There is a real chance ofTikTokbeing banned in the United States if potential bills are signed into law and Chinese owner ByteDance opposes selling the platform. There is a lot to talk about with this, ranging from everything to controlling the information we have access to and trying to prevent international powers from gaining access to user data, most of which our own governments and those around the world have access to already.
It’s a scare tactic, an especially prescient one in a presidential election year. But as someone who, unfortunately, lives in Great Britain, I view this potential ban quite differently. If it were to become a reality, my use of the social media platform would transform entirely. Apart from learning about what ‘gooning’ is and watching videos of Taylor Swift concerts I didn’t grab tickets for, most of my feed revolves around video games. That and Jeremy Allen White.
Even if TikTok is banned, Congress is too boomer-coded to realize that the majority of posts on Twitter and Instagram are just reposts of popular TikToks anyway. Good luck trying to put a stop to that.
Enthusiasts will share cool tidbits from games old and new, while speedrunners impress with incredible skills and strategies. A lot of the time, you might even stumble across quizzes that ask you to guess screenshots or theme tunes, throwing in a slice of nerdy trivia to my usual habit of doom-scrolling. Most fascinating, though, is the presence of video game developers and publishers, who have taken to the platform as both a marketing tool and a means to try and communicate with their audiences.
Plenty of the ones I follow, likeLarianorMassive Monster, don’t operate from within the United States, but I’d like to bet a bunch of their audience does. Having this source of information taken away is a big deal, and I hope it doesn’t negatively affect studios that are already having a hard time staying afloat.
Much of the content produced by companies boils down to silly memes that make use of popular sounds and trends, often to millions of views and likes that throw them right onto trending pages. Do it right, and you can gain hundreds of thousands of followers in mere days. But more fascinating is how TikTok’s mixture of short and long-form video content helps to demystify the craft of game development, or to allow viewers to peek behind the curtain at how games, both big and small, are made.
Marketing for video games is known mostly for being incredibly polished and curated, ensuring that audiences will leave both impressed and ready to throw down a pre-order.Even attempts to delve deeper into this creative process, such as The Last of Us Part 2’s Lost Levels don’t take this far enough.
If the ban goes through, it will be interesting to see how developers operating inside the United States will take to the change, or abandon the platform altogether.
TikTok has allowed the industry to buck that ingrained behaviour, turning the intricacy of game development into not just a marketing tool, but an educational one. Over the past couple of years, I’ve become an avid follower of developers likeFabrazGames, a small developer responsible for the fiendishly challenging platformer Demon Turf.
He’s candid about every aspect of the production, the challenges he faced, and how the launch played out and what changes he hoped to make as he slowly built an audience.I even spoke to him ahead of launch about using TikTok as both a marketing and community engagement tool, something that comes naturally because of how the platform works.
It’s also a space that gives unlikely games a way to shine; games that might not receive a traditional chance elsewhere. Or to find an audience in like-minded circles where toxicity so ingrained in this industry can be phased out or curated so much more effectively.
While based in the UK, the small team behindBillie’s Bust-Up has accrued almost 500,000 followers on TikTokand, through their following, has been able to raise funds, take the game to trade shows, and innovate on the experience in real-time following feedback from fans and like-minded creators. TikTok is outfitted with so many more layers than something like Twitter or Facebook, adopting what I’d describe as an ‘old-school forum’ feel with the fast-paced nature of modern social media.
These are just two cases I’ve pulled from a pile of hundreds, and chances are there are many more teams who just haven’t appeared on my feed, thanks to the algorithm. Goodness knows how many independent communities and smaller studios are not only hoping to sell the game to a new audience, but hopefully foster a following in which they can build on. To know that a ban could take years of hard work away for no good reason kinda sucks, especially as the true holders of power in this industry have no interest in doing the same without a morbid commercial incentive.
Over the past few years, TikTok has grown into the next evolution of social media, providing younger generations with a platform to be heard and creative disciplines to flourish in ways we are still in the process of discovering. As a critic who writes about games for living, it has helped open my eyes to precisely how certain games are made and the hard work going into them, alongside how meaningful it is to form communities away from platforms that have long become defined by their toxicity. TikTok is something new, so of course, powers we can’t intervene with are doing everything they can to take it away. It would be a monumental loss.
Cult of the Lamb
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Cult of the Lamb is a hit indie roguelike, in which you play a lamb who must raise a cult in honour of a mysterious god. Along the way you must indoctrinate new followers and deal with rival cults.
