When V Rising hit 150,000 concurrent players on Steam, Jeremy Fielding had one thought: we have to do something immediately.
Jeremy is the Community Manager and Narrative Coordinator at Stunlock Studios, the Swedish developer behind the vampire survival hit V Rising. On a recent episode of Player Driven, he joined Feature Upvote founder Steve McLeod to unpack what really happens when a game blows past every internal projection — and how a small community team can scale without losing the thing that made players fall in love with you in the first place.
The launch nobody predicted
Stunlock's optimistic internal forecast for V Rising's Early Access launch was somewhere between 30,000 and 50,000 concurrent players. They got 40,000 on day one — and kept climbing. The team had a cake. They also had no infrastructure for what came next.
With just three people covering community and marketing, art department employees started monitoring servers. Engineers were on standby for hotfixes. Jeremy was flying out to Sweden, working 60-hour weeks in near-endless summer daylight. "An experience I would not trade for the world," he says — but he doesn't recommend being unprepared for it.
The lesson: wish lists tell you something, but they don't tell you everything. Build your feedback and community systems before you think you need them.
Feedback at scale isn't a reading problem — it's a systems problem
One of the most common misconceptions Jeremy encounters is that managing player feedback is roughly equivalent to spending an hour scrolling Reddit. It isn't. At 150,000 concurrent players, you are drowning in signal — and most of it is noise without the right infrastructure to filter it.
Stunlock started using Feature Upvote to collect and rank player suggestions and bug reports, including for private beta testing where they needed a feedback channel that was accessible to testers but hidden from the general player base. The solution — a password-protected board with a randomized URL — is simple. The thinking behind it matters more: you want tools that fit your actual workflow, not tools that promise to slot in seamlessly and then don't.
"A lot of people try to sell you tools telling you it will be no work on your end," Jeremy says. "They never actually understand your product."
The right tool isn't the one with the best sales pitch. It's the one your team will actually use consistently.
Community managers are game developers
Before the feedback conversation got underway, Jeremy made a point worth sitting with: community managers are, unambiguously, game developers. They interpret player sentiment and bring it back to designers. They contribute to creative decisions. They help shape what gets built and what gets cut.
"You participate in the development process, whether it's helping interpret feedback or just talking with people," Jeremy says. "Designers will tell you — yeah, the community manager is a dev."
This framing matters for how community and player support professionals see their own work. It also matters for how studios structure their teams. If community is downstream of development, feedback arrives too late to be useful. If it's integrated, it shapes the thing you're building.
Why honesty is less work than the alternative
Jeremy's approach to player communication comes down to a simple operating principle: just be honest. Not as a strategy. As the path of least resistance.
He described a moment when a player quoted something he'd said in an interview back to him. He didn't remember saying it — which, he realized, was actually a good sign. "It means I'm not actively keeping track of what I say, because I'm just saying stuff I know is true. If you're honest, you don't have to stress about cleaning up lies. It's way less work."
This extends to how the studio handles things that go wrong. When a partner makes a mistake that reflects badly on Stunlock, the instinct to throw them under the bus is tempting but counterproductive. The frame Jeremy uses instead: it's all of us against the problem, not any of us against each other. Players respond to that posture because it's the same one they want to adopt.
What players actually listen to (hint: it's not your announcements)
At scale, studio announcements don't work. Players don't read them. What they do is listen to each other.
This is the insight that shifts community from a communication function to a competitive advantage. If you consistently tell players what you're going to do and then actually do it — and if what you're doing reflects what they've been asking for — you build a group of people who will advocate for you in spaces you can't reach. Not because you've manufactured them. Because you've given them accurate information and they genuinely want the game to succeed.
"You don't have to be the person defending your studio in every forum thread," Jeremy says. "You have people doing that for you."
That doesn't happen through volume of communication. It happens through credibility built over time, one honest interaction at a time. And in a gaming climate where players are increasingly fatigued by studios that don't follow through, that credibility is genuinely scarce.
The rise of the mid-size studio — and why it matters for community
Jeremy made an observation near the end of the conversation that deserves more attention: triple-A studios are often too large to actually listen. When you're at 50 to 100 people, you can still build systems that keep you present, responsive, and human. That's the double-A sweet spot — and V Rising's growth is partly evidence that players are hungry for it.
"Your reputation right now is everything," Jeremy says. "So many players are suffering from fatigue — feeling like they're not being listened to, like they're being abandoned. What's working is genuinely making good things and communicating with your audience about what makes those things good."
The competitive advantage isn't a proprietary feedback tool or a bigger community team. It's the decision, made at the leadership level and lived out at every touchpoint, to be the studio that tells the truth.
Jeremy Fielding is Community Manager and Narrative Coordinator at Stunlock Studios. V Rising is available on Steam at playvrising.com. Steve McLeod is the founder of Feature Upvote (featureupvote.com), a platform for managing player feedback and feature suggestions.
