I’d totally forgotten about the jurisprudence headline. God it’s good.

Some old faves:
- Stupid, stupid, stupid man drops omelette
- Car wreck turns frown upside down
- Door either locked or heavy or not door
- Cry for help annoying

Someone in the Clippers FO must have a fetish for bad PR.

#NBAsky

100%. In my world, it’s all “awareness” and “consideration“ now. And, if it’s media based, “$[x] worth of coverage” (with [x] being how much it would’ve cost to get that coverage if we paid for it). Anything to avoid dealing with that pipeline being dead and having to change.

(For real, though, @aftermath.site is great. One of the few sites I visit on the reg. Also a great example of smart people steadily building their own thing.)

You can build that audience, though. Of course you can. It’s just… hard as hell. And requires enough time/money to do that without needing a sustainable patch then and there.

Alas: most media funding chases dumb shit. As Brad Esposito once said: there’s money in media, just not for you.

But those journos are working to get enough eyes to find the small % who will subscribe, click ads, whatever they need to stay afloat. And the slice of those people who will also follow them down the What The Hell Is This Game? path is small.

And that’s where the scale thing comes back into play. Indie games need such a massive number of eyes on them to find the small % of ppl who will buy the game. So they look to journos who, ostensibly, have some eyes.

The odds of that 4X game being the next new thing I decide to do are so damn low – and it’s an example of “indie games -> journo -> reader” pipeline working. And then! Will I keep paying for Aftermath, the site Luke writes for? Dunno! I like it; it’s great. But also: [gestures towards everything].

But what are the odds I’ll but it? Low as hell. Because it’s competing with: the 750+ games across my various libraries, the ~500 books on my bookshelves, the dozen boardgames and TTRPGs also on my bookshelf, the act of going for a walk.

And *even then*… problems. Because then you hit the conversion issue.

A practical example: I read a lot of @lukeplunkett.com’s work. If they say “this is a good 4X game” I think “oh, cool, I like that genre”. Maybe I’ll remember the name; maybe I’ll wishlist it (maybe).

They don’t scale *until they do* – some people will hit a critical mass of “people who trust them” such that they can cover whatever they like and have a sustainable platform (but those ppl then enter into different nightmares of scale). But those people are rare.

And that is *so damn hard*. It requires trust in both the institution and the individual writer – both of which are, again, *so damn hard* to build because the most common means of discovery (search results, social feeds) don’t suuuuuper care about either.

That means two things: steadily building a loyal audience for the thing you want to do (and grappling myriad other nightmares of scale) and nailing the things you already know can hit big.

Indie games, by definition, are swings because no-one knows what they are. You need to convince ppl to care.

You enter the nightmare of scale.

Every publication will have *some* number they want to hit to be sustainable: readers, subscribers, page views, whatever. No matter how well meaning, they’ll optimise for that goal at some point (otherwise they’ll shutter).

Thus, second, platform hell.

Even if you *do* want to cover indies, you need to convince [x] number of people to give a damn – where [x] can represent: readers, executives, tired-as-hell managing editors, marketing ppl, social editors.

Good luck, bud.

But the *goal* of a media industry isn’t supporting [x] industry any more than the goal of the industry is to give media stuff to write about. (See also: media ppl in companies working their asses off for coverage.) Journos are beholden to (a) their masthead, (b) their audience.

Media is adjacent to – but distinct from – the things they cover. You need that distance to cover it well. When healthy, it’s a parasitic relationship (complimentary); they feed off each other.

First, I don’t think it’s the job of media to *support* any one facet of the industry it’s covering. Reviews/coverage also form one small part of a journos coverage: news, investigations, whatnot (to the extent they even existed in games media).

it's. so. good.