> ## Content Index > Fetch the complete content index at: https://seeindie.com/llms.txt > Use this file to discover other available public pages before exploring further. # Why marketing your game feels gross - URL: https://seeindie.com/blog/marketing-feels-gross/ - Published: 2026-08-29T11:00:00.000Z - Updated: 2026-08-29T11:00:00.000Z - Description: Making the game is fine. Posting about it is not. What the research says the cringe is actually detecting, and the three things I am not going to tell you. - Author: Isabella-Viktoria Quilez - Tags: marketing, Indie Marketing Almost every solo dev I have talked to describes the same thing. Making the game is fine. Posting about the game is not. Something about typing “wishlist my game!” under a clip produces a small, specific cringe that does not show up anywhere else in the job. The usual advice is to get over it. I think that advice is wrong, or at least badly aimed, and there is a decent amount of research explaining why. This one is not a how-to. It is an attempt to work out what the feeling actually is, whether it is telling you anything true, and what follows from that. The short version - **The discomfort is directionally correct.** People do react worse to self-promotion than promoters expect. The research on that is reasonably solid. - **But your forecast of the reaction is wrong in a specific way** — you expect people to be pleased, and what they mostly feel is mildly annoyed. Knowing which part is wrong helps. - **It is not just fear of being punished.** The largest study on this found the reluctance persists even when there is nothing to be punished by. - **Solicited and unsolicited land differently.** The same sentence is judged differently depending on whether anyone asked. That is the closest thing to a lever in here. - **Nobody has measured whether your discomfort costs you anything.** I looked. That link does not exist. On this page [Not a character flaw](#common) [What the research says](#research) [Not fear of punishment](#not-punishment) [The one asymmetry](#asymmetry) [Push and pull](#push-pull) [Two wrong stories](#two-stories) [A retracted study](#retracted) [What I won’t tell you](#not-telling) [FAQ](#faq) ## The feeling is common, and it is not a character flaw Worth saying before the research: the games industry is not a calm place to be right now, and the discomfort does not arrive in a vacuum. The GDC State of the Game Industry survey published in January 2026, with over 2,300 respondents, found **28% had been affected by layoffs over two years**, rising to 33% in the US, and **48% of those laid off were still unemployed**. Thirty-five percent of respondents were self-funding. That is the backdrop against which people are being told to post more. I am not going to build an argument out of that, because “the industry is stressful” does not explain why *marketing specifically* feels worse than the rest of a stressful job. But it is the room the conversation is happening in. ## What the research actually says The most-cited study here is Scopelliti, Loewenstein and Vosgerau, published in *Psychological Science* in 2015 under the excellent title “You Call It ‘Self-Exuberance’; I Call It ‘Bragging’”. Three experiments. In the third, 99 people wrote either a self-promoting or a neutral personal profile and predicted how readers would react; 456 separate people then rated those profiles. Two findings, and the second is the useful one: 1. **Self-promotion did reduce how much people liked the writer — with no offsetting gain in perceived competence.** You do not buy respect with the sympathy you spend. 2. **The promoters were wrong about the reaction in a specific direction.** They overestimated how proud and pleased readers would feel, and underestimated how annoyed. So the aversion is not irrational. Something real is being detected. But the *content* of the fear is off: the expected outcome is not “they will think less of me”, it is closer to “they will feel less than I imagine they will feel.” Honest caveats, because this is a 2015 psychology paper: the samples were Amazon Mechanical Turk, the per-condition numbers are modest, pre-registration was not standard practice then, and I could not find a direct replication. Treat it as suggestive rather than settled. ## It is not simply fear of being punished The obvious explanation is anticipated backlash — you do not promote because you expect to be judged for promoting. There is real evidence for that mechanism, going back to Laurie Rudman’s 1998 work showing that self-promoting women were rated less likeable and less hireable than identically self-promoting men. But the largest and most careful study on this points somewhere else. Exley and Kessler, in the *Quarterly Journal of Economics* in 2022, ran **over 4,000 online participants plus over 10,000 school-aged children**, asking people to rate their own performance on a task to a hypothetical employer. They found a persistent gap — and, critically, it survived every attempt to explain it away. It persisted when confidence differences were controlled for. It persisted when the strategic incentive to self-promote was removed. It persisted in setups where no backlash was possible. Which means at least part of the reluctance is not a calculation about consequences at all. It tracks something about **how people evaluate their own work when asked to describe it to someone else.