Why BlueSky Is Not Ready For Game Marketing

BlueSky has been a growing platform, particularly as turbulence continues at X (formerly Twitter). X’s implementation of charging for its API, the requirement of a Blue Mark subscription for basic functionality, and the controversial political stances taken by the company’s leadership have not worked in X’s favor, resulting in nearly an 80% loss in value. Enter BlueSky.

BlueSky is a potential platform for marketing your game, and at Glitch, we’re fans of BlueSky. Even on our brand account (not a personal one), we’ve managed to organically grow our follower count to over 1,000 in just 24 days—a testament to the platform’s growth potential.

While we love BlueSky, it’s not without its challenges when it comes to marketing your game effectively. In this article, we’ll discuss some areas where the platform could improve to become a marketing powerhouse for your game.

Needs to Show Impressions

While some people believe impressions are a vanity metric, we disagree and we wrote about the reasons here. Impressions are an important way to raise awareness about your game and evaluate the health of your content. We measure the engagement rate as the (total engagements/impressions) x 100.

When our clients say, “I wish I had more than 10 reposts of my content,” we currently have no way of determining whether that’s good or bad. If 100 people saw their post and 10 reposted it, that’s a 10% engagement rate, which is phenomenal! On the other hand, if 10,000 people saw the same post and only 10 reposted it, that’s just a 0.1% engagement rate—extremely low and an indicator they may need to rethink their content strategy.

When providing analytics from our social scheduler to our gaming clients, we typically use engagement charts like this:

Without impressions data, we can’t accurately measure content reach or engagement levels. This makes other metrics, like follower count, shares and reactions seem less valuable in isolation. To truly help game developers understand and improve their content performance, impressions are essential.

Better Media Capabilities

When marketing your game, high-quality media is crucial. A visually stunning game is often what persuades people to think, “Shut up and take my money!”

For video content, quality for us means 60 FPS and high bitrates to maintain the richness of the visuals. However, BlueSky’s current 50 MB upload limit forces our social media scheduler for posting content to downgrade videos to 30 FPS or lower, with bitrates under 5,000 kbps. This often turns great videos into subpar content.

Additionally, videos on BlueSky are capped at 60 seconds. Since the average game trailer runs around 90 seconds, this restriction can make it difficult to showcase a game’s full potential. BlueSky needs to improve its media capabilities to help games present themselves in the best possible light.

The last area of improvement is BlueSky’s image upload size. The max size of an image is currently 1 MB if you use their API, and our social media scheduler compresses images to meet this limit. This compression isn’t always the best quality or the best representation of a game’s vibrant media.

Developer-Heavy Audience

At Glitch, we’re a data-driven company, so what we’re about to say is purely anecdotal: the gaming audience on BlueSky feels developer-heavy rather than consumer-focused.

If true, this means that when you market your game on BlueSky, you’re likely reaching other game developers—not necessarily the players who will buy your game. If this isn’t your target audience, it raises the question of whether BlueSky is the best place to build your following.

BlueSky Overall

BlueSky is a great and growing platform with many positive attributes:

• A friendly, relatively non-toxic community
• Great starter tools for new users
• Strong organic growth for accounts

However, from a marketing perspective—especially for games—BlueSky has some shortcomings. That said, we still recommend engaging with the platform during its early growth stages. It’s an easy way to build a following, and as BlueSky continues to evolve, it will likely add features that make it a powerful marketing tool in the future.