brodnork

i'm something

  • they/them

Game developer, animator, artist, dumpling eater, bug appreciator, creator of squishy friends.
★★★
Created Frogsong! Working on a secret new game!

finfin come and see him


My website! 🐝
bumblebee.city/
My frog game! 🐸
frogsonggame.com/
support me pls!! 🦑
www.patreon.com/brodnork

Game dev question if anyone has experience or knowledge - are mailing lists worth it at all? I had made one for Frogsong but barely used it because it never seemed to have any more effect than just posting to social media. But it's such a common thing I hear mentioned when it comes to indie game marketing.
You also don't have to be a game dev to respond, if you're signed up for any indie game mailing lists I'd love to hear about your thoughts on them too!


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in reply to @brodnork's post:

Not a game dev — I love to sign up for mailing lists from my favorite indie devs so I know what’s up between releases! It’s so easy to miss things in the social media deluge, whereas a mailing list guarantees I will see you in my inbox and will be on top of it when you push your next game.

So that’s one anecdotal evidence pro-mailing list from a fan! 🕺🏼(I’m a member on your Patreon as well, and I think it can serve a similar purpose. But not everyone is up for Patreon, and a mailing list is a good way to have a tether to the folks who care about your work that doesn’t rely on that platform…)

That's sort of how I feel too. I've signed up for a few mailing lists, and there's plenty of devs who I'd sign up for if they had one.

The tricky thing is unlike social media, there's obviously no like button or comment button or share button, which I think leaves it without a sense of feedback. I don't really have an easy way to gauge whether or not the people reading it are actually interested. It sort of feels like shouting updates into the void!

It was also tricky to figure out what to write. I think Toby Fox was smart when he chose to make the Deltarune mailing list seasonal. Game development is a medium where months can go by without anything interesting to show for it. Doing one email per season means you not only have quite a bit of time to write something, but it pretty much guarantees there'll be SOMETHING to write about

I don't mind them if they're once a month. It's one of those things where if you don't have to put in a lot of effort to do it, there's not much reason not to do it. Some people prefer that to following an account on social media.

I'm terrible at maintaining my own, but what I do like about being subscribed to other people's mailing lists is that occasionally I get an update about what they're doing without the need to follow them on social media, or even using social media at all.

I think having one is a good idea, if you want to decouple at least parts of your audience from a specific platform, and maybe less in terms of pure "this is going to get more more engagement".

Yeah it's been on my mind a lot lately with the decline of Twitter (and the realization that maybe twitter never even helped me much in the first place). I'm probably gonna keep tweeting until the site shuts down cuz its free and low effort, but it just can't be my main hub anymore.

The only other social media I regularly use is Cohost, and as much as I love it here, it's VERY small and niche. Only so much reach you can get here.

As a player I love mailing lists and I always sign up for them when they're offered by games I'm interested in. I generally expect them to be about once a month or less (whenever they have news worth sharing) during development and more frequent around release. I don't go on social media every day so it's easy for me to miss things otherwise.

They're especially nice when a game is so far out that there's no store page to wishlist yet. My memory is not great and I really need some way to be reminded or I'll totally forget the game even if it had a sick trailer.