TikTok Live is helping some indie games find a larger audience
Indie games in particular are having a moment on TikTok Live, where some smaller streamers have said they’ve found success attracting new audiences with more off-the-radar titles.
When Konrad Pawlikowski finished making his lighthearted horror game, he committed a cardinal sin of game development: He didn’t market it.
But as an indie developer who makes games in his spare time, he didn’t think he needed to. Please Stop Crying, a first-person fatherhood simulator, was a passion project. He worked on it while he was juggling parenting his infant daughter and working his full-time job making interactive learning modules for an oil and gas company.
In March, after a month of having worked on the game, he uploaded it to the platform Steam, where he priced it at $2.99 per download. Much to his surprise, Please Stop Crying became a hit on a different platform: TikTok.
For years, TikTok has been a go-to for music discovery — giving lesser-known artists a way to rise to stardom if their songs go viral. Now, some indie developers like Pawlikowski say the platform is having a similar impact in the gaming world by helping bolster smaller titles.
“I definitely think TikTok has a lot of marketing potential for small indie developers,” Pawlikowski, 25, said. “As a game dev, it’s amazing when you see people playing and enjoying your game.”
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