2026 Week 36: audience on hold

What do you definitely not need when you're putting all your spare time into gamedev?

Social media companies accusing you of being a bot.

But that's what has just happened to us and our new Google Account and YouTube channel for EXIT. We've put in an appeal, but we'll have to see what happens.

The problem is, as the world gets more and more automated, we're going to need more and more layers of automation to keep those layers protected. And there are always going to be false positives. It's impossible to avoid.

It would just be better if it didn't feel so annoying to be accused of being a bot by a bot.

If for whatever reason the appeal falls on deaf ears (we're not holding our breath). We'll pivot to only using video on Bluesky, or self-hosted, and try and find an audience through more direct gaming channels like Steam and Itch. Which was always the plan, but we had hoped that YouTube would also have helped us out, rather than becoming a time-wasting hinderance.

One worry we've had since starting our social push, is that our game name E.X.I.T (Escape the 11th Terminus) aligns to other names (in different industries). The name didn't when we first started the work. In fact, we've owned the domain exitgame.co.uk for far longer than any other brand entering the space (since 2009). Precisely because we knew we'd get here one day. Hopefully this block is nothing to do with any nonesense copyright claim, but if so we have proof of our continued work in this area over decades.

And that should at least count for something.

As a small team, we're quite fed up with the world being run by large bullies. Each of these oversized companies started small, and only got where they are today by people supporting them and using their services. Sometimes they need to be reminded of that.