How Sinn Studio Is Building ZOMBONK With Its Players, Not Just for Them
For Mrigakshi Sharma, Marketing Director at Sinn Studio, understanding players means spending time where the community actually lives.
She works closely with Sinn Studio’s developers, creators, community team, and players across Discord, social channels, in-game feedback, and the game itself. That connection matters especially for ZOMBONK, the studio’s free-to-play social multiplayer title, where community plays a major role in shaping the experience.
“With a social multiplayer game like ZOMBONK, community isn’t really separate from the product.”
From 50 playtesters to a thriving community
Mrigakshi has been involved with ZOMBONK since its prototype days, when fewer than 50 playtesters shared feedback in a private Discord server. Watching that early group grow helped shape Sinn Studio’s approach to community from the beginning.
Today, ZOMBONK has more than 500,000 installs, over 150,000 active players, and more than 40,000 Discord members. The community also extends into creator content across YouTube and TikTok.
The game’s cooperative nature has created a culture of camaraderie alongside all the competition and chaos. Players help newcomers, share discoveries, make content together, and often flag issues that need the team’s attention.
Some of ZOMBONK’s best moments also spread far beyond the match where they started. An in-game interaction can become a Discord conversation, a creator video, or an inside joke that travels through the community.
That sense of participation is something Sinn Studio has worked to preserve as the audience has grown.
Community gives a game staying power
Mrigakshi sums up her philosophy simply:
“Community is the difference between a launch and a lifecycle.”
Updates, content, and marketing can bring people into a game. Long-term energy often comes from the players who keep creating reasons to return.
For ZOMBONK, that includes Discord regulars, creators, friendships, rivalries, voice-chat moments, and the stories players build together.
A healthy community also gives the studio an ongoing source of feedback. That requires listening closely, recognizing patterns, and responding when something matters.
Mrigakshi looks beyond community size or Discord activity when thinking about what makes a community successful.
“A great community develops a culture of its own.”
Players begin welcoming newcomers, creating traditions, building friendships, and taking some ownership over the environment they share. The studio supports that culture by staying present, setting clear boundaries, recognizing positive contributors, and giving players room to participate.
One moment made that especially clear for the ZOMBONK team.
After the game went live and a new wave of players arrived, some of the earliest community members immediately began helping newcomers and providing context to moderators. They had become community veterans almost organically.
For Mrigakshi, it showed how much players cared about the space they had helped create.
Trust at the center
That experience connects to the biggest lesson Mrigakshi has learned from community building:
“Trust is the most valuable thing you build with a community, and also the easiest thing to lose.”
Players want to know that someone is listening and that their feedback reaches the people making decisions.
As communities grow, listening becomes more complex. Teams have to look across channels, player behavior, and recurring patterns instead of reacting only to the loudest voices. They also need moderation systems that can keep pace with growth. Live voice made that challenge particularly important for ZOMBONK.
Voice conversations happen quickly, disappear quickly, and depend heavily on context. Tone, repetition, and who is targeting whom can completely change the meaning of an interaction. Human moderators also have limited visibility when thousands of players are communicating at once.
Earlier in ZOMBONK’s growth, the team relied heavily on manual player reports, moderators, and information shared through Discord. Reports helped, but they could leave important gaps around what had actually happened.
Bringing more context to voice moderation
As voice became a larger part of the player experience, Sinn Studio began using VoicePatrol to give its moderation team better visibility.
Moderators can now review voice logs, understand incidents with more context, identify repeat behavior, and respond more quickly when something requires attention.
That visibility supports the kind of experience Sinn Studio wants ZOMBONK to have: social, spontaneous, competitive, and a little chaotic.
“The goal is to give players freedom to be themselves while having a way to step in when behaviour genuinely crosses the line.”
For studios thinking about voice moderation, Mrigakshi’s advice is equally straightforward:
“Build it in before you think you need it.”
Having the right systems earlier gives moderation teams more context when the player base grows and communication becomes harder to manage at scale.
Building a community worth returning to
Sinn Studio is now working on more community-focused features for ZOMBONK, with plans to give players additional ways to interact, experiment, contribute, and stay connected beyond the core gameplay.
Mrigakshi’s advice for anyone building an online gaming community captures the philosophy behind ZOMBONK’s growth:
“Don’t optimize for the biggest community. Optimize for one people actually want to come back to.”
Know your early regulars. Set the culture early. Listen carefully. Prepare for growth before it arrives.
For ZOMBONK, those principles have helped a small group of playtesters grow into a community with its own stories, habits, relationships, and identity.
