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Please go away

It’s now been a bit more than a week since I released Virtue’s Heaven and I haven’t really done much since then. Honestly all I could muster was to re-share the initial announcement post every now then, and since I also haven’t done any real press outreach before the game’s release, the amount of coverage is basically nothing.

There’s a part in my brain that keeps telling me that I should at least try to contact some streamers, or reach out to some press outlets and other people who might cover the game, but to be honest: I don’t even know who I could contact and I’m too tired.

The game’s been doing fine, but numbers wise it’s very much on the lower end of expectations. I’m mostly concerned about the lack of reviews, because of Steam SEO reasons, but also because I think that having more reviews might help people with coming to a decision as to whether or not they’re interested in the game.

I know all the conventional sayings in regards to marketing and releasing your game. Don’t start a week before the game’s out, have a press kit, personalize your emails, always include a key and whatever else might come to mind. One thing that’s definitely true is that you should probably start doing your press outreach before the game is out.

However, something that’s rarely being talked about when you make games mostly on your own is that you are making a game mostly on your own. That means you are your own QA department, your artist, sound designer, composer, producer, programmer, and also PR person. That’s at least five jobs too many for one person to do properly, unless they take infinite time, or destroy themselves in the process.

Sure, while under ideal circumstances you would do a ton of press research and outreach before you release your game, it just wasn’t possible for me.

A few weeks ago, when I was loudly musing about potentially just not doing any pre-release outreach for Virtue’s Heaven, because it felt like too much work for way too little gain (the game rarely got any attention over the years of its development so I wasn’t particularly optimistic that it would suddenly change), I had someone tell me, that I would be doing the game a disservice, if I were to do this.

Now I have to be clear that the person who said this is cool and I’m not mentioning this story to drag them. For me this episode just illustrated something that’s very prevalent in indiegames in general and something I myself have internalised to a degree:

There’s this notion that treating your game *just* as a work of art is not enough. This mostly applies to commercial games, but I’ve also seen a similar sentiment applied to non-commercial titles. Truly caring about your work in indiegames means caring about them as a product.

Sure, if I were to think about Virtue’s Heaven as a product, I’m probably doing it a disservice, because I’m not trying to sell it with as much fervor as I probably could. However, if I would think about Virtue’s Heaven as a product, it wouldn’t be what it is now. It would be something else that might sell marginally better, but would be so much worse.

The fun thing here is that just typing this out causes the awful business worm that seems to live in my head to crawl out of its awful hole and say: “Well, that surely means that you don’t care about people giving you money for your game and you also don’t want people to play it then, right? And if you don’t care about these things, do you truly care about the game then?”

Which then loops back to that whole idea of how not doing PR means that you’re doing your game a disservice. Then it’s back to this constant pressure to post more, to write emails, to find streamers and steam curators and to keep reminding people to write positive reviews, when all you actually want to do is take a nap and think about JRPG battle systems all day.

Of course I would like for more people to know about Virtue’s Heaven and to buy the game, if they can. I’m honestly really happy that so far most of the reactions I’ve seen are very positive. I was honestly shocked how much reaction my announcement post on bluesky got, because it was rarely the case that anyone besides myself gave a shit about this project. It showed me that I wasn’t that wrong with my feeling that there’s something in that game that would interest people.

However, it’s not like I have been working on this game quietly in my room for the past seven years of my life. Pretty much since the beginning I've been talking about it. It’s just that not a lot of people either saw these posts, or cared about them.

There were a handful of people (none of which follow/followed me, just in case someone feels I'm subtweeting them) who reacted to the game coming out in a way that made it sound like they’ve followed most, if not all of its development, who never interacted with any of my previous posts, ever.

So that notion that I haven’t done any marketing for the game just isn’t true. It’s just that the response over the years led me to believe that writing emails to people would be a waste of my time and energy.

I also don’t know what else I can talk about at this point. I said everything there is to say and it’s all out there for people to read.

I have worked on this game since 2018 and I have talked about it since then. Isn’t that enough? Don’t I deserve to just be able to take a nap and do literally anything else?

To anyone who does want to cover Virtue’s Heaven: Me not writing you an email, doesn’t mean I’m not interested in coverage. Just get in touch and you’ll get a key and whatever else you might need. As much as I like to complain about everything and the world, I’m fairly approachable and happy to talk.

But I’m also very tired, so don’t expect me to contact you anytime soon.

Anyone else: Please buy Virtue’s Heaven and if you have it in you, write a positive review on Steam.

To the business worm in my head: Go away, I don’t need you anymore.