Have you ever seen anyone try it and report numbers? Ads for Facebook are fairly specific. Its creepy how finely you can segment your audience. Industry giants may have larger budgets, which just means that they can cast a wider net. Well targeted ads may have better returns.
Facebook is not the only platform. Reddit, Polygon, and Twitch all have users that would fit your demographic more. Social media personalities (Twitter, Youtube, Tumblr, etc), all will mention your game for the right price. If you have ever seen 'Featured', 'Promoted', or 'Partner' content, then it was paid for. Communities and forums are overvalued for the time investment, especially because they rely on other people to spread your game.
We live in a consumerist society driven by ads. Refusal to use them is silly.
Indie games have become a race to the bottom, and devs are content on watching them slide. If I had a nickel every time I saw a downward sloping sales graph, with a single spike for that one Front Page day, I would have enough for the latest bundle.
Turns out a machete is much easier to use than the machine that is Unix. A machine that will mow down the entire forest in 30 seconds, or blow itself up, depending on what you tell it. Oh, and that machine has 1014 levers, knobs, dials, most of which are only labeled with single letters, or vague snippets.
I am always shocked at how marketing-adverse indie game devs are. Developers invest a ton of their base commodity (time) into a game, but refuse to advertise it or fail to save cash to do so. Instead they rely on front pages, bundles, and sales. Then 9 months latter they do post mortems, where they correlated sales graphs to events. I want to see a sale graph for conversions based on Facebook ads. Mobile/FB Game companies pump out mediocre games, but maintain huge user bases just because people find their games.
Everything thinks that they are going to be Notch and their game will spread by word-of-mouth, because they have a unicorn. Turns out your time-bending, retro, 2D, pixel-art shooter/platformer doesnt have the genius of Virtual Legos, and no one cares about it.
This analogy falls flat when you compare the levels of Unix 'bullshittery' to a shop. In a shop you have a limited number of already working machines that are readily visible. In Unix, you not only have to know how to use the machines, but how to install them, how to repair them, how to select similar, yet slightly different ones, how to copy your machines and make them run the same way in a different location. And on top of that to a novice all of the machines are hidden, and you have to read manuals/tutorials/forums to even know that they exist.
Unix tools can sometimes be horribly obtuse to use when first starting out. As you get use to them, you may discover the elegance of simple programs with pipable output, but their beauty is not readily obvious. Going from Windows installers to apt-get to git clone/make/setup, is a long process. Expecting students to already know this eats up time.
The 'bullshit' he is referring to is not the software itself, but its arcane interface. Think about the first time you tried to install a new version of python, only to have both version end up in your PATH somehow. Or run into permission issues and someone told you to run 'chmod 777.' As a novice, hours are easily lost trying to find the perfect commands to do something, and it often ends up being only one or two lines, something an expert would know immediately.
His job as a mentor is to empower his students to do research, not be sysadmins. Selecting a student based on a pre existing ability to use a tool drastically limits the pool.
Not all ESPs force unsubscribe links. We ultimately put liability on our customers for CAN-SPAM compliance. We had CAN-SPAM compliance checks on by default, but they could be disabled. As to your original question, no, ESPs have not gained much in the way of power. I might be in the minority in my industry, but I think this is good. All of the arguments against page-based ads can be used against email-based ads. But in this case, the users have won, and have full power over their inbox.
This is a cop-out article that MailChimp can direct its customers to when they ask "how to disable spam filters." I worked in support for another ESP, and customers would often have unreasonable expectations about email delivery rates. Enough industries are corrupted, that customers thought that with enough money, we could bypass spam filters, or ensure 100% deliverability (never mind that half their email addresses didn't exist). I even had someone ask how they could make sure that everyone would open and read their emails. Like we sold some sort of Orwellian device that would hold people's eyes open and indoctrinate them to buy a specific Insurance.
Facebook is not the only platform. Reddit, Polygon, and Twitch all have users that would fit your demographic more. Social media personalities (Twitter, Youtube, Tumblr, etc), all will mention your game for the right price. If you have ever seen 'Featured', 'Promoted', or 'Partner' content, then it was paid for. Communities and forums are overvalued for the time investment, especially because they rely on other people to spread your game.
We live in a consumerist society driven by ads. Refusal to use them is silly.