybe like one marketing manager and that’s it. so yeah, you’ve really got to sort of tailor it to what it is they’re looking for.

Steve McLeod
That’s really good advice for I think any job application, but specifically for community management jobs. Hey, tell me about Far From Home, how many people work there?

Greg Cummings
So we are in that second category I mentioned. We are a team of about just under 30 people now. We’ve been around officially since 2020, officially formed during the pandemic. That was in Wroclaw, Poland. The team prior to that was made up of AAA devs mostly who worked at Techland. A few people worked at other places like Larian, CD Projekt Red.

From all over sort of AAA Polish game dev for the most part. Um, a lot of them working on Dying Light, Dying Light 2 to the Divinity series, the Witcher series, you know it. Um, and eventually they decided that they wanted to sort of break away from that AAA life that they’ve been doing for so long. And they formed Far From Home.

I think the play on the name was basically sort of saying like they’re out coming out of their comfort zone. They’re far from what they used to and that’s how it was formed from that, which is ironic name really because during the pandemic everybody was working from home.

Steve McLeod
Stay at home.

Greg Cummings
So they’ve never been closer to home geographically, but that’s how it started.

Steve McLeod
And the main, and their big game, their big success is Forever Skies, for which you’re the community and content manager.

Greg Cummings
You can call me just Community Manager, it’s fine, I don’t mind. Yes.

Steve McLeod
And so you’re alone in doing community in that team of about 30 people.

Greg Cummings
Yeah. So on the marketing side, there’s, uh, there’s, three of us really. So there’s the, marketing brand manager who’s also one of the, business owners, uh, Pawel Jawor. Uh, there’s also myself and we also have a PR manager as well, who, is with a sort of part-time. also works with a few other, uh, Polish dev companies. Well, actually not Polish, but various other companies. And so, yeah, for the most part, it is just me doing, uh, community content, social media, et cetera.

Steve McLeod
And how did you get to be working for a Polish company while you were in the United Kingdom?

Greg Cummings
It’s a long story, it’s a mutual friend of ours. Shout out to Jarvs Tasker. At the time…

Steve McLeod
Who was on this podcast a few episodes ago.

Greg Cummings
Yes, of course. there we go. So at the time, so she was working for Untold Tales, which is a indie publisher, again, based in Wroclaw and she told me that this other studio was looking for a community manager in the coming weeks, coming months. Me at the time, I was working full-time in retail. ⁓ But what I was doing alongside my full-time job.

Well, as well as also being a dad, was also being a streamer and content creator with a group of friends of mine in the local area. That was a YouTube channel called Enigmatic Play, but we also did Twitch streaming as well. So shout out to Ed and Johan if they ever listen to this. They were doing streaming content creation, so I joined them and I was helping them do the video game side of things because they covered media in a wider sense.

And on top of all that, I was also doing unofficial community management for one of my favorite YouTube channels called PlayStation Access, who are the official PlayStation YouTube for PlayStation UK. So I was doing unofficial sort of community and social work for them. So we had an unofficial fan account.

Steve McLeod
Unpaid or paid?

Greg Cummings
No, unpaid. All of this was unpaid. was just doing their social media on Twitter, you know, when they did new video, new content, additional posts. And I was also modding their unofficial discord as well, because they didn’t have their official, an official one. So we as a community created one for them.

So I was doing all of these things, just trying to get my foot in the door, which is something I advise anyone who wants to be a community manager is you don’t need to necessarily get into the industry officially in a paid capacity to start gaining experience. You can do all of these things to start getting experience. So I was doing that and Jarvs gave them my name said this guy wants to be, myself, wants to be a community manager.

I hadn’t applied for anything yet at the time. I was thinking I want to do another year of unpaid sort of like voluntary type work. But yeah, they reached out. I went for an interview. Then I went for another interview after that. A few other hoops to jump through. And eventually, I found my way into my first official job in the industry.

It was about a sort of two-three month process. It was a lot of work to get it done. it got there in the end. And yeah, I’ve never looked back.

