#do you think it is reasonable to use that tag for stuff??

[devsgames]

"Is Tumblr Blaze Worth It For Promoting My Indie Game?" - a Postmortem

Lately I've been thinking about marketing and promotion of my games and wanting to explore new avenues. Tumblr Blaze was one of those things I wanted to dip my toes into a bit to understand how it works and if it has potential for advertising my sort of stuff. Like as not, there's no point in making games if nobody actually plays them after all!

Conversely I have also heard bad things about Tumblr Blaze; that it's not very targeted, the reach is fairly limited, and people on this site generally hate anything that is Blazed to them.

I wanted to test all these waters a bit to see if it's something worth investing in, and share what I found for my own benefit and the benefit of others. Finding various info on topics like this for indie dev can be a pain, so why not share my findings?

The Plan and Goal

While Centauri Dark is still in development and is the thing I actually want to advertise more of right now, Bombing!! 2 is already out and is much more marketable with some cool art made by community members. I think as a first impression it tends to show well, so I decided to make my test post with that to get exposure to it and see how it goes.

My goal was mostly to see what a Blaze post does for advertising a launched indie game and how much "eyes on" it actually gets in terms of actual engagement.

Posting

From the outset I knew I wanted to make a post that 1) wasn't annoying to people just looking at the webbed site 2) featured a call to action of some kind I could measure 3) wouldn't break the bank.

Here's what I came up with:

The intention was to flash some cool looking art to grab their attention, explain what they're looking at, and then link the game a couple of times while mentioning "Buy or Wishlist" for good measure as a call to action.

Since Bombing!! 2 is such an art-forward game, I found the coolest art pieces made by community members that felt the most "Tumblr" to match the audience, and would also show off the range of art you could make in the game. I also wanted to make it personal, like me writing a message to whoever would read it instead of something that sounded like a standard ad. Generally I think it was a fairly reasonable little post that catches some interest and doesn't overstay too much of a welcome. What I think also helps is it's explicitly a "hey this might interest you" sort of framing (as opposed to a more "why am I even seeing this" sort of post you tend to get from Blaze sometimes).

I also think it's worth emphasizing that writing a posted explicitly intending to be Blazed was a much stronger approach than just Blazing some random post I had made for my own followers months ago, because I could align it to my promotional goals. It also assumed that random people on the Internet would be the ones seeing my post, and not the followers and friends who already know me and my work.

Blazing

As I looked into Blaze early on there was actually a few key things I wasn't fully aware of about the system.

It guarantees a minimum amount of views

It guarantees it will be Blazed for a minimum of 24 hours no matter how many views

You pay a single base rate for the whole campaign (great compared to some ads which tend to price based on views/engagement).

You can define an audience explicitly (some info that was floating around lead me to believe this wasn't the case).

Campaigns come in a few amounts:

I paid for the 2nd tier; $17 USD for a campaign, which amounts to $25 CDN. I wanted to go a little more into it than the lowest tier offered, since I figured the lowest wouldn't give me as much data as I would've liked and I wanted to know what to reasonably expect should I decide to do it again in the future.

Since Bombing!! 2 sells for ~$20USDI also figure if the Blaze campaign prompts at least two people to buy the game then the Blaze would have paid for itself.

Blaze lets you use tags to define which audiences you want to reach. Unfortunately it doesn't let you view that data after you've applied it, but the tags I chose were generally anyone who spoke English and has an interest in Digital Artist or Video Game circles.

The campaign ran for 24 Hours, starting yesterday and ending today.

The Results

I definitely noticed a sharp uptick in engagement during the campaign! It hit the target audience of ~7k around one hour into the campaign, after which point I noticed engagement take a sharp decline.

Here's the Blaze campaign analytics provided by Tumblr (which was also very helpful to have):

So it seems ~12.5k views from Blaze, ~370 likes, ~80 reblogs, 5 shares elsewhere. The post itself has ~520 notes, so I assume there's some reblogging and liking happening from beyond the Blaze campaign that isn't pictured here. The good thing is that despite having reached its 7k target after only 1 hour, it continued to circulate and be Blazed until 24 hours later. Eventually the post made it to ~12k views overall, which was nearly double the amount promised by the campaign - I attribute this mostly to a strong post/target audience/subject matter and I'm sure it's not standard.

Here's the general velocity of engagement around when the post was Blazed:

It jumped much more than I honestly expected, but you can tell Blaze seemed to put it in front of people's faces more than my regular posts do. You can see it drops off sharply as I hit the quoted amount as well, back down to the normal amount of engagement I get on Tumblr.

