Cyclops (V.O.): Previously, on Sexy X-Men Dating Sim. We received a surprise deadline from Dorian, our publisher. If we wanted their resources, we’d have to publish a “pilot” for our dating sim in just two months! Oh my stars and garters…
Amanda and I had a choice to make. Stay in Dorian’s Artist Accelerator program, which would require us to produce three episodes of our sexy superhero dating sim at a breakneck pace. Or we could say forget it and make the game entirely ourselves, which would mean paying for all the art assets ourselves.
After some deliberation, we decided to stick with Dorian. But the choice didn’t require much soul searching. The decision boiled down to a technicality. We didn’t sign a contract to be part of their Artist Accelerator program. There is no legal requirement for us to deliver anything. So we figured we might as well try to make the deadline and treat it like a fun game jam. If we miss our ship date… Oh well. There was no downside for us. If we make the deadline, we get to use their awesome artist. If we don’t, and they’re upset, we’ll take our scripts and make the game ourselves.
The email thread with Jess at Dorian continued when we said we were still “in,” despite the surprise deadline. Over email, we talked about our goals with the project. Jess explained that if we wanted to make a meaningful income from our game, then the more we put into it, the more we would get out of it. She’s a dating sim creator herself, in addition to being VP of Content. When she launched her 30K word, three episode pilot for the Game of Thrones inspired Royal Red (it took her a month to make outside a full-time job, which to me is the writing equivalent of battling a hoard of White Walkers solo), Jess got good traction from the app’s players and earned $1K in royalties the first week. She looked at the user data and repeatedly ‘optimized’ the choices in the first three episodes for maximum revenue, while at the same time quickly releasing more episodes. Today, Jess says her game is a reliable and significant revenue stream for her.
Jess said she owed her success to optimization and consistency. Then, remembering I once told her I had a Substack, she compared success on Dorian to success on Substack, where consistent updates are a key to success. Dear reader, if you’ve been following my journey, you know my time at Substack didn’t end well. I do not want my Dorian experience to be anything like my Substack experience! And I don’t just mean the Nazi stuff. Though if I start playing a dating sim on Dorian where a hunky shirtless wolfman tells me “Jews will not replace us,” I will throw my phone down the goddamn toilet. (And learn how to program in Ren’Py.)
Recently, I watched a YouTube video called “Death of the Follower & the Future of Creativity on the Web,” an SXSW talk from earlier this year by Patreon founder Jack Conte. It’s a terrific talk if you’re interested in why the creator economy blossomed in the early 2010s and why she ain’t what it used to be. The TLWW (Too Long Won’t Watch) version is that the proliferation of the follow / subscribe button on sites like Twitter and YouTube, combined with linear feeds showing users content from creators they chose to follow, allowed creators to grow their audiences and reach them directly. When platforms moved to an algorithmic feed to feed you nonsense content that makes you angry, the subscribe button lost weight and creators lost audiences. Jack said something towards the end of the talk that really stuck with me…
“Everywhere we look today as creators, the gravity is just pushing us to make for other reasons than why we set out to make things in the first place. It’s so important to remember to make beautiful things. To make things that light you up and to make things that you care about.”
By “gravity,” he means the needs of powerful tech platforms. A classic example of gravity shifting was the infamous “pivot to video.” Facebook feeds used to be populated with links to written articles shared by your middle school friend who’s a Republican now? In 2015, Facebook issued a public statement saying that video views on their platform surpassed 1 billion. Consequently, the company tweaked the algorithm of their news feed to decrease the popularity of text articles and increase the popularity of Facebook hosted videos. News outlets, websites, and magazines across the industry pivoted to video, firing their journalists and editors to focus their efforts on cheaply made videos with no sound. A lot of them had no sound, it was weird. Anyway, it was all based on a lie. The following year, Facebook publicly admitted their video numbers were artificially inflated to trick advertisers, and a later court case revealed they may have inflated their numbers by as much as 900%. Yikes! That’s way more than 100%, which is supposed to be the most percent.
Substack has virtual “boot camps” for creators to teach them how to grow their newsletters and “go paid,” aka monetize them. I did one of these bootcamps with a group of fiction writers, and we were making fun of the Zoom calls in a Discord side-channel. Their advice was obviously geared towards the types of nonfiction writers who succeed on their platform, like political opinion writers who siphoned off a large following from, like, Vox. These are the types of creators who thrive in Substack’s ecosystem. Under their gravity.
Substack beat the drum for monetization hard while I was on the platform, regularly adding “features” to incentivize monetization, like verification-looking checkmark badges for authors whose newsletter reaches a certain number of paid subscribers, but no corresponding badge for when a newsletter reaches a certain threshold of free subscribers. When I was in their ecosystem, I got a lot of messaging about “going paid,” the pivotal moment in a young newsletter creator’s life when they begin charging $5 a month for subscriptions. To be clear, I think writers deserve to be paid for their work. Absolutely no shade to any creator charging for anything, whether it’s a game, a newsletter subscription, a book, an album, or animal sculptures made from arm hair. Get those buckeroonos! But looking back on it now, I can see how the gravity at Substack pushes writers to go paid, because that’s how Substack makes money. They take a cut off each subscription, so writers were encouraged to write more frequently than they otherwise would, or write content that converts better, because Substack incentivized it.
Dorian is a platform, too. Creators sign up to make their own games. So I understand why Jess wants to foster a gravity towards maximum monetization. It helps Dorian and those creators looking to turn dating sims into a side hustle. More power to them. And this is not meant to characterize Dorian, a small dating sim publisher, as some kind of heartless corporate overlord. They’re doing what they need to do to grow as a business.
Amanda and I don’t have a “growth mindset” about this project. To paraphrase Jack Conte, we’re looking for a project that lights us up. So we’re not treating Dorian like a platform. We’re not making content for the Dorian algorithm or even explicitly for the Dorian audience. We’re working with Dorian as our publisher, outside the gravity of its creator ecosystem. Our sexy superhero dating sim is for us. If we make a little money from it? Cool. If we entertain some players? Awesome. But when I look back on this project, I will ask one question first and foremost: Was the process of making the game fun?
I told Jess that Amanda and I enjoy making things together and a Dorian dating sim gives us a nice, complementary structure to pour our combined creativity into. Jess fully respected that, and said a lot of other creators feel the same way. She said she looked forward to playing our pilot. We’d have the art and marketing support of Dorian to assist us. All I wanted to close my inbox and start writing.
🎲 Your Turn: Do you ever feel the gravity of social media and the creator economy? How do you navigate it? Do you think we’re navigating tech company pressures as artists in a healthy way? Reply to this email or hit the orange button below to tell the world.
📨 Next Time: A surprise announcement, I think? Oh boy, we’ll see!!
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