One of the most common questions we get from our followers on social media is, “how can I get my car featured on the official Automation social media?” Well, here’s a quick rundown for you!
So first of all, for those who don’t know, we make daily posts of eye-catching community builds on the Automation Instagram and Bluesky accounts. In addition, we also use community builds in our news posts on Steam, here on our Dev Blog, and elsewhere in our marketing copy.
How do we choose what’s featured? Well, there are quite a few things we look for when choosing a featured build. First and foremost is, it’s got to be a good looking car, especially one that’s particularly creative, or photographed in an eye-catching manner. This means you actually have to pay attention to the quality and composition of the photos you’re taking in Photo Mode! A decent car with excellent photos is just as likely to be featured, or perhaps even more likely, than an excellent car with mediocre photos. Builds with lots of featured photos are more likely to be featured than single-photo posts, since that’s what the algorithm wants these days.
Second, your photos need to be posted in one of our community hubs – we field pictures from the Automation Discord, our official Subreddit, the Automation forums, or from the Steam Artwork Hub for Automation. Photos that are sent directly to us in, say, Instagram DMs, likely won’t be featured! We want to keep this as a little perk for our community members, as a way of saying, “Hey, you did a good job with this build and we feel like you deserve some recognition for it!”.
Next, we generally want our builds to be something that’s at least recognisable as a car, or something similar to it. As much as many of you make all kinds of wild things like motorcycles, airplanes, tanks, cellphones, gaming consoles and buildings (and that’s just scratching the surface…some of y’all really need to learn Blender! xD), we want to keep the builds we feature to be somewhat automotive-related, in any case! On that note, we will not post anything that’s obviously military, or has any kind of visible weaponry on it as well.
Also, anything with real-world branding in it is very unlikely to be featured on our socials. Obviously real-world car brands are out the window immediately, but even stuff like real companies and logos as part of a racecar livery, or advertisements in the background on a racetrack, or real-world car parts like white-lettered tires is enough to be disqualified. We maintain a good working relationship with the real-world automotive industry, and we’d like to keep it that way!
Finally, a word on being featured – don’t be discouraged if you don’t get featured, and don’t play the game solely with the intention of being featured – as much as it’s nice to be celebrated by us and by the community at large, you should be playing Automation because you enjoy the game, and because of the unique experience it offers!
Hopefully that answers some of your questions about being featured!
Cheers!
