The 3 best ways to market your game transcript

Whenever I get the chance to speak to a viewer in like a one-to-one setting, I always ask them the question, what would be something that you want me to make more videos about? What is something that you struggle with and you want to understand more about? 80% of the time comes down to marketing. How do I market my game? How do I get my game in front of more people and all of that? Because I don't know what to do in this regard.

I just want to make games and, you know, I want people to play my games as well. And I understand that. I always felt like, oh, I've talked so much about marketing, but clearly I haven't. So, in this video, I want to talk about the three main ways, the three biggest and like almost only ways that you should try to market your game with. And these are going to be the very high return on investment things. There's going to be other things that you can do, of course, but these would be the things that I honestly think is the bare minimum and also not like super hard to do for your own games.

So, the first thing that you should do is content creator marketing. What this means is that you're going to be making content about your game, but it's not going to be you who does it. It's going to be other content creators like for example YouTubers, Tik Tockers or Twitch streamers who will be making content about your game. This is the best highest leverage thing you can do basically because you just make the game once you send emails out to these people.

So you do like a one-to-one outreach and then they will then amplify your game through their audience. Because whilst you as a developer may have a small shitty YouTube channel of like 500 subscribers or whatever, you can reach out to hundreds of YouTubers at the same time and get them to cover the game and they all have like between 10,000 and 10 million subscribers and it's going to give you a lot of views. It's going to give a lot of people that first look of, hey, there's this new game coming out.

I'm interested in this. And it's just simply a skill that you can't really do yourselves. or if you want to get to that scale like a Danny or like a twostar for example, you need to spend a lot of time and just have the raw skills of editing, script writing and all of that, if you want to make your own videos, never make your own videos. It's not really worth it. I would say in 95% of the time, unless you just really want to do it, but instead you want to reach out to other content creators.

Now, how do you do this? The answer for this is honestly pretty easy. You find games that are similar to yours. Maybe you're making a simulator game or a management game or whatever. Probably there's going to be some games that are similar to yours and you're going to look up these content creators on YouTube, for example, and see, hey, who covers these games? Are they still active? And if so, you want to take note of their channel and you want to be able to reach out to them at a later date when you have something to show for them.

And this is a pretty big list. It's going to take some time, but I'm going to give you like a cool alternative if you don't want to do this all manually. And you can do a similar thing for Twitch where there's this website on Twitch called Sullyome. And in there, you can enter a game name and it's going to give you a list of all of the live streamers in the last 7 days, 31 days, or whatever custom filter that you want.

And it's once again going to just give you a list of all of them. And you can just go through them. Do these streamers look like good fits for me? If so, can I find their email address on Twitch, for example, they often state it in their bio of like, hey, if you want to reach out to me, here's my email. And once again, you're going to compile a very big list. And then once you have something playable, whether that's a demo or it's the full game release, you want to send them an email probably a few weeks in advance of like, hey, I'm working on this game.

I'm the developer. I want to give you early access to my game. Here are some reasons why I think you and your audience would really enjoy playing it. And once again, you want to give them some time, usually two weeks in advance before like the main release date of like whether it's your demo or it is the full game, just so they can actually schedule the video, plan the video, record it and all of that because it does take some time.

And that is basically it. Now, there's one unfortunate truth or like kind of caveat to this. You want to make a game that content creators also want to play. I think that is a big one. This is where visuals, for example, are very important because you're kind of going into a trade deal between a content creator and you. You, the game developer, give them an exclusive, interesting game that kind of has that promise of people are going to want to watch my game.

And that's what you as the developer try to guarantee to the content creator. If you can guarantee a content creator that they're going to get a million views or whatever on a video, of course they're going to cover it. And this is mainly done through your capsule art, which is going to be the video thumbnail most likely, and then through the actual game visuals. If your game just looks simply bad and it's something that people don't want to look at, well, they going to very quickly click off the YouTube video, which is going to kill retention rates, which means the video gets algorithmically punished, and not as many people will watch it.

