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Despite my best intentions...

It’s now been two weeks since GB Rober’s Steam Page went live (please wishlist it!). So far, it has been good? It’s hard to tell, really. The numbers look a lot like Splinter Zone’s, but considering that Splinter Zone’s page went live about three weeks before its release, I feel like GB Rober might be doing much better. It certainly feels like it, considering the reach some of my tweets have gotten. Honestly, I don’t think that I could’ve done that much better, considering my resources, so everything should be good?

I mean, yes, but also not quite. It’s still rough and even more exhausting. Despite my attempts to go into this without much expectations, I still end up feeling like the numbers should be higher, that somehow I’m not doing enough, despite really doing my best.

It all feels a lot like way back when I was doing Youtube videos. I have a tight schedule, I’m constantly producing “content” (gifs, trailers, tweets), trying to find the ways to maybe skew the algorithm a tiny bit in my favour and overall feeling like I cannot take a break ever, because then whatever interest I generated will just vanish and I would have to start all over again.

This all gets much worse, when you do end up making the mistake and try to look up advice and reporting on what else you could be doing, because most places that offer this kind of stuff are much more busy with shouting at you what you haven’t been doing.

And so, even with my best intentions and plans, I end up feeling like I’m not doing enough. That I could push GB Rober in front of more people, if I would just work harder.

I talked about this before, but it’s really fascinating how little advice for game developers takes things like time, or the size of your team into account. They just assume that both are abundantly available and tell you to fill all of it up with ways to increase all of your numbers.

It suggests, again, that there’s one solution that works for everyone who wants to earn money with games and that really the only thing holding you back is yourself and your lack of effort. They may occasionally state otherwise in their pieces, but then they immediately turn around in the next paragraph and tell you about this new thing that developers have doing that really pushed their wishlists up and how you too can be the wishlist god, if you did the same and also signed up to their own mailing list and maybe buy whatever other service it is that they’re selling.

A lot of “marketing advice” (it’s not really about marketing and more being overly obsessed with numbers) for game developers is basically like selling Snake Oil. But instead of getting something that cures you of every possible ailment, it’s about curing your own economic anxieties. It’s okay to be anxious when you release a commercial game. It’s risky, even under the best circumstances, so I don’t blame anyone for buying into this grift, in the hopes that it might help them (and it might actually be helpful to some!), but where I start to take issues with, is when selling this grift involves increasing these feelings of inadequateness, instead of helping people find their own approach.

Videogames is already very often a shitty place to be in. I would really like it if folks wouldn’t make it even more shitty, by always trying to exploit the anxieties of those that are stuck to its margins. All this stuff about how your marketing is definitely not good enough and will doom your game to failure inevitably feeds people into the shitty publisher industry that has been growing over the past few years. After all, what better way to ease the pressure of having to market your game, when you can let someone else do it, as long as you hand them over 50% or more of your earnings?

Anyway, GB Rober’s doing fine. I’ll probably still end up getting welfare for the foreseeable future, but I’m really happy with how it’s going and how people are reacting to it. I’d still like it, if you could go and wishlist it on steam though. That would be really cool!