Don’t build your castle in other people’s kingdoms – How To Market A Game

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How To Market A Game

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In the past couple of months a couple of big social media sites have changed their terms or introduced suspicious paid plans and it has caught content creators off guard.

For instance, last week Twitch introduced a new “Boost” program where streamers can pay to get more viewers to see their stream.

Read here

Twitch Adds New Boost Stream Feature<br>Twitch Tests Paid Boost Feature

OnlyFans ALMOST banned porn which would have left content creators out of hundreds of thousands of dollars. Only Fans (under heavy pressure) reversed the plan… for now.

Every single year one social network or another pulls a stunt like this. Somehow people are still shocked when it happens.

Don’t be.

It isn’t a matter of if, it is a matter of when. They don’t care about you. You must market your game as if the platform you are using will go away tomorrow and you will lose access to some or most of your followers.

My basic point: DON’T BUILD YOUR CASTLE IN LAND YOU DON’T OWN!

I got the pixelart itch again and have a blog to write so I thought I would combine the two. This week I created a little metaphorical fable about building your castle in other people’s kingdoms. I am using the amazing RPG tileset from Pita Madgwick to do it.

Here goes:

Your game studio is basically your land. You are the king. You can do whatever you want on this plot of land and kick out who you want, charge what you want. Set the rules.

Goal here: You want to grow from this little tiny hamlet to a giant castle. You also want a bunch of people in your kingdom living there (aka playing your games), and paying you taxes (buying your games) and telling you how brilliant of a leader you are (fan mail, fan art) and enjoying the company of your kingdom’s fellow citizens (community engagement).

That is your goal but for now you have no one in your kingdom. Your castle is tiny. But how do you get people to come to your crappy little kingdom?

You look across the sea and you see another country run by another King. They have thousands of people. Everyone is rich. The king is giving away land for anyone to build their castle.

Let’s call it Myspacia

So you cross the sea and build a castle in their land. The King doesn’t even charge you for it. So you decide to spend a whole lot of time building a big beautiful castle. Everyone is there. Thousands of people come into your castle built on their land. Your home Kingdom is neglected but why worry?

Then one day the rain dries up and the land isn’t fertile, and the king doesn’t do anything like invest in irrigation, and the infrastructure sucks.

People move away and that castle that you spent so much time building is empty. Nobody is around to visit. It sucks. Your castle looks awesome but it sits empty not because of anything you did but because the landlord messed up and everyone left.

So you say, no matter. Let’s go over to this kingdom where everyone is setting up.

Let’s call it Facebookia

Again, just like Myspacia once was, it is bustling. It’s just like the good old days.

You start a new castle! Sure you have to start all over but look at all the people! So you build and build and build. Your home Kingdom is still neglected but who cares! Facebookia is awesome!

Then one day. The King of that land puts a giant wall around their kingdom. Even though you helped make his kingdom worth living in, you are not allowed to enter your castle. In fact, the King starts charging you a toll just to enter your own castle to talk to the people who are there! Why oh why did you spend so much time and money on this castle?!?

This happens every single day.

But there are thousands of variations

A hoard of racist barbarians invade and nobody wants to visit your castle anymore because the king turns out to be a total creep and everyone is scared off because he just lets the racists hang out. (See Twitter and Facebook)

The kingdom gets absorbed by another neighboring King that has no idea why people where there in the first place and starts changing the laws and everyone leaves. Example: Tumblr

There are countless tales of this happening. EVERY SINGLE EXTERNAL KINGDOM will do this to you. No matter how “cool” or “hip” they are right now. They will let you down.

So what do you do? How do you possibly fix this? Here are the rules.

Rule #1: Build your castle on land you own

Your kingdom is a platform that you own:

A website on a domain you own<br>Your blog hosted on your site (not on medium or Patreon)<br>A mailing list<br>Your Intellectual Property that you own and can license out<br>Merch that you sell on your site<br>Your own reputation

But wait! Your mailing list is hosted by Mailchimp which is another company, and your website is hosted by GoDaddy or Squarespace? Aren’t they evil kingdoms too?

Not really. They are just hosting platforms that are invisible to your...