One of the huge things with Indie games in the modern gaming
climate is promotion. Many indie game developers now have become public
personas able to talk with their fanbase and reviewers in person. With the
social media boom this is very easy now and with things like Kickstarter fans
can get their voices heard with fabulous ease.
Take for example Markus Persson, also known as Notch,
creator of Minecraft. He’s an extremely public personality using Twitter to
talk to his fans with this fedora wearing public persona. He self promotes to
great success, being able to tell his fans of new projects and keep people
interested in his work. Many devs like this get fans themselves as well as fans
of their games. At the business side of things this lets them advertise new
games and projects, as well as being able to find out their fanbases opinions
easily.
Of course sometimes this can backfire. Youtube is central to the indie game
community. It gives reviews and publicity to games. Usually this is an amazing
thing.
Day One: Garry’s Incident made by Wild Games studio was
released in September of 2013 and soon became one of the biggest things in
indie games for the time. Not for good reasons. It was immediately hit with
terrible reviews. Youtube Critic Totalbiscuit created a review for this game,
using a pre-release version he was given by the developers as done with many
indie games.
The issue is that he gave the game a terrible review. He was
incrediably critical of it. Wild Games Studio instead of dealing with this
instead made a false copyright claim against the video to get it removed, and
succeeded for a brief time. In Totalbiscuits words on Twitter, "Long story short. Dev sends code, code used
to make critique, dev dislikes critique, dev abuses system to censor
critique.".
Not only this, but it was
also revealed that the studio was giving fake reviews to try and boost its
score on the review site Metacritic. When all of these things came to light
gamers acted harshly, and now the game has been struck with terrible reviews
given a rating of 0.4. This is a huge display of how social networking and
youtube can completely ruin a game, instead of giving it fame and attracting
fans. This will most likely effect the company for the rest of their career.
As you can see social media
effects the indie gaming scene for both the good and the bad. Some developers
can and do use the more open connectivity of the industry now to their
advantage, and some others need to be careful that EVERYTHING is recorded, even
the bad things.
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