Where I announce my long-awaited retirement from social media

I just want to take a nap.

I had a bit of a melt-down yesterday and because I actually like talking about what I'm doing and I don't want to keep reducing other people to number generators, I made the decision that I'm going to stop posting and existing on social media, which right now means blsky, but will also extend into any other forms it might take. The one exception is my mastodon account, but that one is private.

If you're interested in keeping up with my work, here's where you can do that:


If we've interacted more often on the internet, feel free to send me an email (it's hidden, because I've gotten too many bogus-steam key requests, but you can find it here), if you feel like sharing discord information or whatever. Though I've never been a particularly active instant messaging app user even going back to the ICQ days, so please be aware of that.

With all that out of the way, I'm now going to talk at length about how I came to this decision. This is going to be messy and personal and I will probably sound like an Ass (which is one of the reasons why I'm disengaging from it all). So be advised.


About a week ago, I published the Steam page of what I'm hoping is going to be my next commercial videogame. I've been trying my best beforehand to not continuously post about it on blsky, because I didn't want to fall into a trap where, instead of actually making the game, you're just performing the act of making a videogame to an audience, without actually making anything.

This was one of the many problems I ran into with Virtue's Heaven and I'm really trying to do things differently this time.

Anyway, so I announced the game and the reactions were for the most part like usual. Folks shared the announcement around, some even said very nice things about it, but the interest very quickly fell off the cliff. I found it really funny how, within a few hours of me posting my announcement blog post, that ends with "Videogames deserves Eswahr Eternal, because people within it spend days debating the virtues of adding yellow paint to environmental objects", another yellow paint debate had started.

There were also debates about how Nintendo made Link wet or something and here I sat with my little game that I thought was cool and no one seemed to care.

Then a few days later, I wrote a ranty blogpost about the very strange connections between gambling-adjacent systems and indiegames. A post where I forced myself to just air my frustrations, instead of trying to properly build out an argument, and I even added a fucking disclaimer, that it's not the most well-researched piece you're going to read.

And what do I stumble into a day later? Someone with about 20 times my reach subtweeting me, because I dared to put out something messy. Obviously the problem with subtweets is that you can't quite tell if you're meant or not, but that particular thread was published within about two hours of my blog.

That person doesn't follow me, but apparently reads my blog, which I guess counts as something?

Anyway, this strange moment, in combination with some other lingering frustrations of mine then caused me to completely lose it over the weekend and it has mostly to do with how I feel my work is being treated by those parts of "Indiegames" that's aware of it.

Broadly speaking I feel that whatever interest in me might exist from these people has mostly to do with my opinions and much less to do with my actual work.

This goes back almost ten years ago, when I published a rant about a group of business-minded indie developers who did something I found rather revolting. I never interacted with any of them, didn't mention them in my post, or when I shared it around, but somehow within a few hours I had Jeff Vogel in my mentions lecturing me about professionalism and the developer of Skate Bird started to interact with random posts of mine.

Then, especially from the Cohost days onward, where I started to write more blogs, I had a strangely high proportion of rather well-known people from within Indiegames follow me.

There was another wave of this after my talk in July and when I shared the transcript of it.

For a while now I had this lingering frustration that it's much easier for a blogpost of mine to get shared around and find people, but for some reason, each time I'm trying to talk about one of my games it's met with almost nothing. That subtweet I mentioned earlier started with "Game Developers should". It's funny how I'm "Game Developers" when I'm posting a rant, but when it comes to the actual games I'm developing, it feels like I'm a nuisance.

I had a great time in Glasgow and giving the talk was fun. Yet, I'm starting to resent it as well. Did you know that in the years prior, I tried to submit Virtue's Heaven to the same event and it was rejected each time? Obviously this can have myriad of reasons, but it is interesting again, how my actual work is not considered as being worthy of display, but my opinions about the work of others is?

After my talk, I had a lot of very nice reactions, and for some reason I expected that the same people who liked the talk would also be interested in a game that actually tries to do the things I've been talking about?

And some are! But relatively speaking, it seems that the closer to a "professional" indiedev a person is, the more likely it is that they care more about my opinions than about my actual work, if they care at all.

This is probably wrong and I'm very likely being very irrational here. Yet, this is what social media feels like to me. I don't like how it turns people I interacted with in person into abstract number boosters. I don't like how it turns me into the worst version of myself.

Have you watched the trailer for Eswahr Eternal? I haven't done much work on the game this past week, so when I sat down to make a shorter version of it to post on blsky, I was just reminded how well it catches the game's tone and I was so happy about it all.

I then posted said trailer on blsky and it took me having a public meltdown for people to actually share it around.

I don't want this. This isn't fun and it never was.

Maybe as a parting word, because apparently this blog is read by people with at least some degree of authority in this space:

If you actually want things to improve in that swamp of yours, care about the work of smaller developers, especially if it appears to be "less professional". "Caring" means to actually engage with the works on their own terms and supporting the people who make them. Sharing the occasional blogpost while adding "oh this is so important!" is not caring. That's hijacking someone else's' work for social media points.

I'm going to do my best to stay away from social media. Habits die hard, but usually when I say "I'm done with this" I am actually done with it. So don't expect me to engage much. I'm basically going to treat blsky like I treated twitter in 2023: I'll occasionally post links there, but nothing else.

In the meantime: I want you to open up Eswahr Eternal's Steampage and stare at it for at least ten minutes. Maybe it will do something to you.


Then, watch this trailer for at least an hour: