START HERE · SOCIAL MEDIA

Social media for game developers, honestly

Social is the piece indies are told to do first, and it is the one that pays back the least in traffic. That does not make it useless — it makes it useful for something other than what most advice claims. This is what it is actually for, and how much of your week it deserves.

The channel you own → All posts

Last updated

What social actually does for a game

If you measure social the way you measure a website — clicks in, wishlists out — it looks like a waste of time for almost every indie. That is the wrong instrument. Social earns its place in two ways that a traffic report will never show you.

The short version
  • It is not a traffic motor. For a small studio, posting will not fill your store page. Anyone promising otherwise is selling a course.
  • It is where answers get quoted from. When someone asks a model about games like yours, it pulls from places where people discuss them — which is increasingly not a blog.
  • It is where a small community starts. Not the reach, the replies. Fifty people who answer you are worth more than five thousand who scrolled past.
  • The platform is not the point. Pick the one you will still be posting on in six months. Consistency beats the algorithm you picked.

The social posts

This cluster is being written now. The pillar lands on 11 August and will appear here the day it publishes. The Discord guide sits on the community page instead — that is a different job, for the reasons in the questions below.

Why this page exists before the posts do. A hub with nothing in it is honest about being early. A hub that links to posts which are not live yet would just be four broken links, so there are none here until there are.

Common questions

How much time should social get?
Less than you have been told, and less than your store page or your site deserves. Treat it as the place you talk to people who already care, not the place you go looking for new ones. If it is eating the hours that should go into the game, the ratio is wrong.
Which platform should an indie pick?
The one you will still be using in six months. Every platform has a year where it is the answer and a year where it is not, and switching resets whatever you built. Consistency on a mediocre choice beats a perfect choice you abandon.
Does Discord count as social media?
Not really, and it is worth being precise about it. Social media distributes you to strangers; nobody discovers a game through Discord. Discord is where people go after they already found you. It belongs to the keeping-people half of the job rather than the getting-found half, which is why the advice for the two looks so different — and why it lives on the community page.