TikTok Live is helping some indie games find a larger audience

When Konrad Pawlikowski finished making his lighthearted horror game, he committed a cardinal sin of game development: He didn’t market it.

But as an indie developer who makes games in his spare time, he didn’t think he needed to. Please Stop Crying, a first-person fatherhood simulator, was a passion project. He worked on it while he was juggling parenting his infant daughter and working his full-time job making interactive learning modules for an oil and gas company.

In March, after a month of having worked on the game, he uploaded it to the platform Steam, where he priced it at $2.99 per download. Much to his surprise, Please Stop Crying became a hit on a different platform: TikTok.

For years, TikTok has been a go-to for music discovery — giving lesser-known artists a way to rise to stardom if their songs go viral. Now, some indie developers like Pawlikowski say the platform is having a similar impact in the gaming world by helping bolster smaller titles.

“I definitely think TikTok has a lot of marketing potential for small indie developers,” Pawlikowski, 25, said. “As a game dev, it’s amazing when you see people playing and enjoying your game.”

With TikTok’s live feature, which launched in 2019, content creators can livestream from the platform. Livestreaming has been a cornerstone of the gaming world for years on platforms like YouTube and Twitch, where people play games while simultaneously streaming them for their audiences.

Indie games in particular are having a moment on TikTok Live, where some smaller streamers have said they’ve found success attracting new audiences with more off-the-radar titles.

In recent months, games like Fruit Mountain, developed by the Japanese gaming studio BeXide; That’s Not My Neighbor, developed by Nacho Sama; and Content Warning, developed by the Swedish studio Landfall Games, have become wildly popular among streamers on TikTok Live. Hashtags of the game titles have racked up millions of page views.

Sam Clark, known to his followers at @SammyC_TV, said he has seen more engagement streaming on TikTok than he has had on Twitch.

“I think it can be attributed to these indie games,” he said. “They basically kind of helped me explode a little bit.”

Clark said many of his 24,000 followers tune in specifically for his streams playing Fruit Mountain, a game that requires players to toss fruits on a plate and combine them with other fruits.

It has proven to be one of the more popular indie games on the platform. As of April 5, videos including the hashtag #FruitMountain had 87.9 million views. Videos with the phrase “Where to get Fruit Mountain” had 21.6 million views.

TikTok has become an ideal place to popularize simple indie games because viewers can jump into a stream at any time without having to know a game’s backstory, Clark said.

He also described the platform’s endless-scroll homepage as a unique benefit that distinguishes it from Twitch.

In recent years, TikTok has made an effort to entice more gamers to come to its platform. In 2021, it launched The Game Room, an initiative to spotlight gamers who livestream on the platform. TikTok has also added things like subscription perks, features reminiscent of Twitch.

A spokesperson for TikTok didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.

Attention from streamers has helped game developers like Pawlikowski, who said he has already earned a few thousand dollars on Please Stop Crying.

As the traditional gaming industry goes through a transitional period because of mass layoffs and underperforming better-known mainstream games, Pawlikowski said he anticipates indie games will have a moment in the spotlight. He hopes to see more “developers shift their focus.”

“I think there’s a little bit of corporate greed, and nowadays, games are just seen as this, like, dollar signs where they just generate profit,” Pawlikowski said, adding, “I believe games are more about expression and art and just creating something that players would like to play.”

This article was originally published on NBCNews.com