The Cyberpunk 2077 Guide to Building Community
The Cyberpunk 2077 Guide to Building Community
push to talk #5 // feat. the biggest comeback story in recent gaming history
This week's issue features an in-depth Q&A with CD PROJEKT RED's Acting Lead for International Community, Carolin Wendt, who has just published an excellent book for new community managers called The Pocket Mentor for Game Community Management.
The best community managers are those who've been through the fire and flames. And Carolin—like the rest of the Cyberpunk 2077 team—has been a part of one of the most remarkable comeback stories in recent gaming history.
Find the Q&A with Carolin below. But first, this week's spiciest industry news.
Scuttlebutt and Slackery
The week’s most-shared, oft-Slacked, and spiciest games industry news links.
The Strange Collapse of The Day Before - Thanks to some investigative reporting from German games media at Game Two and GameStar, we’re finally getting some juicy behind-the-scenes info on the weirdest game studio failure in recent memory: Last December’s launch (and immediate de-listing) of The Day Before by the now-shuttered studio FNTASTIC. Game Two’s 31-minute YouTube documentary is in German, but features English subtitles, and is absolutely worth watching if you want to see how the chaos unfolded. (Game Two on YouTube)
That OTHER Survival-Crafting Game - It’s wild, and extremely heartening, that Keen Games can drop a survival-crafting game the same week as the best-selling survival-crafting game of all time (Palworld) and sell at least a million copies in its launch week. As I write there are over 100k concurrent players of Enshrouded on Steam right now. What can you say? Game looks sick. You love to see it for the Keen Games crew. (Enshrouded on Steam)
On the Layoffs Beat… - This week saw 97 layoffs at Embracer-owned Eidos-Montréal, 61 at Sega of America, and a scattering of smaller layoff rounds at studios including Chief Rebel, Nimble Giant Entertainment, Artificer, and Airship Syndicate—all together the week saw something north of 250 games industry job cuts. Kotaku has a layoff tracker that they’re keeping up to date and seems to be pretty well-sourced. (Kotaku)
Everybody is Playing Infinite Craft - On Wednesday, renegade game designer Neal Agarwal dropped a super addictive “element combining” web game called Infinite Craft. The trailer Agarwal posted on X sells the concept instantly, and has since gone viral, with some players posting pretty outrageous emergent combinations. The game works on mobile but imo is better on a desktop web browser. (Neal.Fun)
The Cyberpunk 2077 Guide to Building Community
One of the hardest challenges any game developer can face is fixing the public perception of a game that launched badly.
Some games pull it off, of course, clawing back their reputations after drawing scathing reviews from players on launch. We can all think of a few sparkling examples, like Final Fantasy XIV, No Man's Sky, or Star Wars Battlefront II.
If you're a gamedev, these comeback stories stick in your mind. Anything is possible, you think.
But these are the exceptions, not the rule. The FFXIV A Realm Reborn update was over a decade ago. Obama was still president when No Man's Sky launched. And for every turnaround tale like these, it's easy to name five counter-examples. Anthem. Radical Heights. The Culling. Evolve. Paragon. Lawbreakers. The list goes on.
Even for truly talented, hard-working dev teams who've made something with real promise, the odds of turning around a botched launch are long.
So it's worth learning from the extremely talented developers behind one of the greatest turnaround stories in recent gaming history. I'm talking, of course, about Cyberpunk 2077.
You already know the story, so I'll keep the summary short:
After years of hype and impossible expectation-building, Cyberpunk 2077 released on December 10, 2020, and chaos ensued. It had bugs—lots of them. On last-gen platforms, the game was pretty much busted. Nine days after the launch, the New York Times issued a report calling Cyberpunk "virtually unplayable." CD PROJEKT RED's stock dropped 41 percent. They got sued by their investors. Sony pulled it from the PlayStation store for six months.
This wasn't just a buggy launch. This was a full-blown boondoggle.
Then came the turnaround. Three years and many updates later, the CD PROJEKT RED team has pulled off something miraculous.
By October 2023, Cyberpunk had become one of the best-selling games of all time, with over 25 million units sold across all platforms. Its paid Phantom Liberty expansion (priced at $29.99) sold 5 million copies in the last few months of 2023. The game has a 93% positive review rating on Steam.
