AMA - Hi all, I'm Indie Game Joe
who can name that action figure to my very right??
Right, so, fair warning before you read all this. This is a long one, like genuinely long, and I debated cutting it down and keeping it brief but honestly, if I'm going to do this properly then I want to do it properly, you know? So, if you don't like walls of text, this might not be for you haha. I also want to say that parts of this were actually quite difficult to write, and I caught myself getting quite emotional rereading certain bits of it, which I wasn't expecting if I'm being completely honest. But I hope that if you take the time to read it, and you've maybe been through something similar or you're going through something right now, that some of it lands in a way that feels useful or at least a bit less lonely. Okay. Here we go.
So who actually am I
My name is Joe Henson, I'm a video game marketing consultant, I helped co-start Digital Cybercherries, and I'm the person behind the Indie Game Joe Twitter account that some of you have been seeing pop up a lot lately. And I want to get one thing out of the way immediately because I mean this genuinely and I don't want it to come across the wrong way. I am not here with any kind of "YOU SHOULD KNOW WHO I AM" energy. I really, really am not. I'm just a bloke who has been on a bit of a journey and thought it was finally time to actually talk about it properly rather than in scattered interviews and tweets over the years.
I left school at 15, and no, not because I thought I was too cool for it or anything like that lol, more because school was genuinely awful for me in a way that I didn't really have the language to explain at the time. I was bullied quite badly, I struggled to make friends, I was in and out of special needs classes (it's what they called it back then), and I'd been tested for ADHD and other things so many times throughout the late 90s and early 2000s that it became almost a running joke, except it wasn't funny at all because every single time the answer came back as "borderline" or something along the lines of "we think there's something there but we can't formally say." Nobody ever just gave me a straight answer and I spent a lot of years carrying that uncertainty around without really knowing what to do with it. I'll come back to this because it becomes quite important later.
After school I went straight into the family painting and decorating business (this was around 2007) and honestly, for over 10 years, that was all I knew. It's an experience I'm forever grateful for, not just because I had the privilege of working alongside my dad and two brothers, but also because I learned a huge amount about dealing with people and managing customers, stuff that I actually still use every single day in what I do now, and I genuinely don't think I'd be half as good at the community side of things without those years of working face to face with real people who had real opinions about what you'd done to their living room haha. But since my teenage years I'd been obsessively building fansites for my favourite games, like genuinely obsessively, and I kept doing that all through those years too, and it was actually through those that by around 2013 I made some really amazing friendships with some guys who were actually inside the industry, which still kind of baffles me when I think about it. In 2015, with those guys, we decided to just go for it and start our own studio. That became Digital Cybercherries. Most of us were still working full time jobs when we started, I was still decorating, and it was this kind of chaotic brilliant terrifying thing where we were just figuring it all out as we went. It wasn't until 2020 that I finally left the family decorating business and went completely full time with the games and with Indie Game Joe, which honestly still feels like a bit of a pinch yourself moment when I think about how far we'd come from those early days.
The games
Our first game was Hypercharge: Unboxed and if you want the honest version of that story, the 2017 launch was a disaster. I've said this publicly before and I'll say it again because there's no point sugarcoating it. The game wasn't ready, the team wasn't in the right mindset, there was a lot of feature creeping and a lack of direction, and most of the team ended up leaving. The few of us who remained looked at each other and had a genuine conversation about whether to just walk away from it entirely, and we decided we weren't done, we didn't want to give up. We have a funny joke we always go back to where I said "you can't polish a turd, but you can roll it in diamonds" lol. So we rebuilt it, and I mean not tweaked it, not patched it, we stripped everything back and rebuilt it from scratch based almost entirely on community feedback, and the Early Access 2.0 version that came out in 2019 was a completely different game. It eventually hit #2 on Steam's top global sellers list and #2 on Xbox, which I still find kind of surreal to say, and we launched it on Nintendo Switch and PlayStation too with crossplatform support, all in house ourselves. That comeback is probably the thing I'm most proud of professionally, not because of the numbers, but because of what it required from us as people to not give up when it would have been so much easier to just move on.
Then there's Don't Scream, which is a bit of a different story because it was a challenge I decided to set myself. I led the design and did all the marketing myself, and I also want to be upfront here because I think it's important and also kind of funny in a self-aware way. I am not a game developer in the traditional sense. I cannot code, I am not technical, what I do is closer to game design in terms of thinking about mechanics and hooks and the experience of playing something, but the actual building of it, that's not me, that's genuinely (you guys) talented people who know what they're doing. I joke around and call myself a Temu game dev, at least rated 5 stars lol, and honestly when I first said that about myself I felt a bit offended for approximately two seconds before deciding it was completely accurate and actually quite funny. But I really wanted to push myself with Don't Scream. I hired a talented friend to handle the technical side of things while I led the whole direction, and I just really wanted to see if I could take everything I had learned about marketing and game design and lead something from start to finish entirely on my own terms. We got it done in five months, everything timed perfectly for Halloween, and it sold over 100,000 copies in less than a week, and I won a Shorty Award for Best Launch Campaign for the marketing behind it, which I'm super proud of. Looking back some of it still makes me go "how did that actually work" but I'm incredibly proud of it.
