How Twitter (Rather Unlikely) Helps Me Discover Hidden Gems

Here's a rather lazy post but I already wrote it anyway so why not. Now you must have noticed that the games I talked about here are not all popular mainstream games. There are some games you might not recognize or even paid attention to before. Although they are not necessarily "indie" (as everyone likes to put it these days), they basically are smaller and lesser known games. They are what I personally call "gems". They are out there, but you need a keen pair of eyes to spot them.

There are many ways to spot them and these games are plenty. There are always new little games out there coming out everyday, and best of all, a huge number of them are free-to-play. But that doesn't mean they're all enjoyable. Just because they're not made by big companies and labelled as "indie", doesn't mean they're automatically good. The good ones; the so-called "gems"; are not many. They are not hard to find, but you can easily miss them too if you don't pay attention.

And for that, you can always check any "top 10 list" Youtube video, or you can frequent websites dedicated to indie or lesser known games for updates. Or if you have a friend that is into that kind of games, well, you know who to ask. But for some reason, one of the more peculiar (at least to me) and indirect ways to discover these gems is doing so via Twitter. Now I'm not an avid Twitter user, and neither am I saying that it's the best way to discover these gems, but it does help me and I thought I should write something about that.

Less than 10 of my tweets consist of my remarks on video games ("my best bounty hunter in Darkest Dungeon just died!", "can't wait for Dark Souls 3", you know, tweets like that), while the rest are retweets of news links tweeted by gaming sites I follow. And the main reason of retweeting them is so that I can come back later and go to those links and check out the games that they're hyping about. So it's sort of like bookmarking. This works really well for me because since tweeting is easy, they tweet just about everything, so you're extremely well informed of what's new out there.

But since smaller games and indie titles are easy to miss because of less coverage by mainstream media, you've got to know which websites to follow. If you play on the PC, then you should consider following PC Gamer. There's no need for me to introduce you to PC Gamer, they're quite well-known as one of the "leading" PC gaming magazines. But what I love about them is that they don't sleep on the little games. They seem to appreciate little indie games, including the weird quirky ones, which are the ones that you need to check out. In fact, PC Gamer also have a column called "Free Games of the Week" which you should follow to increase your chance of discovering hidden gems and diamonds. That are free. Yes, free. Another site I currently follow on Twitter, as well as frequently visit, is Rock, Paper, Shotgun. They're dedicated to PC gaming, too. Aside from writing score-less reviews, they also tweet news of recent indie titles, or of any quirky game out there, it doesn't necessarily have to be indie. I discovered a lot of good games from their tweets.

Then there are the "big" gaming media such as Gamespot, IGN and others, who mostly cover bigger games. If you're not their fan, then there's no need to follow on twitter. Not that I'm against them because "ooh I'm such as a fucking indie hipster or anti-capitalist or whatever", I mean if you want to then it's up to you. This is not some promotion or advertisement, it's just a suggestion.

But the thing is that they pay more attention to big triple A games, giving you less chance to hear about the smaller titles; and your twitter timeline will be flooded by their news tweets on Assassin's Creed, Call of Duty and what-not, unless if that's what you really want, to get updates on the bigger games, that is. Then there's no point for you to dig news on the big games on twitter when you could just go to their sites anyway as news on triple-A games are too big for you to miss out on.