That's why certain genres like for example the friends love genre with games like Lethal Company and whatever or Peak are much better suited because they allow for more engaging videos. They also have a better visual style and it's easier to understand than for example a more monochromatic like one bit color palette because that's just something that the human brain and especially the human normie brain I know you're a big brain person does not want to watch the entire time.

If you want to dive in a bit more into like, hey, how should I actually formulate my emails? There's a video up there where I take a deep dive in like I think five different emails that our viewers have used, like the email templates basically, and talk about what's good about them, what's bad about them. But basically, just a very quick rundown of it is you want to include one sort of GIF of your game in action, showing basically the immediate visual appeal that you should have for your game most likely.

You always want to give them a Steam key. The Steam key makes them feel important as well, whether it is for the full game release or even for the demo. For the demo, you can give release state override keys as well, which means that they get early access to the demo. Don't just send them an email of like, hey, my demo is out now. Go and play it. And you kind of just want to treat them like little princesses because content creators are often a little bit spoiled and you should treat them that way as well, just to increase the chances of, hey, you want to play this game.

You can also send them a press kit which has like more assets and all of that so they can make their thumbnails very well. There's a lot of stuff in there. Go and watch the other video if you want a more deep dive into what is the email you should actually formulate. Now, I can already hear you think and this is something that I've talked to with our viewers as well of like, hey, but I don't really want to make like a giant Excel spreadsheet of like 300 entries or whatever with the email addresses and Twitch channels and all of that of people who want to play my game.

It takes a lot of time. It's just something that I don't want to do, for example. How should I do it then? And this is kind of where I have maybe finally the solution for you. And it's also the sponsor of this video, let's track.game, which is actually made by one of you guys, a viewer who had this same simple problem where spreadsheets unfortunately are not really the best, most fun solution to finding out, hey, which content creators should play my game.

There's also some problems with you manually trying to find content creators, like just the fact that YouTube search isn't that good. it doesn't really take good care of different languages and all of that. So, Let's Track Games is an all-in-one game marketing platform basically where it starts very easy, of course, with things like Steam Analytics and also io analytics. But what makes it special is all of the content creator marketing tools that they have basically where it does the entire process basically from finding content creators to following up with them to sending them the emails and all of that.

The way it works is very simple. You simply need to know a few other games that are similar to yours. And then you can easily look up content creators who have covered these games before and add them to your own personal content creator list for when you want to do outreach. And you can then manage these creators and do press outreaches basically through the platform. You upload your keys to the platform and then you can use templates to very rapidly send hundreds of emails to all of these content creators and still make them bespoke for every single individual content creator.

What's even more, and this is a feature that, like I said, it's a viewer. He reached out to me and he's like, "Hey, what do you want to see from this platform?" Something that I do that I don't see a lot of other game developers do yet is tracking key activations as well. I think it can be an important thing to see, for example, hey, how is my email outreach actually working? Kind of like checking the marketing copy.

If someone is actually activating the key, yes or no, because there's a very big difference if you send 200 emails and three people claim the key, or you send 200 emails and 30 people claim the key. Well, this gives you some more data of like, should I change the formatting of my email? Are my emails actually good? Are they being converted? And it also gives you a more of a feeling of like, hey, there's probably going to be a statistically higher chance of content creators playing my game.

This is a feature that I personally kind of helped them implement as well because it's something that I think is really cool and awesome. And then lastly, when somebody does actually upload content or goes live on Twitch, for example, you can integrate it so that you'll get a Discord notification the moment that a content creator is live, which means you can also hop into chat. It's something that I've also once again been doing for all of our games.

When people were playing Kyoto Anomaly, for example, I just went into their chat. You talk to the live streamers as well. And it has allowed me to in the long term build a better relationships with live streamers, content creators that maybe I didn't reach out to that first time, but they got notified of, hey, they've played my game. I hop in their chat. I talked to them. They're a very great fit. Of course, they're always going to want to play your next games more as well because they already have that previous relationship.

I think it's a very powerful thing to do as well. and it's something that you just can't do manually or otherwise. So, if all of this sounds interesting, Let's Track Games is out now. And I have some good news for you because you can do a completely free 7-day trial. No credit card, no nothing. And if you find out that this is something interesting for you as well, you can use code bite me to get 20% off your first month for the first 50 users.

