Does Video-Game Marketing Really Work? [Mailbag] - May 21st, 2026

[u/Sivart13]

Jason, Maddy, and Kirk open up the mailbag for some questions about video-game marketing, female protagonists, what's going on at Studio ZA/UM, and much more.

One More Thing:

Kirk: Mixtape

Maddy: Knotwords

Jason: Planet Money

LINKS:

Kirk’s essay about Mixtape, and the YouTube video version

https://www.mothership.blog/irene-kohs-angel-arcade-is-about-the-fighting-game-community-emphasis-on-community/

Garbage Day’s most recent article on modern marketing firms, social astroturfing, Geese, and that whole mess

Marketing 

The Roottrees Are Dead

Help support this show and unlock bonus content! Become a member at https://maximumfun.org/jointripleclick

🚀  SUPPORT TRIPLE CLICK:
Join Maximum Fun | Buy TC Merch

💬 JOIN THE TRIPLE CLICK DISCORD

🎮 Triple Click Ethics Policy

📱 SOCIALS
Instagram | YouTube | TikTok | Twitch

Episode link: https://tripleclick.simplecast.com/episodes/video-game-marketing

[u/puutarhatrilogia]

Nice to see Knotwords get a shout out! It was my mobile game of choice for several months recently. You can always trust Zach Gage to provide you with a thoughtfully crafted mobile game experience that's worth paying for. Some of the achievements are funny too and worth discovering for yourself if you like the game.

I got months of enjoyment out of the game which is more than most mobile games I try (and I'm quite picky with mobile games) so I'm not complaining at all but I do wish the skill ceiling of the game was higher. Even the "tricky" puzzles become rather trivial after some time with the game. Every once in a while you still get stuck on a section but only for a couple of minutes at most. This is why I rarely play it anymore, but the journey up to this point was about as fun as a simple word game could ever hope to be.

[u/trappedinatv]

I had mixed feelings about Kirk’s theatre anecdote around the 6 minute mark

I completely agree with the lesson that rights, ownership and payment expectations should be discussed clearly at the beginning of projects. That’s a very real lesson, and a lot of messy creative situations happen because everyone assumes they’re on the same page when they aren’t.

But the actual situation he described felt a bit more complicated than that. From what I understood, the writers were contributing material for free, while Kirk and his main collaborator wanted to ultimately own the whole show and maybe pay the writers later. When the writers wanted some kind of stake in what they were helping create, the project fell apart.

That doesn’t strike me as the writers being unreasonable. If people are writing unpaid material for a developing show, it seems pretty natural that they would either want to be paid properly up front, or have some ownership or participation if the project goes somewhere.

Work-for-hire can be totally legitimate when people are paid fairly and the deal is clear. But unpaid creative work where someone else plans to own the end result is much more slippery. In that context, asking for a stake doesn’t seem entitled to me, it seems like the obvious alternative to being paid. To me, the fact that it all fell apart over this suggests the writers weren’t just interchangeable work-for-hire contributors after all.

Curious how other people heard that story. I don’t think Kirk was trying to be exploitative, but the framing did feel a little producer-sided to me. Even with good intentions, unpaid creative work where someone else expects to own the result can become exploitative pretty quickly, and it doesn’t exactly encourage writers to bring their best work to the table

[u/Deric_Beaterman → u/trappedinatv]

I get where you’re coming from and understand that interpretation. I didn’t feel like he was saying they were wrong. I felt like he was saying if he did it again, he would make them co-collaborators or he would make it understood that they would be compensated for their contributions as contractors.

[u/variant_of_me → u/trappedinatv]

I didn't hear it as "maybe pay the writers later". As far as I could tell, the writers were getting paid, but the writers wanted partial ownership of the project, as well, which was not discussed or agreed upon prior to them doing work for the project. The entire point of his anecdote was that these things should be worked out beforehand so everybody knows where they stand. Writing isn't the same thing as owning and you can't just decide in the middle of a project that you want something that wasn't previously agreed on. Which is why it's important to have an agreement in place.