Steve McLeod
That’s a nice story. I am little bit interested. I am interested to know what it’s like for you being in a different country. I assuming they mostly work in office or is it a completely remote company?

Greg Cummings
No, they do have, they have a hybrid now. So when I first joined, was, it was just, uh, purely a hundred percent, uh, a hundred percent working from home. Uh, but they did actually open a studio in Wroclaw a couple of years ago. So now most of the people who live in Poland, well live in their, in the local vicinity do half at home, half in the studio. Some people do full studio. Some of us do like 90% at home, ie. myself who lives in the UK. And we have, uh, one of our programmers also lives in Portugal. So I’m not the only one who’s also from a different country.

But we do go to Poland on a pretty regular basis. So I go to Poland maybe three times a year, sometimes four. That might be for various things. That might be for large updates or anniversaries, know, celebrate three, four, five years of Far From Home, for various reasons. Or sometimes when we have events in Poznań or Krakow, I’ll go there. But yeah, it is like I said, 90%, 95% working from home for me.

Steve McLeod
So when you go to Poland, you’re working in the office for a few days or a couple of days.

Greg Cummings
Yeah, that’s right. Yeah.

Steve McLeod
So I’m curious to know what it’s like for your community management role, being mostly remote. Do you think that that makes it harder or easier? Does it give you unique challenges?

Greg Cummings
It can do yes, because sometimes you know when you’ve got for example, there’s a social post that you want to put out there for a particular reason like you’ve got to be very…

With community management, with the social media side of it sometimes you have to be very reactive like if there’s a new trend that’s happening on Twitter or Bluesky and you want to get your game, you want to get your post out there that’s following this trend?

Like a prime example is a couple of years ago, you might remember a trend where people were going, “Our game, if it was made in 2007”, and it was literally just your trailer to ‘What I’ve Done’ by Linkin Park. Sometimes you just want to do a thing and get it out there. But first of you want to just double-check that you’re not going to, you know, pardon my language, or piss anyone off by doing this first. So sometimes if I was there in studio, I could just go: “Is it good, we’re good? Okay, let’s go.” Whereas I’ve got to go, “Hey, man. Are we okay with this?”.

To be fair in recent years, I’ve become a lot more confident and, I understand our brand a lot more. So now I feel a lot more confident just to do it. But in my first couple of years as a community manager, I didn’t have that confidence of…

I knew the brand, but not as strongly as I probably wanted to. And so I would always double check and say, “Hey, am I good to post this first?” And that would mean having to wait a couple of hours, maybe sometimes for a response because we’re all busy people. Whereas if I was in a studio, I could just go, “Hey, this thing. Good. Okay. Let’s post.”

So yeah, it has challenges from time to time there, but we’re all connected constantly. You know, like if you look now, like even it’s, it’s a fact actually that this will, this is studied in 2024, but 50% of the people, just over 50% of the people working in game dev are still, are working remotely still.

Steve McLeod
I didn’t know that. That’s really interesting. That’s a huge percentage.

Greg Cummings
I mean, yeah, I mean we’re a few years removed since then, but I can’t imagine it’s changed drastically in that year and a half since the study was done. I think at that time it was something like 58% people were still working remotely or in hybrid. So, you know, we’re all connected either through Slack or through Discord, whatever it is you might use. Yeah. So it’s not, it’s not a huge challenge, but there are a few niche issues with the community management role, like I’ve just explained that do present unique challenges, but yeah, for the most part it’s fine.

Steve McLeod
So, my company, Feature Upvote, is completely remote and it has advantages, but I do sometimes miss the ability to frequently get together and just have lunch or work on a problem physically located in the same room where we can just draw on a whiteboard or get around a screen. I miss that.

Greg Cummings
Yeah, definitely. Yeah.

Steve McLeod
But I also like the ability to take my daughter to school every day, et cetera.

