The Culture: Again, Hate The Game

Pat has to remind people, as Professor Dungeon Master did previously, that you really need to hate the game.

The fact is that YouTube, as with all social media and search engines--made worse now by all the bots now powering all of this--out there, is algorthim-driven.

Pat, Prof DM, etc. do the videos that they do because this is what must be done to get eyeballs on the topic AT ALL.

What do I say about Normies? They don't go out of their way for ANYTHING. You have to get in their faces to get their attention. That's what playing for the algo does, and it is a necessary element of competent, effective marketing and public relations for any form of public engagement.

Most people in the hobby are Normies. They don't go out of their way. They buy at Big Store, they buy Big Brand, they play the game the way that is given to them, and that's it. It is rare for them to engage it anything deeper than that, which is despite experiences where this bit them badly in the ass why they are constantly caught out by those who know this mentality and exploit it.

Pat knows this. Prof DM knows this. Every other successful YT channel knows this. That's why they hate the game yet seek to master playing it.

"But what can we do?"

You're going to have to accept an old truism of Indie Writers: Build Your Mailing List.

This is not hard anymore thanks to platforms like Substack; Patreon and Subscribestar have this as a function also. More small publishers and one-man bands need to be incorporating direct-to-email communications in their operations, as they do not rely on algos, and all other social media should be driving people to that instead of to your Twitter/YouTube/whatever.

In short, the #EliteLevel way to do this is use the big media to drive traffic to the email list that you control. Many of the aforementioned options permit embedding video and audio natively, rather than just via another platform like YouTube or Rumble, so a lot of people do that for podcast releases.

But Pat doesn't have that sort of operation. Prof DM is barely trying. The Pundit does, so he could make it work. Better yet, you can set up your accounts there to give paid subscribers early access to what you publish; lots of authors and game designers already do this.

The winning move is to work the algo to get people through your funnel to your platform.

Do that instead, Pat & Company.