How did the wizards at CD PROJEKT RED pull this off? Others have already explored this story at length: GameSpot's excellent mini-documentary The Redemption of Cyberpunk 2077 answers this question from the dev team's point of view. You can also find plenty of detailed analyses of the changes the devs made—I recommend How Cyberpunk 2077 Did The IMPOSSIBLE by gameranx.
The GameSpot documentary in particular is worth watching, and not simply because it shows a dev team "listening to players," although that's certainly part of it. It shows how a group of people who'd gotten knocked down found a way to get back up, dust themselves off, and fundamentally change how they approached working together.
This is a battle-hardened team that's stronger for the lessons they've learned. So when anyone from the CDPR gang is willing to share their hard-won wisdom, it’s time to sit down and listen up.
Which brings us to Carolin Wendt's new book.
Building Community, the Cyberpunk Way
The German-born Carolin Wendt has OG Euro gamer cred—she first fell in love with games by playing Winter Olympics on her brother's Commodore 64 (for the zoomers in the chat, that’s a 1980s computer that looked like a chunky keyboard).
Wendt cut her teeth on the SNES and Game Boy before eventually graduating to PC games like Portal, Heroes of Might and Magic III, and Civilization 3. After pursuing an education in political science, she decided to pursue a career in gaming. She got her first job in the games industry in 2015 as an intern with Stiftung Digitale Spielekultur, the German government-backed cultural ministry which supports Deutschland’s games industry.
In 2019, Wendt jumped studio-side when she accepted a role at CD PROJECT RED as community manager for Germany, Austria and Switzerland. In the years that followed, she's risen through the ranks to become Acting Community Lead for International Community at CDPR.
I picked up a paperback copy of Wendt's The Pocket Mentor for Game Community Management last weekend, and breezed through its 105 pages in a couple of afternoons. Although the book is aimed at junior game community managers or those considering joining the industry, I found it full of pragmatic, useful advice and clearheaded thinking that even a senior community lead would do well to absorb, if only as a refresher.
Beyond sharing lessons gleaned from her own experience in the book, Wendt took an appropriately community-minded approach by surveying 40 community managers from around the games industry and relaying their ideas and feedback throughout the book. Guest authors including Respawn's Karen K. Lee, Guerrila’s Bo de Vries, Webedia Gaming’s Marylin Marx, and Special Effect’s Paige Harvey contribute breakout chapters with useful advice.
Put simply, it’s the kind of book I wish existed when I was first starting out doing community and comms work at Riot Games a decade ago. After finishing my read-through, I reached out to Carolin to ask more about her experience with CD PROJEKT RED and her thoughts on the role of community in games, and she graciously agreed to an interview.
Find our full Q&A below:
PUSH TO TALK: You've been at CDPR since even before the launch of Cyberpunk 2077. It's a game that stands out for how community sentiment about it dramatically changed and improved over time. What can you tell us about what you learned from your experience?
CAROLIN WENDT: It was a true rollercoaster ride of emotions. I can obviously only speak for myself and my experiences and not for my fellow (fantastic) community team members at CD PROJEKT RED, but Cyberpunk 2077 has been truly formative for me and I doubt it's an experience I'll (be able to) forget. Personally, there are so many things that became clearer and more defined in my head. You know how sometimes there are things you know on an intellectual level, but then something happens to you and you suddenly understand it? That's what happened to my understanding of communities, in numerous ways.
I invested a lot of myself to be close to our community in the lead-up to the release, including numerous events, a cinema tour, personalized gifts for ambassadors and more, and as much as possible, I've tried keeping as close to the community throughout the process, even if it was painful sometimes. That was a delicate balance to strike as a CM.
There were many people that enjoyed the game, and I wanted to be there for them and share their experiences, but at the same time, you had to be mindful about those that weren't happy. Being present every day I could on Discord, on the forums, putting an even larger emphasis on relaying feedback from our community to the developers, making proper use of moderation guidelines, and just showing that I am still there and available for questions—in many ways, it was the "hardcore mode" test for all the processes I (and globally, we) set up before the launch.
For me, the most interesting challenge was to find the right moment to re-engage in the community conversation on a larger scale again. I learned a lot about flexibility and adapting plans, tailoring ideas to new realities—my favorite example is one quite elaborate community project I'd started working on in July or August 2020... and then put on ice until the beginning of 2022. By that time, it was received really well, and taught me very explicitly that patience pays off.