Greg Cummings
I completely agree. I’ve got two children myself. like the fact that I could just sort of sign out for an hour or two, whenever it’s needed is like a real, its a real plus, but that’s why what’s so great about hybrid. It’s great when I do get into the studio. And it’s just nice to see everyone’s faces, these people that I work with day in, day out. And it does get to lunchtime and it’s like, “Hey, let’s go out. Let’s just go in and just have a nice time to talk about games.” and just, yeah, have that sort of that camaraderie. It’s nice. I think the hybrid role is certainly the best of both worlds.

Steve McLeod
Yeah. Yeah. Let’s go into some of the questions I gave you in advance that we might discuss. One that’s got my curiosity already is I wanted to know if there was a memorable positive moment you’ve had as a community manager and you wrote our charity work. What is that? I haven’t heard of something like this in a studio before.

Greg Cummings
So I really struggled to think of like a very specific thing related to community management. But things like there’s lots of little victories you get with that. So I tried to think of like one very specific thing that I’ve done within my job role. And that is, again, like you just said, our charity work. So Far From Home has three goals, and one of those goals is generally just to make the world a better place. And to support that goal that we have as a studio is we partnered with, we partnered with two charities.

But I’ll talk about just the one for now. That’s WDC, Whale and Dolphin Conservation. They’re a brilliant charity registered here in the UK. And they support marine life and make sure that whales and dolphins are all free, especially can fighting all these causes where whaling is still, well, hunting is still apparent or they’re being used for sakes of entertainment in aquariums and things like that. So they’re fighting all of these real big issues over here.

And what we did was we reached out to them, the good friends of mine now called Sally Ward, a few years ago, and we said we wanted to work with you. And what we did was we created, what it is essentially is it’s like a decorative artifacts that you can have, that you can craft in our game. Our game is a survival game. So you have a base, which is an airship, and you can decorate that however you like. By fighting things in the world or, know, different modules.

We basically created like a globe, which had some holographic whales swimming in it and you can change the color of it. It costs basically like $2.99. And 100% of that net revenue goes all to WDC. And that goes towards that conservation work. And we announced in December, just gone, that as of as of then, we’ve raised just over $50,000, just from selling that one artifact. And like to me,

Steve McLeod
That’s astonishing.

Greg Cummings
Yeah, that to me was just such a huge thing because it’s a huge thing that we want to try and make a difference. We believe games are more than just entertainment. We believe they can be used to change the world for good. Ant that announcement, $50,000, all to charity, to WDC, really sort of made you feel like you made a difference. So that was one thing for me that really made me very proud of the work that we do.

Steve McLeod
That’s fantastic. And I love that it’s not just, we’ll donate them some money, but it’s actually doing something that raises awareness within the game and makes money for the charity at the same time. That’s really clever.

Greg Cummings
Yeah. Yes. So the players get something, they get a cool artifact to decorate their airship with that they can interact with. And then, the net revenue goes directly to them. We don’t see any of it. It’s a great cause. And like I say, we did also launch a second charity DLC in December as well. And that was with War Child, another UK based charity, which basically protects children in countries with conflict.

And we’ve done a similar artifact for them as well. But yeah, that one only launched in December. So, hopefully we achieved the same level of heights of success with that.

Steve McLeod
Fantastic. What about a challenge you’ve faced as a community manager? Something that stands out in your memory where like, it was maybe harder than you thought this job was going to be or something like that.

Greg Cummings
Yeah, a really… So an example of that, you will face into these challenges a lot as a community manager. But when we launched into 1.0, just prior to that, our Steam reviews were sat at ‘Very Positive’, around this sort of like mid 80% positive reviews. Unfortunately, when we launched into 1.0, we saw a lot of those reviews slip and we basically went into sort of the mid 60%.

‘Mixed Reviews’ essentially, and a lot of that was like it also bear in mind as well when we launched into 1.0 we also launched onto PlayStation for the first time and those reviews have always stayed strong. It’s currently at 4-, last time I checked I think it’s at something like 4.35 or 4.34 stars out of five. So basically over four out of five basically. So those strong reviews have always been pretty strong.

