I was on a call last week with an artist looking to finally make the jump to making games. After years of using game engines for cinematics and as a long-time lover of games, he's in a great position to make something truly unique. After walking through the pitch, I asked him what he thinks about distribution.

"Honestly, I'm not even thinking about that. I want to make what I want to make."

The common wisdom would say this approach is...unwise. Games have baked-in fan bases, genres, and expectations. Unless your name is Hideo Kojima and you can't just do whatever. And even then, in Kojima's words from GQ, he's not immune from Big Pressure:

I feel nervous. I feel rushed. I still have a lot of things I want to do—that I need to do. I thought I could do anything if I was independent, but the reality is that I can’t. I always think of other, more weird stuff to make. But if I do that, and it doesn’t sell, my studio will go bankrupt. I know all the staff. I know the families of the staff. I have this burden on my shoulders.

It's a bind. Yes, if you're running a studio, you're in your 60s, or you're hoping this will get you out of gambling debt, by all means, make sure you play by the rules.

But if it's just you? That's a bit different.

After stepping away from journalism and publishing back in 2016, I spent eight years building a small marketing agency that shares the same name as the newsletter you're reading today. I worked with very, very big companies. Intel. YouTube. Lululemon.

Marketing at these organizations was seldom directly responsible for the product. They provided constraints and intelligence, but "the thing" sat in another department: product, engineering, manufacturing. As a marketer, of course, this was frustrating. In the words of the immortal Arnie Pye: "I'm sick of being a reporter, I want to make the news."

In games, there's almost the exact opposite approach to my experience. The first and final question will be what will sell, and then what gets made is separate. This makes a ton of sense if you're a huge publicly traded company. They're not known for being experimental.

But again, that's not you.

This "market first" thinking has worked down to even the smallest creators and artists. They pick Steam tags before prototyping something. They pick unrealistic comparables. ("I really want to make the next GTA V.") They cherry-pick success as a rationale for making a copycat. They try to time the market. It's honestly an impossible ask.

Besides, even research on big firms find that people are most creative when they key in on interest, enjoyment, satisfaction, and challenge inherent in the work itself. "What will sell" can be a practical constraint, but only if it's perceived as a challenge. When it's a mandate, the spirit leaves the body.

One of the things that I love about artists and those coming from outside of games is that they have a formed creative POV. A body of work or a perspective on their practice *first* leads them to make games. It leads you to unusual places. That's your best bet at creating something different.

Don't worry about what's being made right now. You're just getting started. Be different and indifferent. It's the whole reason you're independent in the first place.

Worry about the marketing later. Today has enough troubles of its own.

Don’t worry about marketing your game yet.

Your audience isn't on Steam (and that's ok)