But this stuff isn't really what I was looking for; I was looking for sales and keeping an eye on 'conversions' - or how many users followed my call to action because of the post. Likes and stuff are fine and cool, but how many people bought or wishlisted the game on Steam as a result of seeing the post on Tumblr?

Tumblr and Blaze obviously have no way of telling me this, so I'm looking to Steam to show me changes there.

Here's what Steam shows me happened to the Bombing!! 2 views yesterday:

That's not nothing! This shows the last month's worth of traffic to the Bombing!! 2 page, and that number was at least double yesterday as it was regularly. It's very cool to know a number of people did actually click through to the game page in order to view the game from the Blaze post.

But the real REAL question is how many bought or wishlisted the game because of this post?

I'll start with Sales, on a graph of 1 month of data:

Flat line :( Which is fine though, as the game wasn't on Sale and was just reaching people for the first time. I didn't honestly expect any immediate sales from this, and was more focused on other engagement anyways. Honestly I would be surprised if someone saw the game on a Blaze post and bought it immediately. I mean it's good but it's probably not THAT good!

Now to Wishlists, which can be a good indicator of who might likely buy your game in the future. Basically if someone has added a game to their wishlist, there's reason to believe they might buy it in the future, which is good for your game.

Here's the Wishlists for Bombing!! 2 from the last month:

That's 23 Wishlists in one day! That's roughly ~18 Wishlists more than an average day!

It's hard to know if some of these are because of the post or just a statistical fluke. However, when compared to previous trends on the game page that's quite a noticeable difference. It means even if no one bought it now, they were interested enough to add it to their shortlist. Looking at it another way, if two people who Wishlisted decided to buy the game in the future the campaign will have paid for itself.

Conclusions

I think like any advertising if you go into it with a plan in mind and try to build something around a specific action, Blaze seems pretty worth it to me especially if I just want to get eyes on something. On top of the obvious data telling me people were interested in the game, there was a few folks who just plain complemented the game or acknowledged it 'was the first Blaze post they were actually interested in', which felt worth it in it's own qualitative sort of way.

I think having an idea of the message I wanted to send really helped, and I'm sure I'd happily do this again with a larger audience and another plan (and probably will do it for when Centauri Dark releases).

[yanderespamton78]

AJDJSOAJW I MADE MY SPAMTON PLUSH THE DEFRAG OUTFIT

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA

I'm so normal. About. This comicc

Yes

Defragmentation by @zarla-s go read it if you haven't rjkwsjdkdhkash

[starflungwaddledee]

Oooo starstruck dee has little stars at the bottom of her feet! Are they just aesthetic or would they make imprints into the ground? (like pawprints)

exactly like that! though she's not the only one...

edit: might need to add some additional dialogue to this to make it more clear, but a clarification in the interim; he knows about his own footprints. he's just surprised to see something similar already there when he knows he's only just landed. he lifts his own shoe to confirm that they're not identical (and also to reveal this to the viewer). seems his stoicism beat off the clarity in this one, sorry 😭

[biblically-accurate-dca]

these are all kind of Bad but this was the best of the bunch so i am posting it :p

i've been trying to draw vanessa more... she is so important to me... sun is here too i guess

[allthoseotherworlds]

Genuinely really loving the tendency of official Doctor Who stuff to now refer to the Doctor in general with they/them pronouns

[shikai-the-storyteller]

Tumblr is way chiller than Twitter for sure but sometimes I see a post and I'm like. Y'all DO remember this is a block game, right? You're not gonna get legitimately pissy and passive-aggressive over characters doing things in a block game, RIGHT???

[spacebubblehomebase]

Without colors or context, this simple and stupid comic of mine feels so, so tense; It's ominous. The difference from the tone of my last doodle is low-key hilarious though. But please, *insert ace joke here* cause I swear this is nothing serious. I don't even know why I gave in so much effort or show ya'll my progress before finishing, yet here we are. -Bubbly💙

[cordycepsbian]

aw, you're not really afraid of spiders, are you siffrin?

(mal du pays design inspired by @skyistheground except we leaned even heavier on the spider motif because we like bug. enjoy a freaky creature)

[saturnaous]

I never stop thinking about them.