But on Steam they slipped. I think a lot of that was maybe early access fans who had higher expectations, who expected more, and they didn’t necessarily achieve those expectations. So the biggest challenge was, really just sort of like a swallowing pride, not taking everything that was being said personally, and just listen to what people have to say, because a lot of it is reading what players actually have to say, reading through those negative reviews, understanding what the common themes are. And from there, we essentially made an action plan about what it was we were going to do.

Because you find that even though it is hard to read when people are bashing your game, what you have to understand is a lot of these people are doing this because they care. And that is the most important thing. The worst thing is when people leave a negative review where they don’t write anything. They leave a negative review and they’ll probably just put
“Mid” or something like that. There’s nothing you can do with that.

Steve McLeod
Ha ha.

Greg Cummings
You have to just go, okay, fine, whatever. But when people are leaving paragraphs on their Steam reviews, this is what I didn’t like and why. Those people care about your game, they care about your project, they probably even care about you as a team. That is huge. That is something that you should absolutely cherish really, because it means, “Hey, this is an action plan. This what we can do better.”

And we actually did put out a blog post we created a graph, we said, “These are four key areas that people have left negative reviews for.” PCGamer picked it up and said, “OK, these guys have actually acknowledged that things weren’t as good as what they hoped it would be.” They did a whole article on it, which was very surprising.

Steve McLeod
Wow, wow.

Greg Cummings
But they acknowledged our honesty, and the community did too. So we’ve actually released two large updates since then, since April 2025, as well as a bunch of hot fixes and patches.

We’ve done two major content updates and we’ve got a third one coming up in a couple of months time. So yeah, that was probably the biggest challenge I’ve had to face. There was a lot of stuff to read through and a lot of it, you do, you do take time. You just try not to take that time because you can’t don’t take it personally. It’s not aimed at you. It’s aimed at the product that you work on. It’s not, they’re not saying I hate this game because Greg sucked. They’re not saying that, you know.

Steve McLeod
Hahaha!

Greg Cummings
You just, can’t take it personally. You just got to read through it. Understand what it says, show empathy, understand where they’re coming from. And it does make handling that a lot easier. But yeah, the updates coming through now and the reviews have since then gone back up. We are back up to ‘Mostly Positive’. Early 70%.

Steve McLeod
That’s good to hear. Good to hear.

Greg Cummings
Yeah. So we, we’re doing the right thing, we believe, by our players. We try and listen to them, understand their issues that they have. Look through our Feature Upvote board and you know,

Steve McLeod
This is probably, I should just interject here and say this was a coincidence, but when I approached Greg or we approached each other about being on the show, I didn’t actually realize Greg was working for one of our customers. It’s completely coincidental, but yes, Far From Home is a Feature Upvote customer.

Greg Cummings
We are a Feature Upvote customer.

Steve McLeod
Back to your story.

Greg Cummings
No, that’s okay. So yeah, we created a plan through that and things are going great. We named the series of updates Echoes because a lot of it was around creating essentially more content, more stories about people who lived in this post-apocalyptic world that we created.

Basically what we did was we’ve added side quests with every single part. There’s three biomes in the game. So part one was updating biome one with side quests and a bunch of other content, same with part two was for volume two and volume three will be the same. And that name came from me. I pitched that name. So I’m very proud that it’s called that.

Steve McLeod
Nice. That’s where you’re the content manager part of your job.

Greg Cummings
Right, that’s it. Yeah, it’s it. But again, it’s like that thing where when you work in indie game dev, you wear many hats. And, you know, marketing, just happens to be one of those things. So yeah, it was a it’s a real honor.

Steve McLeod
What I really like about this story is that you listened and you showed you were listening. I have a little talk I present from time to time on how to manage feedback for video games, how to get it and what to do with it. And that thing of actually acknowledging what people are saying and showing that you’re listening is the part that is so essential.

Greg Cummings
Yeah, absolutely. Because if you don’t listen, if you show that you don’t care what people have to say, then hey man, good luck selling your next project because people aren’t going to trust you.

Steve McLeod
So did you have any strategies or techniques you did to stop it from feeling like it was a personal attack when you were going through reviews?

