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Social Media Hell Month (Part 1)

This is another blog post documenting our learning and attempts to market Fatemender.

Marketing beats! They're important!

But you only have so many, unless you're able to manufacture a few more:

General practice seems to show that these moments are the best ones to capitalize on for a marketing beat because it's when you have something worth sharing. You can work to get more of these by adding more to your game (announcements about language or platform support) or teaming up with others (getting into showcases and festivals, going to events, etc.).

Those are your big marketing beats. But you should still be doing things between beats. Devs are encouraged to post on Reddit, reach out to streamers, send out newsletters, and other things to make sure people don't forget about you and help spread awareness.

And then there's social media.

image (1) (Image from one of Chris Zukowski's older blog posts from How To Market A Game)

Social Media Hell Month

We've been generally trying to follow the Chris Zukowski marketing playbook for Fatemender. Largely because game marketing was completely new to us last year and Chris has a huge backlog of content and data. His own research shows that platforms like Twitter and BlueSky aren't great for finding your audience. Especially if you aren't going to pay to promote ads on those platforms. But he does have one suggestion for social media and that's Social Media Hell Month. It's where you post to your social channels once a day for 30 days and see what happens.

This gives your game a chance of going viral. Of hitting an algorithm the right way on the right day to get a bunch of views. And it's a way to do a general temperature check on your game and how it's recieved. Now he does warn that social media works for specific types of games. Mostly cute cozy games, funny games, scary games, or graphically beautiful games. Games that can show themselves off in a 5 second video or screenshot. That's... not us. Fatemender is a strategic, thinky game that gets most of it's fun from it's systems and gameplay. The stuff that's hardest to show quickly.

But! Chris suggests doing Hell Month so that you have a clear start and end dates and that if you don't like posting and you're not getting any return from posting you can just stop and never do it again! You're free!

So we are giving it a shot and this blog post is about summing up how that went.

Start date: Fatemender demo launch

bs-demo-release

We released the Fatemender demo on July 13th. A pretty big marketing beat on it's own but we didn't want to go too hard on it too fast. Hoping for a few early players to test things out, kick the tires and make sure there were no showstopper bugs. But we did want to start posting to both build up a backlog of videos on our accounts so they don't look sad and empty and also hopefully learn more about how each platform works.

I also had a plan for collecting data on all our posts and hoping to learn something from that. Which makes me feel like a desperate company chasing KPIs but this has mostly been an exercise of curiosity. Or well curiosity and a huge amount of work from both of us just to execute. So yeah, you better deliver something, you stats!

hell-month-butterfly

Week 1

We had started putting videos together a month before we started posting. Sophie went hard on these video, capturing new recordings, writing scripts, piecing everything together with music. This feels like a lot more work than other people do for their TikToks but we're going all in.

I had created our accounts in advance and had a few followers of people we knew on the platforms. But overall I would say that we started from basically empty accounts.

It was said that TikTok will give a lot of visibility to your first few videos because they want you to get that dopamine hit to stick around and keep using the app. This is possibly still true but with much lower numbers. Our first TikTok got over 600 views in 24 hours, which if it was any other platform I would have thought was good but given the rumours I had been hoping for a few thousand on the first. After that things dropped.

Here are the numbers for week 1:

hell-month-w1

My strategy for posting was to post every day but not within the same 24 hours. There are so many rumours and shared strategies over what works bests on these platforms but it's different for each and probably changes regularly, and honestly, my thought is that it doesn't really matter.

My approach was to start a 25 hour timer after putting our posts up so that I would remember to post the next day but not too soon. This ran into some problems quickly when my posting time shifted to after my bedtime. I was not willing to stay up late to post to socials so I would miss a day of posting trying to stay to the 25 hour turnaround.

Thoughts on week 1

Already at this point in the process I'm kind of like... this is nothing. I hate these apps so when I would open to post I would barely look at anything other than the post button, get it over with and move on.

For the first 2 days it felt like maybe every additional video would maybe do better than the previous video, but then day 3 on YouTube got 5... so the hope for an easy path of "post more get more" was instantly gone. Seemed like you could easily stumble into a dud. TikTok now felt extremely generous with their 600 views on day 1.

But it was just week one, we're just gathering information right now. Into week 2.

Week 2

Week 2 progressed about the same as week 1. We still have a backlog of videos but we also started producing more so that we have new content every day.

hell-month-w2

By this time the TikTok algorythm had identified me as a new user who wanted to get more views on their posts. So my own feed was videos about how to get views. How to game the TikTok system. How to use the Creator Insight Tools. And yes I watched some and tried some stuff. But now my feed only shows me engagement farming videos and I don't want to interact with those. I want to interact with other video games or art or puzzle content. Really, kind of felt like a mistake to be pulled into The Feed.

In week 2 we also introduced my face. It has been said across multiple platforms that having a human face talking at the camera does better. So we did many intro takes and Sophie started to add them to the start of the videos before the art content. This seemed very promising on TikTok the first day we did it! But that also basically instantly dropped off.

Also had my first major tech issue in week 2. One of the videos just refused to upload to YouTube. Tried over a few hours, gave up and lost a day, then was finally able to post said video a few days later without a problem and no changes on my end. That's modern software for you.

This week ended up being more art than gameplay but it didn't seem to make much of a difference on views.

Thoughts on week 2

Week 2 felt pretty much like the same as week 1 except I could see the end of our prepared videos and so we were rushing to make more as we went. Stressful.

Also learned that I kind of suck at voice over. I don't mind hearing my voice or seeing my face but I'm really bad at reading and sticking to a script. So we could only record a few a day because it would take so long for me to get a take where I could say all the words properly :|

Overall week 2 felt close enough to week 1 view-wise I'm hesitant to draw any conclusions. All these numbers are baby numbers.

Followers after 2 weeks

That's it for now

We had initially hoped to post every day for 30 days in a row but this started to feel un-feasible really quickly. A lot of the devs who are able to pull this off have more open world games with lots of options for different kind of content. Our simplest content is art, that can just be a few seconds long, but it's not the game. No 7 second clip is going to make Fatemender comprehensible. We did longer, more detailed videos because our game generally does better with people who like the details.

While we couldn't keep up the pace we are going to keep posting and I do plan to do a part 2 once we hit 4 "weeks" of posts. Whenever that is.

We're now mixing it up a little bit. Trying to get away with more contained things that are shorter and flashier. We'll see if that moves the needle at all. But so far my conclusion is that these platforms aren't great for Fatemender. The central promise of the platforms: short bursts on addictive (dopamine driven) content, just doesn't fit with what Fatemender is. I was hoping we could reach audiences more interested in slower content as I'm sure they do exist on these platforms somewhere, but I suspect it would take a lot of extra research, posting, engaging, and time to get there. And that cost doesn't feel worth it when I still have a lot of art left to do to even finish the game.

If you're interested in seeing any of the content the same videos are posted to all 3 so choose your platform of preference:

#fatemender #marketing #studio wtchcrft #video games