One thing that shouldn't surprise anyone: my strong interest in mental health and its connection to community management doesn't come from nowhere. That was one of those learnings that I got through personal pain and experience connected with this release. We were extremely privileged that there was such a great interest in Cyberpunk 2077 among the community, and also from creators, media and peers in the industry.
When you want to stop working for a while and take care of yourself, that makes it extremely difficult, though, especially because of algorithms on most social media platforms. Whether it was YouTube, Twitter, industry Discords or Facebook groups, or just group chats on WhatsApp—people were discussing it, so I had to develop ways to handle it.
The lessons from that still carry me through my relationship with social media, screen time and engaging with certain topics (and people), and it's definitely something that I had to live through to understand the importance of.
Speaking of mental health, there's a full chapter on mental health and burnout in your book. And in it you gave some advice I found interesting, about separating your personal life from your CM role. For example, not sharing personal news on work channels and not using your real name. I think I know where you're coming from with that—can you talk more about your thinking though?
I was curious about this question too, because I’m actually doing the exact opposite! My name is plastered all over my socials and I share certain personal things there as well. It was a conscious choice I made, and luckily for me, it has not backfired (yet). But I've spoken to many peers over the last years that mentioned that their communities don’t even know their first name. Similar things came up as part of the survey I did for the book, and it was a recurring theme there. I wanted to show in the book that it 's not mandatory to share your face and name with your community, if you need to have the separation between personal and private. Both are viable options.
I’d say the most common reasons were related to privacy and harassment. I can empathize with wanting to be able to use your social media for venting, your own hobbies and interests and not having to “perform,” for lack of a better word. There have been periods over the past couple of years where I just wanted to share a stupid thought, and immediately got DMed asking me work-related questions. I developed a certain discipline of being able to ignore these things outside of work hours, but I also understand that it can take a toll on you to not be able to escape work on socials, especially if you're managing bigger communities, such as in live service or multiplayer games. Having a completely anonymous profile that you can use without someone quoting you on Reddit the next day can be really helpful.
About not sharing personal news on channels connected to work, I am somewhere in the middle. I enjoy sharing certain “private” things with my community on purpose because I want to foster that connection—and many of them have cool insights that I enjoy, for example about books, game recommendations, or other things like this. I will share impressions from holidays too, but with pictures, I am very conscious (maybe too much) of what I’m sharing, because I don’t accidentally want to give away my or friends’ addresses or personal details.
It sounds exaggerated maybe, but before I post certain things, I ask myself if I would be upset if a stranger at Gamescom approached me and talked to me about it. For me, this just helps having certain things that are just for me and a closer circle of people.
In the chapter about mental health, I wanted to capture this duality because I truly believe that everyone should find what works for them— social media can have a super detrimental effect on our mental health if we don’t make sure that we use it consciously, but it can also be extremely enriching. I don’t want newcomers to feel forced to share their whole life with the world "because that’s just what everyone does."
I loved the survey data you gathered for the book—one really interesting takeaway was that 92.5% of surveyed CMs are under age 40. Do you foresee this being something that changes as the industry and the role matures?
Personally, I am torn here. I tend towards a resounding "yes." Community positions are consistently maturing and from what I could observe over the last years both from professional media and conferences as well as peer-to-peer conversations is that the role is being recognized more and more as an integral part of the studio.
However, I’m still torn because this also requires further establishing community as a viable development and career path with options to be promoted within the field. Too often I see someone wanting to stay in community, but having no growth opportunities, so as they age, they grow into other roles in marketing, wider communications, or bizdev. And while all those roles are important and it’s of course not a bad thing to change career course, I wish that the field would "lose" fewer people and their expertise for this reason.
I am trying to be optimistic, though, that we’re on the right path, and that we'll see more and more of a healthy age and experience mix in community management. My dream for the field is to have everyone from career starters to people in their 50s and 60s working in it.
There's an ongoing debate about whether CMs have the ability to meaningfully impact a game's growth. Obviously it's not their main role, but where do you fall on this issue?
As you said, it’s not our main responsibility, but I believe that we can, if we are given the proper tools and influence to do a great job. Data and insights show that long-term support of communities leads to new players through improved word of mouth.
As CMs, we are extremely close to players, both of our own titles and—through keeping tabs on places such as Discord, Reddit, Twitch, etc.—to other companies’ communities as well. That way, we can distill what communities find important across target audiences (and in bigger companies, countries and cultures), follow trends, identify potential sales and reputational risks before a game ships, and provide feedback about features that might not land well (or the opposite).
By creating a community where people feel safe and welcomed to provide actual substantial feedback, CMs can uncover what a studio’s target audience truly values, and if they are empowered to fight for (some of) those features, community members will notice over time that some of this actually finds their way into the game. Word of mouth spreads, they bring friends into the community to try it out themselves, recommend it in comment sections of videos… and so on.
Opposed to the often-imagined viral hit tweet, this is a long-term effort and investment, but one that I believe truly pays off, not only for reputation and awareness, but ultimately also in economic success.
Your book is all about helping out those who are new or new-ish to the industry. Given the state of the industry and the layoffs that are occurring, what advice would you give to someone who asks whether now is a good time to try to pursue a career in game community management?
I've been asked in the last couple of days by several people how to break into games at the beginning of their career, or how to make a jump from another field into ours. Honestly speaking, it's really tough. I love working in games, it has changed and is still changing my life in ways I didn't think possible. And my whole life, I've been allergic to people talking others out of their dreams or telling them not to do something because it's hard or scary. As difficult as getting a job right now proves to be for most people, I won't tell people not to try.
That being said, I do believe in giving people as honest a picture as possible, and I tend to be very direct, too. Usually, I start with the disclaimer that in my opinion, right now is one of the trickiest moments—at least in the last decade—to get a job in community management (or wider comms, for that matter). It feels like the job is becoming consistently more popular in general. Add to that all the extremely talented CMs that have been impacted by layoffs over the last months, often coming from multiple released games, reputable studios and with years of experience, and who you might have to compete with due to the lack of available roles. It's extremely competitive.
And with that disclaimer out of the way, I'll usually recommend a mix of things. Be prepared for rejections, be prepared for not hearing back at all, don't let it get to you or think that it's a reflection on your suitability for the role. Try working on as many skills as possible on the side while you can, to be ready for the right job when the listing comes along.
I've actually gone into detail about this in the book as well, because I'm convinced that you can work on many of the required skills before even being on the job, which should then improve your chances of getting hired. Connect with people already in the field, volunteer to be a moderator for studios, reach out to smaller indie teams for games you love and check if they need help—the big names get a lot of attention from job seekers, thus making it way harder to land a role. But small teams are increasingly looking for CMs too, and your proactivity might be what sets you apart. If a company rejects you, work on your portfolio and CV and try again.
If that very painful avalanche of warnings and questions cannot discourage you from wanting to be a CM, I truly believe you should try. But I genuinely think that people deserve the full picture of what to expect to make an informed decision.
What are your hopes for your career in the future? In particular, is there something you'd love to do in games one day, that you haven't had a chance to yet?
There are so many things I'm curious to experiment with or get better with! That's one of the most exciting things for me: you get to constantly connect with new people and adapt to new platforms or trends.
One thing I am getting more into—quite late to this particular party because it honestly made me very nervous—is on-camera work. I really love what several CMs across different companies are doing in the field of video content, and we have recently launched a German video podcast for our community, so I get to play around there and develop new skills.
Another thing I genuinely love is working closely with developers on the content side, and a global project I was working on from 2022–2023 gave me a brilliant taste of it, so I cannot wait to explore more of that.
One day I'd love to create projects that blur the lines between gaming communities and other entertainment & art communities. I think there's still a lot of potential for including more people into our communities that just don't know yet that they like games—and I would absolutely love to be a part of that development.
One other thing that may sound weird, but I never had the opportunity to build a community completely from scratch. Of course, it's been an absolute privilege to have your first IPs to work on be The Witcher and Cyberpunk 2077, and I got to create new social channels and expand our community—but I'm really excited to one day be part of building up a completely fresh community for a new IP.
When it comes to hopes for the future, we are actually coming full circle: at least at this moment in time, I hope that I'll get to work in the community sphere until I'm ready to retire. As we briefly touched on, this is still extremely rare, but that makes the challenge all the more exciting.
That’s all we’ve got today, dear readers. Forward this issue to your friends and coworkers to unlock tier 27 of the Push to Talk battlepass, which unfortunately grants you absolutely nothing except my appreciation.
See you next Friday.