Info

This post was originally intended for a Patreon audience.

marketing and social media

I want more people to play my games, chat in my Twitch streams, and support me financially so I can eventually make games full time, but how do I do that? Income on Patreon has only shrunk in size since I launched it and I’m very bad at posting interesting things regularly (sorry about that).

Over the last year, I decided to tackle this problem by investing more energy into streaming. To that end, I’ve been streaming more regularly on Twitch, interacting more with the wider community, and making more friends in the streaming space. It’s been going well! Ultimately, even though I am doing all of this to market myself, I also enjoy all of my new relationships with streamers and the interactions I get to have with supporters and viewers. I’ve found streaming to be quite fun.

In addition, I became affiliated on Twitch, which means I can now make money on the platform. Although the income share on Twitch is a frankly awful 50%, I have experienced organic growth on Twitch and I’ve actually been able to gain a few subscriptions. Enough so that I’ve actually been able to use the money from Twitch to afford a few things, though it is still less than Patreon.

It is now clear to me that Patreon is a dead-end as far as growth in income is concerned, and it really only exists as an end-point in a marketing strategy and I need to use other platforms to grow.

So, I have decided to make a more concerted effort in that regard in the upcoming year. I am thinking about making… a YouTube video… that I’m definitely not procrastinating on… but in a more active and concrete way, I am participating more on social media.

• I’ve made an account on Cohost, and I’ve already posted an introduction and some thoughts on how I feel about Per Aspera.
• I’m working on making short-form video content to post on YouTube. I’ve made nine shorts so far! (not posted publicly yet, I’m building a backlog)
• I applied to get an account on a vtuber-specific Mastodon instance. I’m planning on posting more often on Twitter and Mastodon both to share the progress on my games.

In general, I’m trying to incrementally build a regular routine for all of this marketing I need to do for my game and future games I want to make. It’s important because marketing is basically 50% of a game, but it’s also intimidating because I don’t want to do things in a soul-sucking way! I want to participate meaningfully, so I’m trying to find things that I enjoy doing and post things that other people can also appreciate in a “real” way that doesn’t depend on what I think of as toxic patterns.

On a similar note, I’m thinking about making all of my VODs public, but given the availability of VODS for other streamers and their relative disuse, I suspect no one watches VODs anyway. So, while I still plan to record them so I can make shorts and edits, I may stop posting them here on Patreon. I will announce these changes later when I am more sure about my decision.

Anyway, those are my half-baked thoughts for now. I can’t promise I’ll post more regularly or that I will keep up with what I started, but I will try my best!

Thank you as always, skeletons. <3