coverMyGame

Most platforms that connect game developers with creators ask for a subscriber count or a quality bar before you can use them properly. Those are fair rules that happen to lock out everybody who is starting. This is the one I wanted when I started, and what I am trying to do differently. There are already plenty of places where game developers and creators find each other, and most of them work. I am not here to tell you they are broken. I am here because I could not get through the door of any of them when I started, and I doubt I am the only one.

The bar is invisible once you are over it

Look at what most of these platforms ask for before you can use them properly. A subscriber count. A channel that has been going a while. On the other side, a game that clears somebody’s quality bar, with a trailer that looks like it had a budget and a store page that looks like a studio wrote it.

None of that is unfair. If you are running a service at scale, thresholds are how you keep the quality up and the noise down, and every one of those rules was written for a good reason. The trouble is that they are invisible to everybody already past them, and they are the entire experience if you are not.

A developer shipping their first game has no reviews to point at. A creator on their second month has no subscriber count to clear a floor with. Both of them are exactly the people who would get the most out of finding each other, and both of them are the people the rules are written to filter out.

I hit this from both sides

I am building a YouTube channel myself, and starting was harder than I expected. Not the making: the getting anywhere near the games. Every route to a developer wanted a number I did not have yet. And the same week I would read a post from somebody who had just shipped a first game asking, in earnest, how on earth you get anyone to look at it.

So this is not market research. I am building the tool I wanted to use, and if it is useful to other people starting out then that is the whole of the ambition. Everything in it exists because it annoyed me first.

The other half: being reachable should not cost this much

The flip side of being hard to reach is being too easy to reach. Once one address of yours is out there, you get PDFs. You get press kits you did not ask for. You get the same letter eleven times from eleven people who all bought the same list, and a few that are not letters at all but somebody trying to get into your account.

And the honest bit, which nobody says out loud: sometimes I do not want to talk to anybody. I want to look at what is there, take the thing I am interested in, and get on with it. Having to open a conversation with a stranger before anything can happen is a real cost, and for a lot of people it is the cost that stops them.

So you decide how much of this you want

This is the part I care most about getting right. How much contact you accept is a setting, not a character trait, and both extremes are supported on purpose.

• Say what you actually want sent, and nothing outside it reaches you. If that is nothing at all, that works too, and it costs you nothing to say so.

• You never have to negotiate. A creator can look through the games here and ask for a key; a developer can say yes or nothing. No pitch meeting, no small talk, no thread.

• Or talk properly, if that is what you like. Some of the best coverage comes out of two people actually getting on. The point is that it is a choice you make, not a toll you pay.

A feedback loop that goes both ways

The thing missing from almost every version of this is what happens afterwards. A developer sends a key into the dark and never learns whether the video happened, whether it landed, or why not. A creator covers a game and never hears whether it moved anything.

Both sides get to say what worked here, and both sides get to read it. Two people getting better at this beats two people guessing at it, and over enough rounds that is the thing that makes a small channel and a small studio worth each other’s time.

It is not unique, and that is fine

I want to be straight about this, because a launch post that claims to have invented something is the first sign that it has not. This is not a new idea. Plenty of people are doing a version of it, and several of them are doing it well.

If there were one car maker in the world we would all still be driving the same car. Things get better because somebody builds the version they wanted and other people turn out to want it too. So: no corporate look, no corporate rules, a low front door, and someone at the other end who answers. I am flexible, I will take feedback seriously, and I would rather change my mind in public than defend a decision I have gone off.

What is not built yet

It would be easy to write all of that as though the thing were finished. It is not, and pretending otherwise would break the first rule on the card above.

• I do think about how this pays for itself one day, but none of that is built: no checkout, no billing page, nothing to buy. Use the whole thing for free while that is true.

• I am still running interviews with developers and creators, and the answers still change what gets built next.

Come and punk your way through this with me

That is genuinely how this feels: no publisher, no permission, no waiting to be picked. Building the room I wanted to be in, and leaving the door open.

Accounts are not open yet. Leave an address on the waiting list and I will write when they are. I may ask you for a short interview before then, and nothing else.