The Wandering Village is living proof of TikTok’s impact on games

polygon.com:

Sprinkled into TikTok’s endless feed of videos, you can find all sorts of content related to video games. You can see lore analysis videos, cool tips and tricks, cosplay, and, if you’re lucky, thirsty edits of characters like Leon Kennedy. The platform has become a place where people can learn about the games they love and discover new ones. Some games, like The Wandering Village, have specifically flourished thanks to TikTok and have found millions of viewers on the app. But now, that could all go away.

In April, U.S. President Joe Biden signed a bill into law that will ban TikTok if its China-based parent company, ByteDance, doesn’t divest from the platform within 270 days of the bill’s signing. Polygon spoke to Philomena Schwab, a co-founder of Stray Fawn Studio, about how TikTok impacted the development of the team’s game, The Wandering Village. If TikTok went away, Stray Fawn Studio would not just be losing its account but also its direct line to the consumers of games themselves.

“We [had] some pretty big posts even early in development, which reassured us to continue to work on the project for longer because if we hadn’t had that reassurance, not only from TikTok but also from the Wishlist count — like, how many Wishlists we got out of the posts and so on — we probably would have wrapped up the early access version sooner,” Schwab said via video chat. “I think it was good that we didn’t, because it was a pretty good release at the end. It helped us have courage in the game.”

At time of publication, Stray Fawn Studio has more than 68,000 followers on TikTok and has videos that have more than 899,000 views. Statistics like the number of followers on social media platforms can directly impact the success of current and future games. Schwab said she includes social numbers on her pitch decks, which, in turn, can help secure the studio funding. She checked, and roughly 55% of the followers on the Stray Fawn account are American — so the team would lose over half