SEND ME ART REQUESTS BOY

[eliounora]

red white and royal blue was so cheesy and predictable I enjoyed it thoroughly. making banal queer romantic comedies is hard but necessary work

[icewindandboringhorror]

More misc. daily life pictures and such

[todayisafridaynight]

I’m fairly new to the fandom, but I do have a question if you can answer it! Why do people ship Daigo with Aoki / Masato? I tried looking to see if they’ve interacted before, but couldn’t find anything! Sorry for asking I’m just </3 dumb AND I LOVE YOUR ART OF THEM!!! Nerd looking ahhhhhh

hi ! welcome to the community i hope you're having a lovely time so far and ty for enjoyin my stuff :) no need for apologies it's a very fair question to have :]

i cant speak for everyone (all. ten people into masadai anyway) but Personally To Me i just think the idea of them together is very funny. thats quite literally it im afraid..

[spectrumgarden]

Okay so I've never really joined the whole "small talk" argument that's been happening increasingly over the last years because I tend to just not agree with anyone I see discuss it. Like no I dont think people who use it are evil or making things hard on purpose, I also dont think it makes them lesser, ... I Also dont think that someone who refuses to use it / cant use it is automatically worse and will not make friends.

Importantly i also dont think everyone can learn it. I should know because I spent multiple years with professionals trying to teach me how to have a conversation At All and I still am actually nowhere near what would be expected at my age group. (Most recent reports usually go something like "makes slight improvements in having a two sided conversation" - because I can say nothing, or I can ramble on and then not react to your answer. The rest? Struggle time, to this day, in every aspect) No matter how many intricate guides you write, if I fail at the basic concept of a conversational structure very frequently then I will not succeed at small talk either. And additionally I also genuinely can not tell what might be too personal for this other person.

A lot of these people who get upset when people say "I cant do small talk because I'm autistic and I cant learn it, I tried and failed" and go "of course you can!", just sort of like. Ignore that a lot of the developmental delay in conversation and / or (nonverbal) language never closes up for many of us, the way a lot of us generally never reach the developmental level of our peers (in some areas). and it's not because we have not seen enough complex flow charts or not practiced enough. when so many of us literally spend so much additional time of our youth sitting in front of whiteboards and workbooks and such, being explained over and over how to talk to someone at all. I am 22 and after years of explicit teaching I still have to ask for verbal confirmation and explanation of any nonverbal cues that I think were used by my conversational partner, but do not know what they mean. Which is pretty much all of them. And I probably miss a lot of them existing at all. You can scream "just practice until you can recognize the other persons little cues on if they want to deepen or end this" until you turn blue but it will not actually make me accomplish it if the fucking people who've been spending their whole life teaching it didnt make me figure it out. On account of, you know, the developmental delay.

Sure some people can learn! That's why they try to teach us after all! Cause it has been successful! But generally stop with this shit of "everyone can learn this you're just choosing not to!"

I will never be rude to someone for engaging in small talk, I will obviously fail at their attempts to engage me in some, which usually makes them stop trying (thank god). But I will not tolerate others talking shit about it that is uncalled for (implying malice from every user, making fun of people who seem to crave it, ...).

But I also do not care to learn it anymore at this point? It's no goal of mine. I have made multiple friends, most non autistic, without ever using small talk. Including in adulthood. We simply skipped that stage. We went from "hi!" "Hi!" Immediately to "heres when it went wrong in my life (humorous but still often dark / personal). Also these are my political opinions. Sure I want to hear about the girl you dated for years in excruciating detail. Let me retell you the plot of this old indie movie you will never watch for 20 minutes and why I enjoy it. Let's go to a concert together after talking slightly in depth like this twice". Is this the way that you creep everyone out in everyone's friendship acquisition theory I've been seeing? Sure! It's been working perfectly fine, enough of the times for me, though.

Will this work in like a work environment or something? Most likely not, which is why I generally plan to keep to myself. Does this mean I still confuse every stranger who approaches me trying to small talk? Sure. that's why I'm still fucking disabled. But I have created meaningful relationships as an adult without small talk. I have genuinely tried learning in many ways and failed. And I'm done apologizing for that, either you take me with my inability to small talk or you wont.

[blujayonthewing]

thinkin again about the time elyss's DM cut in to stop a conversation between her and a semi-retired player character to hurriedly take back control of him as an NPC before he could give her, as an extremely kind and thoughtful gift, one of his own personal belongings, and then said 'elyss can probably buy it from him though :)' instead

like. what an egregiously fucking shitty thing to do, actually.