I'm also involved in Paranormal Tales, which was originally my game that I was leading the design of and did all the marketing for, its a bodycam horror game that's now being co-developed with Digital Cybercherries and got over 70,000 wishlists from its announcement alone.
The stuff that was harder to write
Okay so this is the part I mentioned at the start, the part that got a bit emotional when I was rereading it, so please bear with me and hopefully everything starts to make sense lol.
In 2024 I became a dad, and becoming a dad was and still is the single most incredible thing that has ever happened to me. My little boy is everything. But something happened alongside it that I wasn't prepared for and that I don't think I've talked about this openly before, so here goes.I want to be clear, being a parent is hard, like genuinely hard, and I knew that going in, but I remember thinking to myself, this feels like more than just the normal hard, this feels like something else entirely, like I was struggling in a way that didn't quite make sense even to me, and I couldn't figure out why.
I had, by any reasonable measure, built the life I had always dreamed of. Amazing wife, beautiful healthy baby, dream job, working every day with people who are genuinely my closest friends, making games for a living. And I remember sitting in my office one day thinking, I've reached the top of this mountain, the actual mountain I spent my whole life looking up at thinking I could never get there (oh man this is hard to write). And I have everything, I genuinely have everything, and I still felt completely and utterly alone. Not because I wanted more, not because anything was missing in an obvious way, just this horrible hollow feeling that I couldn't explain and couldn't shake and honestly couldn't justify to myself either. Because how do you sit there with all of that and still feel like something is wrong? It felt deeply selfish and felt like a betrayal of everything I'd worked for. I felt guilty about it constantly, which of course made it worse, and I got into a pretty dark place, probably the darkest I've been, and I've had some dark patches throughout my life.
So, with the support of my wife I eventually decided to go private and get properly tested for ADHD, because the "borderline, we're not sure" answer from my childhood had never really gone away and again, with becoming a dad I felt like it was time to actually know and see if there is support out there, because I really wanted to give my son the best shot at life without me messing him up. It was a lengthy process, and the result was, to put it plainly, full blown ADHD, depression, childhood trauma, traits of autism, and something called Rejection Sensitive Dysphoria which I had never even heard of until that point. The full load, as I now describe it, usually with a slightly hysterical laugh lol.
The ADHD diagnosis genuinely reframed my entire life. So much of what I'd spent years thinking was a personality flaw or a character weakness, or that I'm just stupid like I was always told, suddenly had an explanation. The hyperfocus, the impulsivity, the way I could put everything into something that excited me and then feel completely lost when there wasn't a clear next thing to move toward, all of it made sense in a way it just never had before.
Why I started sharing indie games, and why I don't charge for it (FINALLY)
So there I was, in the middle of all of this, and we (Digital Cybercherries) were in pre-production on a bunch of new projects (kinda still are) which meant things were naturally a lot quieter than usual. And I remember sitting at my desk one day feeling genuinely useless, genuinely low, and thinking, I know there is more in me than this, I know I have something to give, I just need to find a way to use it.
It may sound cringe or cliche but I literally just had a thought one day and went, I should start posting about indie games, it'll give me something to do, I'm good at marketing games, I love helping people, so why have I never tried this before? And honestly? Dopamine. That's the most accurate word for it and I'm not embarrassed to say it at all. It gave me a small goal each day, a little bit of purpose, something to wake up and work toward. And I genuinely love finding a game to put more eyeballs on it. I love the moment a developer messages me because their wishlists have spiked and they're completely in shock, that feeling, it's just amazing, it makes me so happy for them.
And honestly, seeing all my socials grow this fast, and the community that is being built aaround it, has made me realise that the bigger IndieGameJoe gets, the bigger the spotlight I can put on indie games, and that's become a proper goal for me now. More reach means more devs getting a chance they might not have had otherwise, which also means more dopamine for me, so really everyone wins lol.
