Social Media Campaign - 10 days later

It’s been ten days since OWI announced their newest social media campaign, which caused an ambivalent at best or what could even be described as hostile reaction from the community. I have since monitored the changes in subscribers using Socialblade and wish to disclose my findings to the rest of the community who might not be in daily contact with me.

Youtube - An open question

I decided to handle Youtube first, because it is the only social media page I couldn’t keep track of. Not because I didn’t try, but rather due to the fact that Youtube only discloses subscriber changes in one hundred increments, so finer measurements are impossible.

What we could discern is that Youtube gained a hundred subscribers since the campaign was announced, however, it is unclear when the bulk of these one hundred people arrived as it could have easily happened as a coincidence, unrelated to the puzzle game.

Instagram - Peaked early

Instagram looked like an absolute success story at first with gaining 42 subscribers, however, the tide soon turned and on the current day the page was hit with a loss of 25 subscribers, this along with some other minor losses ultimately caused a net gain of only 8 new subscribers to OWI’s Instagram page.

Twitter - Stagnation

Twitter largely gained as many subscribers as it lost and while there were major dips in both directions, ultimately it resulted in an amusing net gain of 1 subscriber to OWI’s Twitter as of the time of writing.

Facebook - “It’s fire - and crashing! Oh the Mudokonity!”

While the other social media pages at least saw a minuscule growth, the same sadly can’t be said to OWI’s Facebook page. Since the start of the social media campaign it has lost 65 likes and while it seemed to be stabilizing at first, this has turned out to be a fluke and the page started losing likes quickly afterwards. It is currently projected to lose nearly 300 subscribers every month.

Community backlash

Quite uncharacteristically the social media campaign was met with an almost unanimous backlash from the Oddworld community. Many consider the campaign a stab in the back after the more than two months old promise of releasing Soulstorm’s release date “very-very soon.” Others brought up the fact that OWI has already attempted to gather followers with the similarly ill-fated Oddwall without much success.

There are of course some, who are excited about the campaign and have promised to share it with their friends, but their numbers are far smaller.

The stagnation of the media campaign sparked an active conversation on OWI’s Discord server, where several fans discussed their displeasure at the state of things. This ultimately prompted the company’s community manager, Hackattack, to chime in trying to calm the rightfully frustrated fans reassuring them that OWI does in fact care and that they’ll need to figure out a better way to convey things and deliver content. What this entails is not yet known as at the time of writing nothing has changed yet.

On Facebook someone even shared my previous post, which made me feel very good, if you’re reading this, thank you very much!

My thoughts and conclusion

Without the intent to be smug, I (and frankly anyone else who stuck around long enough) have foreseen this, so the current state of things aren’t surprising at all. I still stand by my opinion, doing away with the social media game and just releasing content would bring in way more people than waiting for the less and less likely event that so many new people appear from thin air.