Greg Cummings
There’s no, there’s no real strategy. You just got to remind yourself that like say that people are writing stuff cause they care. And if that means taking, you know, taking a break every hour and having to walk around going for a cup of coffee, then, know, do what you need to do, but just you have to keep that in mind. There’s no real sort of strategy other than, this is, this is the reality of working in game dev. You know, you just got to, you’ve just got to grin and bear it sometimes and not take it to heart.

There’s there is no strategy other than like, like I just said, unless anybody has any other strategies out there, I’m willing to listen to them, but that’s what I do. And it works for me. Yeah.

Steve McLeod
Ha ha ha ha. Yeah, it’s tough, it’s the direction where burnout starts coming in. So if you have to do that stuff too often by yourself. Hey, you mentioned you have two kids. How old are your kids?

Greg Cummings
So I’ve got a 14 year old daughter and I’ve got an 11 year old son. Yeah.

Steve McLeod
That, of course, probably is getting to that phase in life where it doesn’t require quite as much as energy as it did when they were younger. But how do you manage to balance family life and being a present father with your community manager life when the community wants attention 24 hours a day? Do you have any rules or guidelines that you use for yourself there?

Greg Cummings
Hahaha. Yeah, you do. You do have to remember, even though like this for me was a dream job, like this is what I wanted to do for a long time. You still have to remember at the end of the day, it is a job. It is a job that you do is what you do to earn money. You have set hours that you work and you make that sort of known, with your community as well. Like, I’m around constantly, and if there’s an emergency, I’m there. I have Discord on my phone. I’ve Slack on my phone. So I’m constantly reachable, if necessary.

But my advice is to get a really strong team of mods behind you to manage some of your platforms because they will, they, I can’t thank my mod team enough. They are absolutely an incredible bunch of people.

I try to do my best to make sure that I’ve got a good balance between people who are in Europe and also people who are in the USA to try and cover that 24 hour period as best I can. And a lot of it is just people coming in like, cause they’ve got a bug or they’ve got an issue, but if there are any major issues that ever occur, um, then I’m there and I’m on hand. Um, apart from that, it’s just, they know that I, you know, they know my working hours, they know what I’m going to be around when I’m, you know, I’m approachable 24 seven. My door is always open, but thankfully we’ve been, they’ve been, know like, “Hey, Greg’s probably finished for the day. He’ll check this tomorrow.” You know, that’s it. That’s, that’s probably the best thing to do is just have a team of mods in place that you can trust.

Steve McLeod
That’s cool, and communicate very well to them about your availability.

Greg Cummings
And make sure, yeah. Make sure that they know. Yeah. I created essentially a mod handbook for our Discord page, which they just sort of essentially follow to the letter. And if, if I need to jump in, if I need to intervene during my out-of-hours time, then I will, but honestly, it’s such a rare thing with them in place, that it’s, yeah, it’s hardly ever happened. So yeah.

Steve McLeod
So on the topic of mods, these are voluntary mods, right? Moderators working for free.

Greg Cummings
Yeah, they’re like our core fans who want to go in above and beyond.

Steve McLeod
Okay. do you, do they, do you go through them pretty quickly? Do people give it all for six months and then realize the kind of done being a mod or do you manage to keep them around longer?

Greg Cummings
Um, it varies. I’d say we, we have, uh, some people who have been modding with me since we, uh, since I was first hired mods, so 2022. Uh, but yeah, there have been a few other people who’ve sort of come in and then just sort of like maybe disappeared, become less active and disappeared. And, know, that’s fine. You know, we don’t, you know, this is. I don’t expect them to be constantly present and constantly sort of, available.

So when people are sort of coming in and then you don’t hear from them for up to a couple of months, it’s fine. Real life comes first. So yeah, it’s a bit of a mixture.

Steve McLeod
Yeah. Okay. And how do you find these mods or do they find you?