So, once again, that's code bites me. You know how to write it, I feel at this point, but I'll put it up on screen anyway. It gives you 20% discount. I really like the tool because I have been involved with the creation of it basically from day one as well. So, I do think you're going to really like it. It's very fair pricing. It's very indie focused. So, give it a shot. Once again, also thank you to Let's Track Game for sponsoring this video.

And let's keep going on because there are other ways to market your game as well, apart from just purely content creators, of course. Another big one, and it's something that I've only been discovering in the past few months, to be honest, is Steam events. Now, there's a bunch of different categories here in Steam events that I want to talk about. You probably know the big one, Steam NextFest. That is probably one of the biggest events and I know a lot of our audience participates in as well, where if you have a demo of your game and the game is unreleased yet, you get one shot to join the Steam NextFest, which gives bonus visibility and often between like a few hundred and a few thousand wish lists for your game.

It just highlights all of these demos. People play a lot of demos and it's a good way to market your game. Now, there are some issues, of course. you can only join one single next fest and the next fest also doesn't make sense if your game is out already or if you don't have a demo yet. This is where other festivals come in as well and you have the steam themed events in general as well. So these change every year basically but you have festivals like the deck builder festival, the visual novel festival, the bomb festival where they have a festival centered around a single team.

For example, the Steam Screamfest is another big one that is more focused on horror games. These are festivals that Steam themselves host. And I'm going to be honest, some of them have been pretty good for us. Like the capitalism and economy festival did get us a pretty decent amount of sales for for industry. Whereas other festivals that we participated in, like this planes, trains, and automobiles festival last year had honestly almost no impact.

The thing is, these Steam events are probably some of the easiest to join because they get announced months in advance. It's very easy to apply for. You basically have a guaranteed entrance if you fit the description and you fit the tags of your game. And generally they do have at least some impact in terms of sales or wish lists. The main problem I have here is that sometimes they're kind of oddly specific. Like you're probably not going to be participating in the horsefest or the ocean festival or the pointand-click adventure festival, but they can still be very good events to kind of take along.

Where the real value in events lies, however, is more recently in third party curated events. We recently participated in like the Southeast Asia Hungry Ghost Festival with two of our games. And I think we made a combined $1,500 in sales just in that one week basically of that Steam Festival. And all it took for us was to fill in a Google form. Now, I say all it took and this is where the biggest problem for these third party events comes in.

The fact that they're third party and there is no central real database or whatever to find all of these events. in the case of the Southeast Asia games one that I joined. I found that one I think on XD everything app and I've also found some events on LinkedIn like the games under 5 hours festival for example but there is no single source of truth basically where to go there. There's also the how to market the game worthy festivals list but this one also in my opinion is honestly pretty incomplete.

Is there a good solution here? No, not really. It's kind of just being active on like Twitter, Blue Sky, and LinkedIn, like I said, of all places, following some developers on there. And generally, you can sometimes find out about these festivals that way. I unfortunately do not have a great solution for you here, but it is something that you should look into if you can find some of these third party festivals. You can often, like I said, hear them talked about on social media.

And the application processes is pretty much always free. Sometimes, once again, the events give you almost no coverage, like the games under 5 hours festival. Sometimes, like I said, they also have great return ons investment. It's kind of a gamble, but at the end of the day, the amount of work required to join a festival is just so low that you want to join every single one if you can. And then there's a final fourth kind of festival, and those are the online festivals that are linked to real game events.

So, for example, Tokyo Game Show, Gamescom PEX for example. If you join these festivals in real life, you also get Steam featuring, which means that like for a day or something in like the country that that festival takes place, your game is going to be part of the festival page and the festival page will get coverage on the front page of Steam. I generally wouldn't suggest you to go to packs or whatever to have a booth and whatever because even with those online festivals the return on investment often isn't there where sure you can get like a few hundred wish lists maybe but the cost between like an online only festival like I talked about before where you just fill in a Google form or a festival where you have to travel to another country sometimes have to set up a boot you have to mandate boot for a few days and all of that just doesn't have that same kind of value basically because yeah sure you're getting some wish list but you're getting them at a very high cost where sometimes you're paying between $2 and $5 per wish list if you like convert the event cost and then also the opportunity cost of having to be at that event for two or three days or whatever with actually just doing paid advertising or something like that.

