About four years ago, I made a one-minute video on TikTok about Jay Dragon’s Wanderhome. That video went viral to the tune of nearly a million views. A few months later, Jay showed me the spike in revenue Possum Creek Games saw as a result and told me I had essentially kept the studio’s lights on for three months.
I say this not to suggest that anyone can expect this kind of literal overnight success, and only a little bit to brag, but primarily to illustrate that short-form video is an unbelievably underused avenue for marketing your game.
Don’t know where to start? I’m here to help.
The Very Basics
You don’t need a fancy setup; a phone with a decent camera and some natural light is enough. The first thing you’re going to do is break the seal. Record your first video. Don’t be precious about it; just toss it off. Write yourself a short script if you like, and aim for a minute or less; this will look like two to four paragraphs depending on how wordy you are and how quickly you speak. Sit by a window with natural lighting, frame yourself up, press record, and talk about your game. Give us the elevator pitch. How would you explain your game to a new acquaintance? Most likely, no one will see this video. That’s okay; that’s not why you’re doing it. For now, you’re just getting more comfortable on camera and establishing a workflow.
Maybe you’re a great extemporaneous speaker and you got it all in one take. If not, you’re going to need to edit your video. Personally, I record and edit in-app on TikTok, but you may prefer something different. Lots of folks like CapCut. My partner edits in iMovie on her computer. Most phones have rudimentary video editing software on them. Put your clips together in the right order, trim any long pauses, and upload your finished video.
There are four major short form video platforms: TikTok, Instagram Reels, Facebook Reels, and YouTube Shorts. I find it helpful to have a “main” platform (in my case, TikTok), where I upload my videos, add background music and closed captions, and save the finished product for upload to the other three. Yes, you should upload to all four if you can stomach it. There are different audiences in each place, and you may find a video performs well on one platform while it flops on another.
Congratulations! You’ve done short form video creation! Now do it every day for the rest of your life.
Just Kidding… But Not Really
One truth I learned in the trenches of playing Magic: The Gathering limited formats is consistency is power. The consistency of your posts is a force multiplier on their effectiveness. No, you absolutely don’t have to post every day—or god forbid, multiple times—but the more often you post, the better. The key is to find a schedule and a frequency that works for you. Once a day, three times a week, even once a week are all totally fine. Less frequently than that, and you’re simply not throwing enough spaghetti at the wall.
Because that’s what short form video creation is! Anyone peddling a magic bullet or the secrets of the algorithm is a bullshit artist who’s not to be trusted. The only “magic bullet” is a shotgun shell absolutely packed with lead. It’s the ultimate in iterative experimentation. Just try stuff. Make the same video five different ways and see what does best. Make videos where you play your own game, talk about the design process, show off the art, tell stories from playtesting or campaigns, or just share who you are as a designer. Make a whole video about the smallest mechanic you can. Your game is a jewel with a thousand facets; the beauty of short form is you can make a full video about every facet for three years and never run out of material.
You’re A Designer, You Know About Goals
Before I made any videos at all, I did two things: I picked some creators to model my work on and established my goals. This guided my format while ensuring that the voice in my videos was still my own. You might not know your goals at first, and they may evolve over time. But at least for me, the mission statement I established upfront has been a lodestar for my entire career. It consists of my goals:
Get new players to try RPGs.
Get RPG players to try GMing.
Get GMs to try new games.
And my principles:
Every video must be of value. Stories must be entertaining, advice must be actionable, recommendations must be honest.
No memes, no shitposts. Jokes and skits are okay, but they must have clarity of purpose.
Meet people where they are; assume good faith until proven otherwise, and no unsolicited recommendations or advice.
My goal was to build trust with my audience, so that people knew that when they saw my face pop up on their screen, I would give them something worth their time. Your goals may, and likely will, be different. It can be helpful to outline them before you start, but we so rarely begin a journey with the gift of foreknowledge about its destination. You may simply have to figure it out along the way.
As a game designer, though, it’s likely that your goals include building awareness about your game and converting that awareness to sales. Short form video is incredible for the first and good (but not great) for the second. Marketing wisdom suggests a person needs to hear about your product at least seven times to actually make the purchase. Short form video is currently the best way to tell people about your product at least seven times. When the moment comes, make the conversion as easy as possible. That means filled out bios with easily accessible links on every account you’re posting on.
This is also why posting consistently is so powerful. You never know when a video is going to blow up, and when it does, most algorithms will send the people who watched the high-performing video to your other videos, too. You want a nice backlog of good videos waiting for them. Especially engaged viewers may even seek out other videos on your profile. They liked the video about your fishing minigame; now they want more information about the rest of the system—make sure they can get it! If the platform lets you organize videos into playlists, do that. You are building and maintaining a long-term marketing apparatus that is always working for you in the background.
You Don’t Need To Go Viral
A video getting a lot of views is a big dopamine hit, and with the right positioning, it can mean a lot of sales. But viral videos and follower counts don’t actually matter that much in the long run. They are vanity metrics. On any given video of mine, a majority of my views actually come from accounts that don’t follow me. Only a small percentage of my viewcount comes from followers.
