(Q1 - 2026) Quarterly Marketing Thread

After 4 months of having the X/Twitter verified subscription for the engine’s page, I’ve decided to cancel it. The total cost for that time was $26.50, however I can certainly say we’d have gotten more reach from simply doing $25 worth of promoted posts. I also believe that jME’s limited funds would be much better left for our hosting fees or bounties instead of marketing anyways. The only true benefit of the verified subscription was “boosted replies” however there’s also a higher subscription tier (that costs a whopping 40 a month, easily veering into scam territory in my opinion) that gives users even more of a “reply boost” (effectively making the boost for our cheaper tier less effective) and if any of you use twitter, then you likely know how much of a spam-fest the replies on any trending/viral post tend to be. The amount of time it would take replying to game dev related posts to get users’ attention simply isn’t worth it, not by a long shot. A single 8 dollar promoted post would vastly outweigh the benefits of the X/Twitter subscription for a month. So I likely will never revisit the X/Twitter verified subscription for my own game either, and I will be reserving the limited marketing budget I have for more effective forms of marketing. I’d ultimately call it useless for marketing any product/service unless you really have the time to spam replies all day, and even then, I question how effective that marketing strategy is considering some people tend to find that type of behavior annoying if done too much. There’s also a negative stigma that many people have toward profiles that pay for the verified badge, viewing it as a badge of shame of some sorts. Although I think this is truer for average joes and wannabe content creators with the verified subscription who spam every trending post with memes and rage bait in an attempt to get noticed, and being verified likely isn’t viewed as negatively for game devs or organizations like jME that actually have a product/service to provide, but the fact that there is a negative stigma at all is still an important aspect to consider. So the verified subscription was worth trying, but in hindsight it is definitely not worth it, and there’s much better uses of a marketing budget that would yield better results for marketing a game engine or an indie game.