PROMOTION

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Some More Interesting Numbers (Among Us)

4 years ago - Edited 4 years ago1,605 words

Have you ever heard of a game called Among Us? Probably not. It's really obscure. I mean, it only has 104,597 reviews on Steam. I feel sorry for the developers, honestly.



It's not the sort of game I'm interested in myself, but I - like probably everyone and their dog at this point - have at least seen some of the gameplay, and how streamers and youtubers seem to absolutely love it. I'm mentioning it because I looked up ∞ the game's Wikipedia page ∞ a few days ago, as I was curious about the development, how many people worked on it, etc. I found this interesting:



Being bad at marketing is more common than not for indie developers, from what I've seen! Interesting that it exploded so long after the original release, but I suppose it's not like it was dormant during that period:



I'm surprised that it turned out that way. I've read about other devs continuing to support their games long after release but just seeing the userbase - which was almost entirely formed at release - dwindling over time.

Its popularity came from it being played by Twitch streamers and youtubers; we already know they're crucial for games to succeed these days. Makes me concerned about Atonal Dreams, since that's not exactly streamer-friendly, but I've also been privately working on a couple of different ideas with "how would a youtuber/streamer play this?" driving the whole concept. I'm also considering replayability and the "just jump in and play" approach; I wouldn't be able to keep updating Atonal Dreams for months after release since it's a linear narrative and that wouldn't make any sense for it.

I had a look at ∞ the developers' website ∞. Three games are mentioned on their main page: Something that looks like a fairly mediocre mobile game with only a handful of meh reviews on the play stores, Among Us (listed at the bottom for some odd reason), and something called The Henry Stickmin Collection, which I vaguely remember passively seeing but never playing from the old Flash days. It seemed like one of those products of the Newgrounds culture and general art style which seemed so popular back then, and it's interesting seeing that an old Flash creator has gone on to make something that's gripped the world... at least for the moment, though are people playing Fall Guys anymore? That exploded similarly, but seems to have faded just as quickly. Fifteen minutes of fame and all that.

(I was going to mention Fall Guys too, but I haven't got much to say, really. Seems it was made by a bigger, more professional team with a bunch of games under their belt, though, so it's an entirely different animal to this self-published indie game.)

The Henry Stickmin Collection received an update/revamp/remake/addition-to/conclusion/whatever, which seems to be common for these old popular Flash things, and which people obviously wanted me to do with MARDEK. On ∞ his Newgrounds page ∞ (wow, haven't been to that site in a while), the guy who's presumably the main developer mentions that he spent three years on the collection. Seems it was released more recently than Among Us, too; less than 2 months ago? It's currently at 9,078 (Overwhelmingly Positive) reviews on Steam, and I wonder how much of that is due to nostalgic fondness, and how much is due to the ludicrous popularity of Among Us.

The dev's ∞ About page ∞ lists three developers; the main guy in the middle, and two what-seem-like-hirelings? Or maybe they were friends who decided to join up together; I always wonder how these little dev teams form. Whether there's just one ideas person who's already on a path but needs help reaching its end, or whether groups of people come together and form the ideas collectively without any singular mind being the primary creator. It's a tiny team though, and I wonder if they're millionaires now!



I've been very aware of my Twitter follower count recently, for the first time ever. I only have 556, which is more than the average non-creator, but very low for someone who's hoping to make a living from the things I put out into the world. I use something called Tweetdeck to check Twitter, which allows you to add columns for things like specific users or tags, and I've got one for the tag #indiedev, which gets new tweets added to it several times a minute. I try to check most of the accounts of indie devs that I see, and while there are a bunch with fewer than 100 followers, it seems quite common for them to have something like 2000-4000. I'd be interested in collecting a list of them and their follower counts and checking the distribution, though; I wonder whether the lower ones or the higher ones are the outliers. I might do that when I've got some time.

I've been wondering about the correlation between follower count and game success, though. I can't find any right this second, but I remember seeing a few developers with thousands of followers, but when I checked their linked-to games, I only saw a handful of reviews, if that. I suppose follower count shows your popularity on Twitter and not much else... though it can't hurt? I'll need to look into how to increase mine, anyway. Engagement with the platform is surely the biggest way people get noticed, and I've only just started following people and using tags despite having ∞ my account ∞ since 2015. I know there must be a ton of variably-useful guides out there, so I'll look into them when I devote myself to promotion research, which I'll do soon.

(Notably, the three Among Us devs have 30.1K, 13.8K, and 3,255 followers!)



One final thing that I wanted to mention is that I've been watching a bunch of Pokemon challenge playthrough videos recently. I started with a couple that seemed mildly interesting - "Can I beat Pokemon Red With A Magikarp?", that kind of thing - and the algorithm keeps suggesting them, so I watched a few more thinking maybe I could get some ideas about gameplay balancing or something since my mind's been on that recently for Atonal Dreams. There are interesting moments, but mostly they just drag on and I spend a lot of time wondering why I'm wasting my limited time doing something like that when I could be doing so many other better things with it.

They get a ton of views though, perhaps from similarly depressed people having them shoved in their face and watching due to a bland blend of insipid familiarity, nostalgia, and curiosity.

I'm mentioning this because I recently saw one (which was quite interesting in concept actually, since it covered a romhack and I've never played those but am curious about how people have tweaked the games to better suit their liking; seems valuable to know as someone who's attempting to make my own) which got almost a million views:



His videos routinely get high view counts, so I was really surprised to see at the beginning that he mentioned that someone had become his very first patron on Patreon. The video's from February, so I assumed he'd just set it up, and that if I checked it, I'd see he was earning thousands a month for making videos of him playing Pokemon games. "Easy for some!", I thought, and checked... but currently he only has 7 patrons giving $33 a month! (I'm sure it was 6 when I last checked though, for considerably less, so maybe one new person joined the weirdly high $25 a month tier since I last checked?)

So even if you get a ton of attention on one platform, that doesn't mean it'll translate to money for you (though the videos themselves must pay out a ton, come to think of it). There are so many other factors than just viewer or subscriber count. Seemed worth making a note of!

The more I see from other creators' Patreon accounts (and I check every one I see these days; I'm absolutely not anxious about it anymore), the more grateful I am that ∞ 58 people have enough faith in me to be collectively donating $309 a month to help me bring my ideas to life ∞!



I'll need to devote myself to researching promotion stuff sooner rather than later, but I'll likely write about that on the weekend!

I'll also post about testing, which I'm hoping I can do soon; it'd probably make sense to allow my patrons to take part in that.