** That is worth sitting with if you have ever written a store description and felt like a fraud. It is a well-documented pattern, and it is not straightforwardly about other people. **One caution on the gender research**, because it gets flattened constantly: Rudman-style backlash and the Exley–Kessler gap are *different mechanisms*, and collapsing them into “women don’t self-promote because they’ll be punished” overstates what the second study found. ## The one asymmetry that seems to matter Here is the finding the rest of this piece hangs off. Tal-Or, in *Social Influence* in 2010, ran two studies on the same self-promotional content in different contexts. Self-promoters were judged negatively **only when the other person had not asked.** Same boast, volunteered versus requested, produces a different impression. With a sting in it: if the audience works out that the promoter engineered the question, they read it as manipulative. So it is not a trick you can run. I want to be careful about what this does and does not show. It measures **how an audience judges** — not how the person doing the promoting feels. Extending it to “unsolicited promotion is what feels bad” is a reasonable inference and it is not a measured finding. I am telling you that because the entire internet will tell you the opposite with total confidence. But it does line up with the shape of the experience. The cringe is not evenly distributed. Answering a question about your game in a thread where someone asked feels fine. Posting the same information unprompted into a feed does not. ## Push, pull, and what is honestly known The reframe I find useful is push versus pull. **Push** is going to where people are and interrupting them: the unprompted post, the cold email, the ad. **Pull** is being findable when someone is already looking: a store page that ranks, a page that answers a question, a game whose tags put it in front of people who like that kind of thing. Here is the honest state of the evidence. **There is no study showing that pull-based marketing feels less unpleasant than push-based marketing.** I went looking for one specifically for this post. It does not exist. What can be said: - Tal-Or gives a real solicited/unsolicited asymmetry, on the audience side. - Scopelliti’s third experiment locates the cost in *excessive* promotion in an unprompted context — consistent with the push being the aversive part. - Developers already behave as though pull is a channel: in the GDC 2026 survey, **43%** named discoverability as a factor in choosing a platform. So: a useful reframe with partial support at one end and none at the other. Not a finding. If someone sells you “inbound marketing is the cure for marketing anxiety”, they are selling. What I will say is narrower and I think defensible. Pull work has a property that push work does not: **it does not require you to feel good on the day you do it.** A store page you wrote once keeps working. A page that answers a real question keeps answering it in month six. Neither depends on your willingness to perform enthusiasm on a Tuesday. Most of this site is about that half of the job, if it is the half you can stand. [How to market an indie game: the basics](https://seeindie.com/blog/indie-game-marketing-basics/) is the whole picture in order; [your website: the channel you own](https://seeindie.com/website/) is the case for the piece nobody can switch off; [your Steam store page](https://seeindie.com/blog/steam-store-page/) and [Steam tags](https://seeindie.com/blog/steam-tags/) are the two highest-leverage things you can do without addressing a single human being directly. And if the specific thing grinding you down is the posting treadmill, [social media for game developers](https://seeindie.com/blog/social-media-for-game-developers/) is my honest assessment of what that channel is and is not worth — which is less than you have been told. ## Both of the stories devs tell themselves are wrong There are two competing accounts of what happens to a good game, and neither survives contact with the data. **“A good game sells itself.”** In 2025, 20,282 games released on Steam and 608 of them reached a thousand reviews — **just under 3%**. And the rate varies by roughly forty-fold between genres: Open World Survival Craft titles hit that mark 20.8% of the time, puzzle games 0.34%, 2D platformers 0.18%. Whatever is going on there, it is not a story about who posted harder. **“You just have to market harder.”