Anonymous User asked:

what do you think contributed to the success of abnormalmapping?

a lot of luck, and being in the right place at the right time. i think we do good and consistent work but that was true for the half decade before we really had any audience whatsoever. we absolutely rode a wave of visibility with waypoint and also starting ggp, just being in those same communities and getting regularly shouted out put a lot of eyes on us. being the communist mecha anime podcast was a good selling point and got way more people interested than our game criticism work lol.

also it can't be overstated that being able to work for basically half a decade completely for free, em with a job and me disabled in university, is a resource that 99% of people simply do not have. we were able to do it long enough that we stumbled into it quietly being successful enough to justify keeping working on, if GGP hadn't blown up i don't think we'd be doing it anymore tbh. simply having independent resources at all is a large reason we've kinda quietly stayed here building up a body of work while so many of my peers have had full time jobs, got laid off, switched careers, etc etc. the machine really eats people alive and we've been largely to the side of it doing our own thing. which is both occasionally frustrating (i would love a salaried job lol. i tried! just didn't pan out) but also its own form of privilege.

thats not to be modest, i do think we've worked really hard the past decade and done a lot of good work that people enjoy, but i think the quality of the work is at most a small part of the reason we've found a successful footing. i'm slightly worried it's all going to fall apart now that twitter is deader than dead, waypoint is gone, everything is fragmented into smaller subcultures and the games cultuare that Abnormal Mapping was born out of simply does not exist lmao. but we're going to do our best to keep it going another decade! evolving with the times and all that.


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