I’ve joined an accountability game dev group, and we came up with a challenge to put out 5 shorts on each of our YouTube channels. Short form content has been popping up as a topic and all of us recognized that we needed to get more practice making content to learn the format. Last week, I spent time jotting down ideas that came to mind and I spent this last Sunday recording, editing, and scheduling all of my videos across YouTube, Instagram, and TikTok. Each day at 4:00 AM Pacific, my videos would go live and I could wake up and check out how they did. I’m writing this as of Thursday night, so let me catch you up on how each day went.
But first, I wanted to mention that I also made my first guest appearance on a podcast! My friend Justin, developer of Goblins for Good, was kind enough to invite me onto his podcast. We had a great conversation about some of the games we played during the June Next Fest. If you enjoy any of my game studies, you’ll definitely enjoy this conversation.
Days 1 and 2 were testing out content related to other games. I wanted to see if it might be viable to take my game studies and do shorter versions of the gameplay. I recorded 3 runs of Forest Heroes, made one short that was an overview of the game, and another short showing 3 builds that I made. The overview at least made it to what I assume to be the second visibility round, but it ultimately fell off. 38.6% stayed to watch on average 60% of the short. However, this was still much better than the build showcase which only had 20% of people stay and view 50% of it. I suspect that the hook would work for a game where people are searching for builds, but it won’t work for a game that people aren’t organically searching for. I also included the work mark of the game, which is great for giving credit and unfortunately makes the game look like an ad. Lesson learned, stick to stories.
Day 3 I tested out talking “indie game lore”. Because Steam Next Fest had just wrapped, there have been some discussions around the importance of it for discoverability. I made a short covering the game [Redacted] The Safehouse, developed by my friend Heartbeast, and told a story about how he was able to make 2,000 game sales without really doing any marketing or participating in Steam Next Fest. Now, I think he would be the first to say that this is not a viable strategy, but he was still able to sell way more copies than I feel most games would get. Either way, the more important part was that the short ended up being my first video that had over 100% average view duration. I got a lot of positive feedback from others who said they wanted to listen to it again to really understand the story. Ben also told me that he saw a small (probably tiny) bump in wishlists, which gave me hope that it is possible generate traffic with this type of content. This was a total blast to make and it left me feeling positive that this is a great way to pay it forward to other indies. 48% stayed to watch with a 102% average view duration.
Day 4 and 5 are shorts about the Bug Game I’m working on with Pi. He’s been hard at work doing marketing for his card game, Your Class Rep, so I was happy we could divide and conquer on these. I’m writing this as of Thursday night, so I only have day 4’s numbers, but our little bee friends drove a lot of engagement today. 47.7% stayed to watch with a 97% average view duration. Once again, finding that audience who wanted stick around and see the whole thing. I suspect tomorrow’s short will perform roughly the same since they are pretty much following the same script. However the highlight from day 4 was that we had someone comment asking about the game and wanting to know if it was on Steam. As Pi said to me later “We would have gotten a wish list!!”… if only we had a Steam page. More than anything else though, someone asking about if a game I worked on will be available still feels unreal to me. This is something that happens to other developers who are more talented and established in indie games. Certainly not me! It is way too early on to celebrate, but these are the kinds of small victories that keep me going on those days when I lose faith in myself. This whole experiment taught me that there are many ways to find these positive signals if we’re open to looking for them. We never know where trying something will lead, but we always know where doing knowing will keep us.
To be complete with the data, TikTok as a whole was pretty much a bust. I ran into an issue where I was getting 0 impressions on my first few videos, which was likely because I had created a new account and scheduled a bunch of videos without engaging on their platform. Whoops. Fortunately, today’s post got roughly 250 views, so it must mean I’m finally getting recognized as a human on the platform. Instagram also had lower views overall and I’m still not convinced that it’s the best platform for that kind of content. I think it will be worthwhile for me to continue uploading videos on all three platforms and experimenting with these different ideas for videos. I’d love to do another 5 days of shorts and try an experiment by covering a game that is still in playtesting (that I have permission to post content for!), which could greatly improve my ability to validate the ideas for my own games as well.
Send me an email reply if you had a favorite short from this week!
Talk Soon,
Connor