So ignore it for now. I just wanted to mention it. It is a kind of marketing you can do as well. And then the last powerful way of marketing and it's kind of a a shift that we've had in our studio as well which is why we haven't really released much in the past few months is demos. The two things that I talked before, content creator marketing and events are very good. But you can basically amplify all of them and like 3x 4x the total return on investment of them by having demos.

Like the name suggests, a demo is a shorter version of your final game that gives a taste of what will the experience be like playing the final game. And you release that months in advance, half a year in advance, or even longer to already get one, player feedback, and two, just get it from marketing. There's a pretty specific pipeline at this point where you start your demo completely off of Steam, purely focusing on it.io and then once you've realized, okay, we have a professional enough build.

And I say this really, a demo is not a play test, guys. It's a problem I see so much with your guys' demos where demos are uncompleted, they're super buggy, and they're just not playable to be honest. They have like no UI, no settings or whatever. That's not what you should do in a demo. Those you keep toio and once you have a good enough IDO build and you see from people that hey I am interested in this that is when you can move on to steam when you already have a little bit of a following there.

These steam demos once again they allow you to participate in the steam nextfest. Also if you participate in other third party festivals or for example the steam specific festivals you get bonus visibility if you have demos you get more visibility than if you only have a steam page for example which is also once again a benefit. And for content creators, of course, it's obvious. You can do two kinds of outreach. You can do the demo outreach and then you can also do the full-on game release outreach.

Instead, if you don't do a demo, well, you can only kind of reach out to them once like, "Hey, my full game is releasing in a few weeks. Go and give it a go." Demos basically give you way more shots to try and hit something on the marketing dart board. And this sounds make me sad, but that is unfortunately the way it is. You kind of just want to throw as much attempts to marketing. Same with like trailers and whatever.

You can add a demo announcement trailer as well in on top of just your general release date announcement trailer or your release trailer to increase the amount of times you can market your game basically because if you're not doing anything new and special, you can't just suddenly wake up and be like, I'm going to market my game today when you have nothing to really announce. So if you are developing a game, I urge you from day one, think about what would the demo scope be for this game as well.

Try to keep this pretty neat because you want to have a nice demo that does really show most of the game already without having to scramble last minute taking the full game and then like chopping up some parts to just construct a demo out of those components. So, make it really polished. That's what I'm always telling you guys. I see so many of your guys' demos, but they just aren't really good. Make them as good as possible.

If they're not good yet, stick to it.io for a while. use the Steam play test feature, but don't mark them as dedicated demos yet. It's just something that I see you guys make the mistake about so often, and it's something that we kind of had as well. You just need to make a good game. And I know that sounds really stupid, but that is unfortunately what it boils down to as well. It doesn't matter how much marketing you try to do at the end of the day if the game that you're trying to market isn't good in the first place.

So, I hope this gave you some ideas. Of course, you have other things like uploading your own Tik Toks, doing Reddit ads, doing posts on X, everything happen, all of that, but they're more specific to your genre. They're more specific to you as a person as well. What do you like? Do you understand these platforms? Do you understand Reddit, for example? These three things that I talked about, content creator marketing, joining Steam events, and having a demo, will always work.

Surefire, 100% guaranteed. You should do these all the time for every single game. It doesn't matter what the genre is, what your death cycle is, or anything like that. Have a demo, do content creator outreach, and join Steam events. If you are interested in content creator marketing, I'm just going to say it once again, head on over to let'srack.games for the free 7-day trial. No credit card, nothing like that. Just try it out for your own game.

And if you do want to upgrade, use the code bite to me to get 20% off the first month for the first 50 viewers. So, go and give it a go. Apart from that, let me know how has marketing been for you. Have you joined some festivals yourself before as well? and what has the impact been for there? Because like I said, it can be very hit or miss. So, I am always interested to hear a bit more about your experiences. That's all I to say.

Thank you very much for watching and I'll see you guys in the next one. Bye.