Feral as a Moat (FaaM)

Lately I’ve been thinking a lot about how feral product design and brand voice can function as a deep moat. By feral I mean in the terminally online sense: cleverly absurd + hilarious with minimum viable regard for social norms.

I’ve noticed feral companies hitting the top of the charts in game development, content creation, and product marketing with steadily increasing frequency.

A recent example:

Every month CreatorIQ publishes a ranking of beverage brands’ social performance. My reaction to last month’s ranking was immediate:

What is Gamer Supps and how is it outperforming Monster and Pepsi?

Earned media value isn’t revenue, but still… what?!

…oh

My first impression of their website was: oh, it’s gooner marketing and creator partnerships.

As I dove deeper and spoke to creators and insiders, however, it became clear I had underestimated them. The memes were downstream of a well-run machine with:

• Great execution: Fans consistently rave about GS mix texture and flavors, especially compared to competitors. They nailed sourcing.

• Deep partner alignment: GS has quietly developed a strong reputation among large creators for being easy to work with on deliverables, product, and creative.

• Commitment to the bit: GS knows their audience and will meme to within a nanometer of what’s socially unacceptable. The danger is part of the draw!

Paul Graham would be proud (I think.)

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GOING FERAL

Brand-safe marketing from an olden time

I was investing in D2C gamer consumer products around the time Gamer Supps was founded (~2017) and I vividly remember the consensus of the era was that gamers wanted their drinks marketed with the same sleek professionalism used by Razer to hawk mice and Ladder to hawk protein powder:

• A scowling esports athlete with crossed arms

• Taglines like ELITE PERFORMANCE and DRINK OF CHAMPIONS

• A logo equally appropriate for a fintech SaaS company

Guacamole Gamer Fart 9000 and Grandpa’s Ashes were not on the whiteboard, and yet here they are in 2025 soaring past Mtn Dew on the timeline.

Feral brand voice isn’t for the faint of heart: when it goes wrong it goes very wrong. It also has trade-offs baked in even when it goes right. A truly feral brand will never have the universal appeal or addressable market of a Coca-Cola.

The thing is… upstart teams and creators don’t need universal appeal to secure great financial outcomes and have fun along the way. And for a feral brand seeking an edge to stand out in a crowded marketplace, most people turned off by Guacamole Gamer Fart 9000 or waifu memes were unlikely to become customers anyways.

When Paul Graham wrote his famous essay about doing things that don’t scale I doubt he had anime thirst traps in mind, but the ethos is consistent. If you’re willing to do things legacy juggernauts and status-conscious competitors wouldn’t dare, you can delight users in ways they can’t.

Courtesy: SteamDB

We’ve recently seen this trend becoming more consistent in gaming: friend-of-the-newsletter Ryan Rigney has specifically called it out as a consequence of industry deprofessionalization.

The breakout PC game hit of 2025 (so far) is Schedule I: a cheerfully absurd cozy co-op drug dealing simulator. Popular creators like CaseOh have repeatedly made the game go viral by building rapport with persistent NPC customers or accidentally frying them with poorly-crafted fictional designer drugs.

That’s way beyond spicy tweets– Schedule I has unhinged core gameplay loops.

Twitch streamers long ago discovered that ferality is one of the most reliable ways to capture attention in an infinite content marketplace, so the increasing frequency of feral design in indie games is leading to more and more perfect creator-dev pairings.

Schedule I is estimated to have generated $100M in revenue in its first month and has hovered around 100,000 concurrent players . It’s also been a consistent engagement monster for creators across socials.

Similarly, 2024’s indie darling Palworld shattered multiple Steam records with the unofficial tagline “Pokémon: But With Guns!” The definitely-not-a-Pokémon-clone published by Japanese indie studio Pocketpair features gun-toting Pals, industrial-scale labor exploitation of Pals, and Depresso: the adorable gloomy Pal who drowns their sadness with energy drinks.

Lamball uses Empty The Clip. It’s super effective!

The Pokémon Company (TPC) may be willing to sue Pocketpair for IP infringement, but it’ll be a cold day in hell before they’re willing to arm Pokémon with .50 cal machine guns. Palworld’s feral design can’t be fast followed by a brand-conscious juggernaut the way Valve and Riot fast followed Autochess or Instagram cloned Snapchat Stories.

Pocketpair isn’t the first developer to try making a Pokémon-inspired game, but they are by far– BY FAR – the most feral.

The deftly absurd, delightfully unhinged indie title has generated roughly a cool $500 million in a little over a year and peaked at over 2 million concurrent players, good for Top 5 all-time on Steam. No other Pokémon-like has cracked the Top 100.

Admittedly $500M is significantly less than what a mainline Pokémon game makes but… who cares?

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PARTING THOUGHTS

There was a time when sterile professionalism and brand safety were broadly viewed as a useful signal that a company was well-run, customer-focused, and competent.

For companies trying to make money on the internet that signal is harder to distinguish from noise with each passing year.

Professionalism-as-a-signal is still valuable in certain verticals: few people want feral accountants or home insurers. But for companies tied to culture and gaming, there has clearly been a slow but steady vibe shift in favor of the deftly unhinged.

It’s also noteworthy this cultural shift started before LLMs and AI agents became widely available to generate infinite polished slop on demand.

Products and voices that are genuinely unpolished, deftly absurd, and… well… feral can cut through the noise of the attention marketplace extremely effectively. It’s a risky trend to follow, sure, but one that’s paying off with increasing regularity and with plenty of tailwinds suggesting it’s accelerating.

Anyways, as far as I can tell that’s how meme caffeine powder outperformed Pepsi (NASDAQ: PEP) last month.

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