Greg Cummings
So sometimes they do find me, but a lot of the time, most of the time it’s, looking at people who are in the community and saying these three or four people probably would make good future mods. I’m not going to approach them now, but if we do have some people who do go completely AFK for three, four months, then that’s fine. They’re not coming back and we can look at these people, but yeah, that’s probably the best thing to do. It’s always having your mind like a couple of, depending on your size of community, like we have like eight and a half thousand people in our Discord.

Steve McLeod
Mm-hmm.

Greg Cummings
So I have about, I think I have seven mods now, six, seven mods, something like that. Oh no, I just did the thing, the stupid 67 meme that everyone keeps doing.

Steve McLeod
Hahaha

Greg Cummings
Yeah. I let’s say, let’s scratch that. I have about six mods and yeah. And then in my head, I have like maybe three or four other people who are just part of the community who I think are very level-headed, approachable, and would make good moderators. So that’s typically how do it.

Steve McLeod
And once got mods helping out, so this is in your discord, assume, right? It’s where they mostly are helping.

Greg Cummings
Yeah, in our Discord. Yes.

Steve McLeod
Do you, does it require a lot of ongoing effort from you to manage the mods?

Greg Cummings
Uh, no, not really. I’ve so I have, um, so there’s, there’s moderators who are quite new to doing it, but I also have some very experienced moderators. Uh, like I’ve got, um, like a lot of people compare our game to Subnautica. It’s similar in some regards. Um, so we, I actually have like one of Subnautica’s lead moderators on my team. He’s also a moderator on my server as well. So I know that I can trust these people. Um, yeah. That’s basically it.

Steve McLeod
Thanks for going off onto that tangent about moderators. know it wasn’t something we talked about but I really think it was very interesting for me to hear about this. It’s not something we’ve talked about before on the podcast. Moving on.

Greg Cummings
No, they’re important. They’re definitely important to as a community manager. can, there’s no value that you can put in having a good moderator team.

Steve McLeod
Yeah, definitely. So I want to hear about tips you might have for first time community managers. Somebody who’s just being told, “Hey, we want to hire you as a community manager and you’re starting next week.” What are some of the things you would advise for them to do in the first week or two?

Greg Cummings
Okay. So the first important thing is, I’d probably say is knowing your brand and your audience. You know, marketing, community, it helps you communicate effectively and sort of keeps everything on track. So that’s really, really important.

When it comes to lots of things, it’s understanding, you know, helps talking to players, but also on the marketing side, helps knowing what YouTubers or streamers to reach out to, which are going to sort of be in line with your brand. Because obviously they’re going to then bring community members, sort of, players over into your community. So that’s really important. I would say build trust and create relationships when it comes to your community. Be responsive, approachable, show empathy where you need to.

Steve McLeod
Do you mean this to your players or to the studio team?

Greg Cummings
Sorry. No, this is a, is with the players. Sorry. Yeah. So make sure with your players, you’re building trust. you are approachable, you show empathy. Make sure you show that you listen, showing that you care. It helps you, especially when it comes to, people championing your brand, you know, promoting your company or your game, even when you’re not there, that’s really important. And also when it comes to your next game, they’ll also likely to come along for the ride as well.

Make sure you understand the company goals and align your community efforts alongside of that. So for example, establish what metrics, so views, engagement on content that you might create and make sure that you’re basically trying to follow your KPIs and make sure your metrics are aligned with what the studio wants. Like I say, one important thing is manage your time effectively, which is what I touched upon earlier on.

We wear many hats as a community manager, especially in indie dev. So make sure you leave enough time to both talk to your community every day in some fashion, whether that be on discord, whether that be on a steam forums or social media, but also they make sure you’re leaving enough time to do everything else that you need to do. So that might be, uh, writing a blog post for, for next week or scheduling social media posts or creating content, whatever that might be. That’s really important.

Uh, and then. I guess the only other thing really comes to my mind is just being online and chronically online like I am really does help. Be aware of trends that are happening because sometimes you have to quickly react to trends that are happening. Like the example I gave earlier. ⁓ so, ⁓ yeah, I would say, I would say those are probably the most important things off the top of my head. Yeah.

