Yes its true. Prepare to have your minds explode. Positech Games is not on discord. We have no discord server/channel. None. There may be people discussing our games on discord in unofficial servers, we do not no, or to be honest…care. Why?
Its because there are just TOO MANY different places on social media that an indie game developer needs to keep track of. When an indie dev has 8 employees and one of them is the dedicated marketing/social media/PR person, perhaps, maybe, just perhaps, there is some value in having a discord server where that person can be constantly replying to people and talking about the game… but even then I seriously doubt the ROI on that.
Right now, our social media and online presence consists of the following list:
- My personal (cliffski) twitter account
- reddits for Democracy3 and 4, also some older games which we never check now.
- facebook pages for virtually every major game we made. (Only Democracy really checked now)
- Our amazing forums, hosted by discourse, but paid for on a business subscription by us.
- This blog
- The widely publicized email addresses for me, which means a LOT of spam.
- A keymailer account, that we barely check now (none of the key-requesters actually cover the game)
- The steam forums
- Steam curator connect
- My youtube channel (effectively positech games youtube channel)
Thats ENOUGH. In fact thats WAY too much. Some of that gets constant attention (my forums, youtube, twitter), some less so (facebook, reddit, steam stuff), some is all but abandoned (keymailer, curator connect).
My feeling is that if people really want to find you, then they will. I am a member of a tesla forum, but also follow a spacex reddit. Why the difference? well all the tesla chat seems to be on forums, all the spacex chat seems to be on reddit. I am not (and I suspect few people are) so massively invested in a single social media platform that I only communicate with people that one way.
To put this another way, I suspect if we just closed down our democracy3 and democracy 4 reddits, and the facebook pages, a fair chunk of those users would eventually find their way to our forums or this blog, or my twitter account. I decide NOT to do that, because I really do not want to lose *any* existing followers/users, but the idea of possibly adding another split in the ‘fanbase’ to yet another format is not appealing.
When you think about it, I could also be trying to promote my games through instagram and tiktok and twitch too. Why not?
Its worth thinking about how many different forums you can possibly cope with communicating with your players when you have to also remember that you *need to also work on making the actual game too*. How much bandwidth do you really have? enough for 5 social media channels? 10? 20? Do not kid yourself that you can cope with all of them, as the number is only going to go up in the future, you need to pick your battles.
Plus…sometimes an entire social media platform turns evil (remember Facebook suddenly deciding to charge you money to message your own page followers? or that time they they totally banned me from ever advertising on Facebook because…I dunno, I make games about politics? (yes really)). And even when they do not turn evil, then can turn stupid, like completely deleting the entire online presence of the terraria devs for no reason and with no warning (yes really), or maybe just realizing they suck and giving up (remember google plus!).
I still maintain the best possible platform for an indie developer to communicate with players is their own forum. It can be hosted elsewhere, but NOT for free (they *will* either go bust or change the terms later…). You have NO SAY what the rules or membership of the steam forums are like. You have no real control or ownership of your Facebook or reddit pages, or your YouTube channel. It can all disappear at the whim of someone in silicon valley.
And so… discord, a company with no real business model whatsoever, and entirely funded by venture capitalists who will want to monetize (track/exploit) all the users soon… forgive me if I don’t get all excited about leaping into the setting up, promoting and running of a discord server. There are plenty of other more productive uses of my time.