[coquelicoq]

i just saw someone say that "the vast majority of the userbase is complaining" about tumblr's recent layout change. i see this a lot after a change: people complaining about it (sometimes without saying what about it is bad, making it sound like either it's self-evident (it usually is not) or just that it's bad because it's change and change is always bad) and saying that everyone else is complaining about it too. i don't know how to tell you this but a) you don't follow every user on tumblr so how can you possibly know what "everyone" or "the majority of users" thinks about anything and b) ONLY THE PEOPLE WHO FEEL VERY STRONGLY ARE TALKING ABOUT IT!! people who are not bothered are not spending time posting about how unbothered they are! please look up "selection bias" and stop making me read this nonsense with my own eyeballs.

[undercat-overdog]

I’ve been thinking recently about all the comment culture discussions and the recent talk around authors’ archive-locking their fic and one of the things that bothers me is how I never really see those discussions centered around the author. The comment conversations are a mix of reasons why readers don’t comment, how to comment, and why comments are good, but I’m not sure I’ve seen something that centers the author as person. Instead it’s the broader community and its desire for “content” that’s centered: comments are good because they keep authors writing (which is, I think, broadly true though people vary in the particulars), but it’s hard to comment (also broadly true, also varies in the particulars), but lack of feedback means some authors stop writing (also also true). The goal seems to be to keep the fic flowing.

And no one is owed comments and no one is owed fic and if it’s harmful to your mental health to comment, or harmful to your mental health to keep your fic online, that’s far more important. Please, don’t take me as saying that you need to comment or that you need to keep making fic available. Reader and/or author, what is best for you comes first; what you are able to do or want to do comes first.

(As for the talk about how authors are bad for archive-locking fic and that they should be shamed and scolded for doing so? No sympathy. I have less than zero patience for that argument. It’s more than fine to feel sad or grieved that you have lost a story you loved or can no longer access it - it is sad! It’s why I download stories now. But an author can do as they wish with their creations; no one is owed fic.)

But none of this gets at the author as person. These discussions seem to return to the personal reasons why a reader wouldn’t comment and how the author as content producer is more likely to write if they get feedback, the goal to get people to comment so fic continues to be produced: put money in the vending machine so you can get a snack. But I think at least some of authorial angst is driven less by comments per se and more by the desire to be recognized and feel seen as people and not fic-producing machines. Authors have anxiety too. Oh, do some of us have anxiety!

To use me as an example, since I’m the only person I truly know: I have almost deleted fic or moved it to an unrevealed collection multiple times because of anxiety that is tied to feels of either not being seen or being seen and intentionally ignored; I almost did so yesterday. It hurts to be ignored, especially when you know that your fic was read and seen but ignored. And that would be one thing - no one’s required to like my work or my friends’ works but to pretend your story is unique when you’re clearly very, very influenced by those works to the point of rewriting dialogue and using the same plot points with the same plot items. It makes me as a person feel ignored and it is currently killing my motivation to write, because at times I am a fainting flower. (To be very clear, my reaction is me, and no one owes me feedback or whatever, or to listen to my navel-gazing.) And I don’t like when my friends and fellow authors are seen then ignored either: that very much makes me angry. But yes, anxiety. It's easy to feel invisible or to feel like you're not worth recognizing.

I do want to note that there are circumstances in which acknowledgement and recognition is owed. If you take direct inspiration from someone’s plot, or rewrite it, that needs to be acknowledged, and it bothers me when it’s not: it feels like being used. Likewise, one place readers do have an obligation to comment, barring extenuating circumstances, is if they are given a gift fic as part of an exchange or event that they signed up for.

So idk. I guess what I’m saying is that I often feel that people don’t see that there’s a person behind the ao3 author’s name and that person’s not recognized. It might be that which stings the most.

(While I used  “author” throughout, this applies to all people in fandom who create and share their works. I am an author, so that’s the perspective I’m speaking from, but there are many creative perspectives that are no less important. And of course, “writer” and “reader” are not exclusive categories and I’d guess that most of the former are also the latter. Likewise “artist” isn’t exclusive, nor “podcaster” or so on.)

One last point: I’m not sure it’s talked about how long it can take to write something? I’d guess that most of my one-shots have taken at least two or three dozen hours to write/edit/post and I’d say I’m probably of average speed (when I’m writing lol). For most authors, writing’s not quick; 5k isn’t dashed off in an afternoon but might take 40+ hours. It’s a labor and for most of us it takes time.