This is for a few reasons; one, algorithms are always working behind the scenes to show you to new people and see how they respond to you. Two, much like how it takes at least seven impressions to get someone to buy, people don’t often instantly follow an account that makes a video they like. You have to prove that you provide consistent (there’s that word again) value to them before they like and subscribe. This is totally fine! It means you have a core audience of your most engaged followers, an outer orbit of viewers who get your videos every so often and watch them (so the algorithm will serve you to them again), and a vast swath of potential audience the platform is constantly combing for you.
This inconstant audience is a blessing that allows you to experiment. You can iterate, try new things, even remake (or repost, though I prefer not to) a video and it will go out to a largely brand-new audience every time. This is what I mean when I say “don’t be precious.” The user base on short form video platforms is less like a crowd seated in an amphitheater with their eyes all trained upon you and more like so many droplets of water in a rushing river. So just make your videos, and don’t worry so much.
Count Your Assets
One thing I have noticed about game designers getting into short form is that they seem to have no idea how much gold they’re sitting on. If you’re wondering what the hell you could possibly make your videos about, this section is for you.
If you have published a game, I guarantee you every single page has the potential to become one short form video at minimum. Is there a cool mechanic on that page? An example of play based on a real session you played? A design challenge you had to solve to get this part of the game to work? An evocative bit of setting? A cool item? Fuck, is there art? Do you have pictures in your game you can show off? What’s the picture of? What’s the story there? Who’s the artist? What made you want to work with them? What about your non-game work? Do you have a blog? What articles have you written? Ever toss off design ideas or noodle around on microblogging sites? Do you run games? What kind of design work or scenario design are you doing for it? Did you make an engaging encounter, treasure, spell, monster, or trap? Or maybe you play? Got any good stories? Did you make any mistakes in designing a game? Things you wish you did differently? Things you would fix in a second edition? What did you struggle with? Got any work in progress? Abandoned projects? A great idea you never found the right game for? I could go on. Every single one of those things can find a renewed audience. Every single one could be an amazing video.
When folks hire me to make promo videos, I always recommend they hire me to do more than one, not just because I make more money, but because it’s genuinely more effective. Of course we make the obligatory overview video, but the more successful video is almost always the one zeroing in on a specific part of the game that makes it special. You have the benefit of knowing every nitty-gritty detail about your game, and I promise that the little things you think are boring would fascinate the right audience. Short form video platforms are purpose-built to find that audience.
As a person with a product to sell, you also gain a few intangible benefits on short form platforms; namely, you aren’t beholden to their monetization schemes, because your money comes from a real-world good you can provide to people rather than your ability to hold their attention. Your videos can be as long or short as they need to be, and you do not ever have to be shy about hyping up your own work. If you don’t believe in it, why should anyone else? Talk about your game like you love it! If you ever feel like you’re harping on it or being annoying, remember the rushing river. Most people who watch your videos are seeing you for the first time. Any video you make could be someone’s first impression of you. I don’t say this to put the pressure on; just the opposite. Every video is a fresh start. Over time, you’ll attract the people who want to hear more from you.
Shaping and Honing
The more stuff you try, the better your sense will become about what works for you, what your audience responds to, and what you actually like doing. The center of this Venn diagram is your short form social media strategy. I couldn’t possibly tell you what it will look like, but I can give you some ideas:
“Talking head” videos straight to camera
Skits or dialogues with two or more characters (usually both played by you) playing your game, reenacting a scenario, or making a point
A micro-AP where you play your own game
Mechanical breakdowns demonstrating and explaining specific rules or procedures
Tutorials for how to run, play, or build characters in your game
Stories from your game, presented as in-universe microfiction
Stories from your game, recounted by you for the camera
A developer log of your work-in-progress
Clips from other video projects you’ve done, like recorded interviews or AP
Short video essays about your process
Modular designs or subsystems people can steal for their own games
A tour of your game where you never even show your face
And this one gets its own shrine:
Reviews and recommendations of other people’s games.
It’s true what they say: as good as it is, self-promo is no substitute for promo. You can do a lot of good work and make a lot of sales promoting your own game, but as my opening anecdote illustrates, it will always be more effective when someone else does it. If we could build a network of game designers hyping each other up on short form video, that rising tide could lift an awful lot of boats.
Go Forth And Make Your Little Tick Tocks
My honest-to-god TL;DR is just do it. Just start, muddle your way through, figure it out as you go. Views and engagement will give you feedback, but don’t take anything too seriously. Block early and often if people are weird or annoying to you. Don’t get into arguments. You don’t have to talk fast, perform, be affable and charismatic, or act enthusiastic… but it does help. You do have to be willing to be publicly vulnerable and put yourself out there. And for the love of god, you can say “fuck” and “die” and “kill.” If I catch any one of you motherfuckers saying “unalive,” I will fucking kill you.
If you need any help with any of this, I would be happy to. I love you all, and I hope I see you out there on the trail.