The fangame community and how marketable it can be

Fan-made creations are something that are emphasised to an extreme degree in the age of the internet. Gone are the days where your newsletters had to be delivered or even emailed to you. You can now get content anywhere and everywhere on the internet. And in terms of a community that has grown at a quick rate due to the internet’s existence, one of the best examples I can think of are fangames.

What are fangames? Fangames are video games made by fans based on one or more established video games. Many fangames attempt to clone or remake the original game’s design, gameplay and characters, but it is equally common for fans to develop a unique game using another only as a template.

To be even more specific, a community that I have come to respect is the Spyro fangame community. The YouTuber CrystalFissure has been covering Spyro fangame content for over a year now, and has been called a “signal-booster” by some fans due to the size of his channel. CrystalFissure has successfully been marketing these fangames because of his passion towards the Spyro series. In many ways, CrystalFissure’s promotion of these games show off just how important marketing is.

There is so much potential for these fangames but if no-one sees them, it may be hard to stay motivated to continue work. But that’s how the internet works. All it takes is one person to link or make a video, and all of the sudden, thousands of people can see this content.

There is a Spyro fangame being developed at the moment that is essentially a made-from-scratch addition to Spyro 2 that adds another world onto the game. It is insane to see just how talented the people working on this game are. The original video promoting the game was uploaded by a developer who didn’t have many subscribers. But when CrystalFissure promoted the video and uploaded his own commentary over the footage, it amassed over 30,000 viewers and sent thousands of fans to the developers’ respective channels and even encouraged others to make their own videos. Just like that, there are thousands of new fans of fan-made content.

Unfortunately though, there is a cost to fan content being promoted. The original publishers of the original IP can send out a cease and desist which effectively ends development of these projects. So it’s basically “get popular, but don’t get too popular..”.