The Golden Rule of Game Promotion: No One Cares About Your Game

In this GDC 2023, talk, the "no one cares about your game" mindset gets explained and shows how this simple marketing philosophy can help teams laser focus their social media posts, keep their trailers to-the-point, write better emails, and shape a wider PR campaign mindset.

Thomas Reisenegger gives a fascinating and actionable overview of how to think about marketing indie games. Some principles are timeless; others are targeted to the current social media landscape.

My favorite insight (and one that has frustrated me when it isn’t followed) is that all your marketing should “work for the newcomers”. It’s important to remember that every post, trailer, etc. you make will be the first time a significant number of people will even hear of your game.

Why NYT’s Connections makes you feel bad

Connections The new daily game at the New York Times is called Connections, and I’ve seen a few people comment that they just don’t like it as much as Wordle or Spelling Bee. That the d…

Raph Koster takes a look at Connections, the new daily puzzle at the New York Times, and delves into the design consideration of puzzles and puzzle games to explain why this one is perhaps less well-received than its predecessors like Wordle.

I found this very interesting, and it pulled into the light a lot of things I had only experienced as instinctive reactions. (Including how I felt about the similar earlier Red Herring.) (Plus I felt a bit vindicated by the fact that one of the things Koster calls out is one of my favorite hobby-horses: the game punishes you for trying to learn.)

Consoles and Competition

Reviewing the history of video games explains why Sony is dominant today, and why Microsoft is actually introducing competition, not limiting it.

Ben Thompson summarizes the history business models of the most prominent game console makers, as background for discussing Microsoft’s ongoing attempt to acquire Activision Blizzard.

As someone who lived through most of this history but spent a lot of it too young to have the perspective to understand it, I found this look fascinating. The shifts in approach play out differently based on interactions with broader market trends in a way that reminds me a lot of competitive players adjusting to a shifting metagame.

See also Super Bunnyhop’s history of game industry buyouts.

Mario but I'm Blindfolded

teamwork! :DJacob: https://www.youtube.com/c/Alpharad♥ The Team ♥Colleen: https://twitter.com/SolarCitrusClaudia: https://twitter.com/HiyFi_DavidBaronArt: ht...

Jaiden makes a lot of fun videos with a recent focus on obscure games or self-imposed challenges. In this one, she plays Super Mario World blindfolded with verbal guidance from a friend.

It’s amusing and entertaining like most of her videos, but it’s also fascinating to see where the difficulty spikes end up being with this approach. It reminds me of Razbuten’s “Gaming For A Non-Gamer” series, revealing surprising things about what makes a game hard if you have different constraints from the typical player.

Sam Barlow's guide to making narrative games

At our recent GI Academy Live event, Sam Barlow of Her Story, Telling Lies and Immortality fame laid out his thoughts o…

Sam Barlow (of Her Story fame) discusses his approach to building stories for narrative-based games. I found it refreshing to see discussion of how the medium affects what’s possible and how to get the most out of it, by incorporating challenge, opportunity for expression, a space to explore, and simulation of a richer reality. (I couldn’t help but look for parallels to my own, far-less-qualified, take on the subject.)

Valve’s Steam Deck makes a brilliant case against walled gardens

Rather than boxing you into its own store, Valve’s portable gaming system lets you install software from anywhere, and it’s glorious.

We can argue all we want about the relative merits of closed versus open systems and so on, but it’s rare that this actually persuades any decision-makers. What they pay attention to is what’s been shown to make money. So it’s exciting that Valve is out here betting pretty big on releasing the Steam Deck as an open system and that they seem to be having success with it so far. If that success continues, then maybe the Nintendo/Sony/Microsoft/Apples of the world will start to take notice.

It’s also an interesting lesson on productization and marketing. All these unusual capabilities of the Steam Deck are really nothing new and have been available on general computers for quite a while. But by presenting the Steam Deck as primarily a Switch-like hybrid games handheld/console with buttons and analog sticks, giving it an approachable works-out-of-the-box setup and configuration, and pricing it affordably, it targets a new audience and is suddenly seen as a direct competitor in what had previously seemed like a different market.

How to handle land value tax in online games and virtual worlds

Lars Doucet and Daniel Cook share a high-level guide for game designers and game economists working in large multiplayer online games and/or virtual worlds.

In one of the frustrating ways art imitates life, games with systems resembling real estate tend to create situations resembling housing crises. In this write-up, Lars Doucet and Dan Cook discuss why this happens (hint: it’s the same reasons it happens in real life) and how to fix it in your game design (hint: it’s the same way we could fix it real life).

The Abridged Videogaming History of Big-Money Buyouts & Mergers

The first 1,000 people to use this link will get a 1 month free trial of Skillshare: https://skl.sh/superbunnyhop01228 00:00 70s02:17 80s05:18 90s08:28 2000'...

Super Bunnyhop contextualizes the recent large-scale game company buyouts by summarizing their history over the several decades the industry has existed and discussing the difference in how they are seen by insiders versus consumers.

Mods Make Games Evergreen | GC Vazquez

I’ve been replaying a lot of Stardew Valley lately. I’m not replaying Stardew Valley for the new content patched in long after I beat the game on release. I’...

I’ve written a few times about mods and cheats claiming that in a single-player game, there is no cheating, only house rules and that mods/cheats and other subversions of developer intent improve the game landscape and that some devs/publishers restrict them not for artistic reasons but as a money grab. Here, GC Vazquez makes a similar argument, but also highlights the ways that mods extend the lifespan of a game, meaning that publishers who clamp down on them in an attempt to sell microtransactions lose out in the long run.

Deleting My Ex's Animal Crossing Save Data

ACNH not only let me grow closer to my ex, but move on from them

A personal and relatable look at how play artifacts can overlap and interact with artifacts of the people in our lives.