  In the marketing of video games made by self-publishing, independent
developers, there is common advice to market a game using the social media
platform Twitter. However, the advice that stems from industry sources is
somewhat contradictory, and many self-publishing independent developers elect
not to use Twitter at all. This presents an opportunity for researchers to
investigate this tension and determine if using Twitter does have a causal
influence on the successful release of a game by using relatively recent
developments in causal data science techniques. In this sense, this paper
highlights these causal inference developments while simultaneously informing
self-publishing independent developers whether they should indeed market their
games using Twitter. It was found that using Twitter results in an average
increase of 85.4 reviews during release week, corresponding to a 314% positive
difference. Using Twitter also doubles the chance of reaching a critical
10-review inflection point threshold on release week. These effects, however,
are moderated by the characteristics of the game, expressed as 'tags', yet in
no case is the effect of Twitter use reduced to 0. Based on these findings, it
is advised that new, self-publishing video game developers do use Twitter to
market their games.