I've now posted over 150 indie games and I have never charged a single penny for any of it, not once. And I want to be completely clear about this because I know it's something people have been wondering about and I want to put it to rest properly. I make the vast majority of my income from the games I make with Digital Cybercherries. The consultancy side of my work, which yes I do have a website for and yes it took me about two years to build and I am genuinely very proud of it haha, is honestly more of a portfolio and a confidence thing than a commercial thing. I barely do consultations and when I do it's either free or for genuinely significant projects. So there is no paid promotion scheme, there is no agency running quietly in the background, and honestly my ADHD brain would not physically allow me to create and manage an invoicing system for 150 developers anyway, so there's that. Although, if we're being technical about it, devs are absolutely paying me in dopamine, so maybe I'm not as generous as I make out haha.
And even setting all of that aside, if I WAS charging for promotional posts, which I want to be clear I am not, there would be nothing inherently wrong with that. Loads of people monetise their reach and their expertise and I'm not judging anyone who does. I'm just saying that's not what this is and it never has been.
On the skepticism, which I genuinely understand
A person doing nice things on the internet. How suspicious. How weird! Like, I get it, I really do, and I think healthy skepticism is a completely reasonable response to something that looks too good to be true. But I also want to say, and genuinely not in a braggy way at all, I haven't just spawned out of nowhere like a random Pokémon lol. I've been marketing games for over 10 years now and I've learned a crap ton along the way, mostly through mistakes if I'm being honest, but that experience is very real and it's what's behind everything I post. Simon Carless at GameDiscoverCo and Chris Zukowski at HowToMarketAGame have both (here and here) covered and recommended my work multiple times over the years, which I'm genuinely really proud of, and Chris recently did an independent data analysis of my posts, sampled 20 of them, tracked views and wishlists and likes, and found a Spearman correlation of 0.95 between views and wishlists. The results are real, they're consistent, and they didn't come from anything other than years of figuring out what makes content perform and genuinely caring about the games I post. There is no secret, there is no bot farm, no russian bots, there is just a lad from West Yorkshire with ADHD who gets a dopamine hit from helping indie devs and has spent a long time learning what works, mainly by getting things wrong first. That's actually all it is.
What I look for, and how to reach me
Just to make something else clear here as well. I am not a content creator, I am not an influencer, I don't think of myself that way at all and I never have. I'm a Temu game designer idea guy and marketing consultant who shares games because he genuinely enjoys it and finds it meaningful.
What I look for is honestly not that complicated. I look for games that make me feel something quickly, because if I feel something in the first couple of seconds then there's a good chance other people will too, and anything with a concept that makes someone go "wait, what, I need to know more" has a real shot. I also share games where I can just tell a dev is really trying, where I can feel the effort and the heart in what they're making even if it hasn't found its audience yet. I'm a massive empath, always have been, and I honestly just share what I feel like at the time.
Something I don't think people always realise is that I also don't just take an official trailer and post it. I re-edit the footage specifically for social media and specifically for the algorithm, starting with the strongest possible moment and cutting anything that doesn't immediately earn its place, and that can take me anywhere from 20 minutes to over an hour depending on the game. It's not as easy as it sounds and I really do care about devs getting the most out of each post, because the happier you are the happier I am, and the happier my dopamine is lol.
I'm also actively working on sharing more pixel art games. Historically 3D has been my natural comfort zone because of my background with Digital Cybercherries and the kinds of games we make, and I think that's created a bias I want to correct.
The best place to reach me is my Discord. I can scan through submissions much more easily there and I'm a lot less likely to miss things than in DMs where I can get pretty overwhelmed pretty quickly. I can't promise I'll post every game I receive but I read everything, and I genuinely mean that.
One more thing before you ask me stuff
I don't share any of this, the ADHD, the dark place after becoming a dad, any of it, for sympathy. I want to make that very very clear. I share it because I think it's important for people in this community to know that the person posting their games is not some untouchable success story who has had it all figured out the whole time. I've been scared, I've doubted myself constantly (I still do.) And I've had days where I genuinely didn't know how I was going to keep going, and I've spent more of my life surviving than actually living, and that's something I'm only really starting to understand and work through now. So if any of this resonates with you, if you're in a hard place right now or you've been through something similar, I just want you to know that it does get better and that reaching out, whether to someone you trust or to a professional, is genuinely worth it even when it feels impossible.
Oh, before I forget, I also want to say that making games is an incredibly vulnerable thing. It's like an extension of yourself, you're showing a part of who you are, something that you love to the world, and just hoping they might love a little bit of it too. And that is scary, like genuinely scary, and the fact that you guys are standing here doing that every day takes massive balls. Applaud yourselves honestly, because it really is not easy, making games in general is not easy, and you really do have my respect for it.
Right. BREATHS. That's me. I don't know what else I can say unless you want to know what I had for breakfast this morning lol. IT WAS 4 LARGE EGGS AND A SLICE OF WHOLEMEAL TOAST. But yeah, I've likely missed things out, my brain is absolutely fried now guys.
- Joe