** The best experimental evidence against this is not from games at all. Salganik, Dodds and Watts, in *Science* in 2006, put **14,341 people** through an artificial music market, randomly assigning them either to judge songs independently or into one of eight parallel “worlds” where they could see what others had downloaded. Quality mattered — “the best songs rarely did poorly, and the worst rarely did well” — but social influence increased both the **inequality** and the **unpredictability** of which songs won. Run the same world again and a different song is on top. Put those together and you get something more useful than either story: quality is necessary and nowhere near sufficient, positioning decisions dominate promotional effort, and a real chunk of the outcome is not determined by anything you did. That is not a counsel of despair. It is a reason not to read a quiet launch as a verdict on how much you posted. ## The study that fits perfectly, and why I am not using it There is a paper that maps onto this topic so neatly that it appears in almost every article of this kind. Casciaro, Gino and Kouchaki, 2014, in *Administrative Science Quarterly*: instrumental, self-interested networking produces feelings of literal moral dirtiness. People in the study reportedly thought more about cleaning products afterwards. It is a co-authored paper of Francesca Gino’s, and it is **one of four flagged by Data Colada in June 2023 for evidence of data fabrication**. Harvard’s internal investigation found research misconduct and requested retractions. I am naming it rather than quietly omitting it, because it is still being cited in exactly this genre, by people who have not checked. If you read something claiming that science proves networking makes you feel dirty, that is where the claim comes from. There is a smaller point here too. The most emotionally satisfying finding is the one worth checking hardest. ## What I am not going to tell you Three things, deliberately. **I am not going to call this anxiety.** Disliking self-promotion is not a diagnosis, and nothing in the research above supports treating it as one. It is a common response with a documented shape. **I am not going to tell you to push through it.** No study I found shows that overriding the aversion improves either your wellbeing or your outcomes. Exley and Kessler shows the reluctance is not strategic; it does not show that closing the gap helps you. Anyone who tells you otherwise is extrapolating past the evidence. **And I am not going to tell you the discomfort is costing you sales.** That is the standard move, and it is unsupported. There is research showing that a self-promotion gap exists and correlates with a visibility gap — a 2025 *Nature Communications* study of 23 million posts about 2.8 million papers found academics who self-promote less get mentioned less. But that is observational, it is about scientists and tweets, and it does not establish causation. **No study measures whether an individual creator’s discomfort with marketing predicts their commercial outcome.** That link is simply unmeasured. What I will say is that some of this work does not require you to feel any particular way about yourself, and that is the half worth starting with. ## Common questions Is it normal to hate marketing your own game? It is extremely common, and there is research explaining why the specific act of describing your own work to strangers feels different from the rest of the job. It is not a sign that you are bad at this or unsuited to it. Does the discomfort mean I am doing something wrong? Partly the opposite. The research suggests the instinct is directionally correct — audiences do respond less warmly to self-promotion than promoters expect. What is miscalibrated is the prediction, not the caution. Should I just force myself to post more? No study supports that as advice, and this piece is not going to give it. If posting is the part you cannot sustain, there is a large amount of marketing work — store page, tags, a findable website — that produces results without requiring you to perform enthusiasm on any particular day. Isn’t “make a good game and it’ll sell itself” true? Not on its own. Under 3% of 2025’s Steam releases reached a thousand reviews, and success rates vary roughly forty-fold between genres. Quality is necessary and far from sufficient — and the Science market study suggests a meaningful part of the outcome is genuinely unpredictable. What is the least unpleasant marketing I can do? The work that does not involve addressing anyone directly: a Steam page that is clear and correctly tagged, and a site that answers questions people are already asking. It compounds, and it does not care how you feel on the day.