Steve McLeod
Okay. On the topic of being online chronically, yeah, it’s one of those double edged swords, isn’t it? Yeah. I mean, we’re all online chronically, aren’t we?

Greg Cummings
Ha! Yeah, you’ve got to manage your time effectively, especially when you’re a dad like us. Yeah, I’m always checking Twitter, TikTok, whatever it might be, and making note of any trends that I see so that when I am back at the desk, I’m ready to go. But yeah, you don’t have to be chronically online like me, but just be aware and look out for these kinds of trends that are happening. That’s what I would say.

Steve McLeod
A few years ago when we were doing some usability testing with Feature Upvote, one of the standard questions we would ask the test victims or I don’t think victim is the right word, but the test subject.

Greg Cummings
Hahaha. Let’s go with it.

Steve McLeod
It would be, roughly how many hours per week do you, are you online? And we had to stop asking it because people would actually get miserable. They would laugh, but it was kind of this like sad laugh, hiding pain. they say like, how many hours am I awake?

And just think it’s the reality is we’re all chronically online, even those of us who try to do something about it.

Greg Cummings
And you were making people realize this.

Steve McLeod
Hahahaha!

Greg Cummings
You make them sit there and think about, think about what you’ve done. Think about how long you’ve been scrolling Twitter for.

Steve McLeod
And really the point of the question was just to break the ice, to make them feel comfortable in the situation with a question they could answer easily. So obviously it was doing the opposite thing.

Greg Cummings
We do a similar thing when we’ve done playtesting with players before. One of the questions we do ask early on, for the same reason as you, is to try and break that ice and get them happy and comfortable. It’s, you know, how many hours a week do you spend playing video games? And you do sort of see that from lot of people going, oh, it is upwards of 100 hours. Oh, OK. Maybe I need to do something about that. Yeah. So I know exactly what mean.

Steve McLeod
Ha ha ha! So as somebody working in the industry and with a family, do you get much time to play games yourself?

Greg Cummings
Not as much as I would like. You would think working in video games that you, a lot of people, especially, know, when, when I tell, when you tell sort of, extended family members, what is it you do for a living here again, Greg? They all assume that I just, you know, spend, spend my entire day playing video games.

And unfortunately, my son also thought that too, which I had to educate him on and say, no, if you do what dad does, you will not be playing video games all the time.

Steve McLeod
Hahaha.

Greg Cummings
I would like to spend more time playing games, obviously like anyone. But you, a lot of the times you you’re spending more time playing your game or let’s say your inspirational games but yeah. I, don’t get me wrong, I do get some time but it’s not like it’s not an extra special amount unfortunately.

Steve McLeod
What do mean by inspirational games? Games that inspire the game you’re working on or?

Greg Cummings
Yes, that, exactly that. Yeah. So for example, when we were, when Forever Skies was in development, our three main, our three main inspirational titles were Raft, Green Hell, and also Subnautica. Raft was probably the most important one because it had a very similar game loop to what we were going for. So a lot of the times you would play those games, see what’s working, see what’s not working.

And for me, from a marketing perspective or, from a community manager perspective, I’d play these games to understand what it is that’s working well. So I could know what content to make that’s going to make, for example, on the Raft fans want to come and check out Forever Skies. So yeah, that’s typically what they do. And now people, we obviously working, we are now working on a second project. So I’m not really, I’m focusing mostly on Forever Skies post-launch support at the minute, but.

We have people in the team who are checking out, let’s say, our new inspirational titles right now for our next project, which I can’t talk anything about, unfortunately.

Steve McLeod
Okay, haha. I won’t push you on that then.

Greg Cummings
Hahaha, not yet, not yet. Maybe we could do this in a year or two’s time.

Steve McLeod
Maybe we’ll have you back on the show. Greg, we’re running out of time. We haven’t gone through half the stuff I wanted to, but that’s because we were going off some really interesting tangents.

Greg Cummings
Hahaha, that’s my fault. do that a lot. I do tangents a lot. That’s me, man. Sorry.

