April 15, 2015 - Sargon of Akkad - Carl Benjamin
02:57
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|---|---|
| The hero of the 2011 pixelated adventure game Sword and Sorcery is a brave adventurer known. | |
| As you may or may not be aware, Anit Sarkisian has begun a new series of videos, specifically about positive representations of women in video games. | |
| The first video in this series is about a character called the Scythian, from the 2011 game Super Brothers Sword and Sorcery. | |
| In the video, Anita didn't have a single negative thing to say about the game. | |
| Indeed, everything she said about the game was glowing. | |
| With the aid of a gorgeous and mesmerizing soundtrack, Sword and Sorcery's retro-inspired visuals paint a pleasantly abstract landscape players can navigate through the simple act of tapping or clicking. | |
| And at one point in the video, she actually directly instructs the viewer to stop the video and go and play the game. | |
| Okay, at this point, if you haven't finished the game yet, you should just go do that right now. | |
| This ringing endorsement comes on the back of a video with over 200,000 views after having been tweeted out to her almost 300,000 followers. | |
| So in real terms, what is the effect of this? | |
| What is the effect of Anit Sarkisian, a woman so famous she has been on the Colbert report, to promote your game, a four-year-old game that frankly no one else is talking about. | |
| This video was published on the 31st of March 2015, and despite its glowing endorsement, the effect on the number of people playing Sword and Sorcery was pretty damn low. | |
| A week after this video had been released, Sword and Sorcery had had a peak of 16 people playing it at one time in a day, which increased the peak players per month by one since February. | |
| By one. | |
| And don't think for a second that Anita curating your games will make any difference to those sales. | |
| She has less than 10,000 followers on Steam. | |
| And if we take the example of Sword and Sorcery again, her recommendation on the 9th of December 2014 translated into no noticeable increase in sales. | |
| Anita added Sword and Sorcery to her Steam curation list on December the 9th. | |
| You wouldn't be able to tell that from Steam's record of people playing the game. | |
| This is what the glowing endorsement of Anit Sarkesian gets you. | |
| It doesn't matter how many people watch her video, whether she tweets it out, whether she directly tells people, the thousands, hundreds of thousands of people who follow her, to go and check out your game. |
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