Here's a marketing lesson I learned from Mixolumia the hard way. I really love the game I made, but these are some interesting consequences stemming from the very core of its design and the way the industry has come to rely on influencers/youtubers/streamers

I think it's fair to say Mixolumia has a very simple ruleset that provides a surprising amount of depth and a high skill ceiling. What that means, though, is that you basically get all the "content" up front and everything from that point forward mostly personal joy/achievement

There are discussions to be had about that depth, we've seen an evolving conversation around strategies as players have discovered new ways to push their scores higher. And I've seen some really thoughtful videos from folks diving into that depth!

But that's really hard content to produce, and most people only have time and interest to record or stream their first impressions. And that's where Mixolumia stumbles, because as anyone will tell you, it is HARD to play this game and talk at the same time.

The thing I designed for, that feeling of pulling your brain into this system to puzzle out what's happening and how to make it work in your favor, is a lot of fun (if you're into that) but it almost universally seems to switch resources away from the player's speech center

Watching someone struggle to figure out a game *and* struggle to talk about it is uhhhh maybe not the best content. Like, it would probably serve their channel better to play something with a story that they can read and react to, or something with more spectacle built-in

I don't think this is necessarily a problem with Mixolumia or content creators. It's an unfortunate reality that first-impression style coverage is all a lot of folks have time/resources to make, and my game isn't well suited to that

I'd learned in the past that a game can be fun to play, but doesn't necessarily *look* fun, which is important to getting people playing in the first place. And as the success of the Mixolumia twitter thread demonstrates, this one is great for eye-catching GIFs!

But my lesson for the next thing is that I need to be more aware of how a game will function in the youtuber/streamer ecosystem

So I might amend my high-level goals as follows:
1. A game should be fun
2. A game should look fun
3. A game should be fun to talk about

(substitute "fun" for "engaging" or whatever you like, I'm not getting into that layer of discussion at this moment but know that I'm aware of it and don't prize the happy-happy idea of fun over other experiences)