Steve McLeod
It makes the podcast easy when you do. Final and most important question. So you said you don’t play games much, but when you are playing games on your own free time, what have you been playing lately?

Greg Cummings
So I’m sort of in the limbo stage, where I just finished. So after it won everything in the Game Awards. I thought, well, I better check out Expedition 33 and see what all the fuss is about. I did that and I devoured it in six days,

Steve McLeod
Wow. Wow.

Greg Cummings
Which kind of goes against everything that I just said about not playing games as much as I would like. Yeah. I, well, it was the Christmas break.

Steve McLeod
And was it as good as they say?

Greg Cummings
It was absolutely incredible. Just as good as they say, it deserves all the awards that it got. And I can’t be sour about it. Like it’s a it’s absolutely phenomenal experience from its writing, from its art direction, to its gameplay, to its story, to its world building. Oh my. Yeah. And so I finished that and I’m doing a bit of like sort of like the extra content.

And I’ve tried to start something new and I just find myself bouncing off a few other things because it’s like that game should come with a warning like anything you play after this is just going to feel subpar by comparison. I mean, I have started actually playing something because I’m a big survival horror fan. And so I have actually started playing an indie horror game called Tormented Souls 2, which is made by a small studio.

Steve McLeod
Tormented Souls 2.

Greg Cummings
Yeah, it’s for people who like classic sort of PS2 era survival horror like Silent Hill, Resident Evil, like Silent Hill actually is very much like Resident Evil 1 remake and Resident Evil 0. It’s very similar to that for people who like those kind of games. So I have that as one thing that has actually stuck. So I’d say that is my answer. It took a long time to get there, but I’d say what I have been playing is Tormented Souls 2.

Steve McLeod
Haha I want to play, the name’s just gone from my mind. The French game you just mentioned.

Greg Cummings
Expedition 33, Clair Obscur: Expedition 33.

Steve McLeod
Thank you. Expedition 33. I had it on the Xbox. think I played like the first 10 minutes of it and thought this looks good. I’m going to put this aside until I have time to dedicate on it. That was like six months ago. I think I need to come back to it. I don’t know where to fit it in though.

Greg Cummings
Yeah. No, it’s, it’s, it’s really difficult, right? There’s just so many great games coming out and I’m not a turn-based guy. I’ve never been a JRPG guy either. Like that’s why I completely overlooked it when it, when it first came out and I heard everybody else gushing about it. I was like, yeah, I might check it out eventually, but I was never that guy. And well, this has certainly made me, it’s certainly opened my eyes to the whole genre.

I start looking back now. I’ve got a whole JRPG catalog that I need to look back through and go, maybe I need to give FFX a go, FFVII original, you know?

Steve McLeod
You’ve got 30 years of gaming history there.

Greg Cummings
Haha, so much to get through, exactly. I have so much to get through.

Steve McLeod
Greg, that’s all we have time for today. So thank you again for being on the show.

Greg Cummings
Thank you. It’s really a pleasure being here.

Steve McLeod
And we can listeners get in touch if they’d like to know more about what we’ve discussed today.

Greg Cummings
Yeah, sure. They can find me on LinkedIn. If you want to talk more professionally, that’s just my name, Greg Cummings. You should be able to find me on there. And if you want to find me on social media, probably the best place is Bluesky right now.

That’s probably where I’m spending most of my time. So that is just at @nowherenearberlin, which is my online, what’s the word I’m looking for, alias name, which is my Discord, my PlayStation, my everything. yeah, ‘Nowhere Near Berlin’.

Steve McLeod
We all have one.

Greg Cummings
We all have one, right?

Steve McLeod
I’ll make sure that both of those LinkedIn and Bluesky are in the show notes. I’m also on Bluesky, so I’m going to go and connect with you after we finish recording.

Greg Cummings
Awesome. Absolutely.

Steve McLeod
Thanks again. Bye, Greg.

Greg Cummings
Thank you. Bye bye.

Steve McLeod
Bye everyone.

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“We raised $50K for charity with a video game” ft. Community Manager Greg Cummins

Transcription