How we spent $0 on marketing our game and sold thousands of copies transcript

almost 3 weeks ago we released our second game on Steam unicycle Pizza time which is a Precision platformer streamer bait style of game that we made in just one month and that one month included marketing the entire game so a question that you also had of course is how did you do that because if we look at the stats here 88% positive ratings with 87 reviews if we look at the total sales we've made a few thousand at this point I think this is for a one month of work this is some very good stats so a lot of people are like hey Marx what did you do marketing your game and that's what this video is going to talk about we didn't do that many different things of marketing we didn't do things like demos we didn't do things like fests we only did one thing I'll talk about that in a second got to make sure you're going to keep watching but before that I want to say do not take this video as a blueprint to marketing we made a lot of mistakes because we made it in one month and we only had two weeks between the Steam page being actually live and the game being released because that's the bare minimum that steam requires you to have you can't ship a game faster than that and even then like the one with thing that we did use was influencer marketing and we only had three days between our build for them being ready and the game actually releasing so once again there's too little time everywhere this is not a how-to this is still to give you an idea of what did we do there are some good things that we did but this is not what you should blindly copy assuming it's going to get you to the number one of new and trending because that's what it did for us there was a lot of luck involved with this as well and I think there were some things that we could have done better as well but I think the first thing that I want you to understand as well is that hey marketing the game sending things to influencers doing steam fests everything you see Krukowski talk about basically it's all nice and well but the main thing actually is not hey how much you have to spend on an ad for the summer game Fest for example or how many influencers you can pay or send emails or how many events you can go to go to something like games and have a boot there no those things will of course impact your marketing of course and how many wish list you can get but the biggest decision and this is going to hurt for a lot of you guys to hear is the genre of game you take and the style of game that you take like the visuals we went into this game with the approach of we have one month we have to Market this as well as possible and we basically just looked at okay what is an art style that sells the most so that's why we ended up going with 3D like high poly like PBR style then also we looked at okay what are some games that are really good for people to play and have create content about because that's what we wanted our main approach was going to be content creator so we should make games that I as a content creator also understand certain topics perform way better better certain styles of videos perform way better than others like for example videos about hey how much we earned or absolute beginner videos if I look at my channel will always get more views than like some of the more boring and like in-depth topics so knowing that YouTube game and knowing at the end of the day other content creators are tied to the algorithm as well and they want their videos to perform well so you as a developer have to make games that will give them that performance basically and that is why we ended up making a more of a streamer based game because the entire thought here was we want want to make great content it's going to elicit a lot of like reactions it's going to be very Visual and also it's someone on a unicycle you have to assume that hey not only are people going to watch like fulllength videos but maybe they'll drop into a live stream and they need to very quickly understand what is this game about they need to be hooked just from watching the game like visuals do a lot as well as hey you have this unicycle what what why is there a unicycle it immediately gives it huh effect so those were some of the decisions that we made when originally started with this idea I know some of you guys are like oh my God this is so soulless like I'm going to keep working on my 2D Metroid Venia that talks about dealing with like loss or grief or whatever because I believe that is the game that I want to make that's fine by me but understand that going in and marketing that game or marketing a game that just doesn't look good marketing a game that is very basic it's 2D 2D does so much in like your game being unmarketable basically and I know it sucks to hear but it's unfortunately the truth because you're a developer we weren't selling our games to developers we were selling our games to normies who do not care about us being the developer at all and all of that so at that point then you go for the higher poly style and you go for the more casual genres there is definitely value in like more niching down and getting specific art styles but it's not going to be the play if you want to do these short Cycles okay with that very long winded intro out of the way but this is honestly the most important thing of marketing choosing that right genre and that like right game basically is influencers I I believe and I've always been believing this for a long time but this was the game where I really got to try it out is I believe the most effective and the like s tier marketing strategy is Simply Having a game and then letting other people play it and use their audiences to promote your own game so you often hear this of like people who are like hey should I start a YouTube channel that you do the developer start to promote my game or should I start my own Tik Tok and all of that and it's like yeah you could do that the big problem you have there is you don't have an audience but there's a lot of people on YouTube who play maybe similar to what you're making who do have an audience whether that's a thousand subscribers 10,000 subscribers or even millions of subscribers and it's much more returnal investment by just locking yourself into getting covered by one of those bigger streamers and then getting tens of thousands of views when all you had to do was just make a game that was interesting and send an email and that is all we did basically in terms of promoting our game sure we made our own devlog which was like we made the devlog not really to Market our own game but more just to show you guys like hey there's something we're working on it was not the our main goal to get wish list because we only got about 170 from our Dev loock which sounds nice but it it wasn't that much now I think also maybe one thing to say as well before we get too driven into the wish list number is I made this brilliant post even though we've sold over 2,000 copies when we launched our game we only had 500 wish lists which by all means should mean our game is Dead on Arrival and there's no possible chance of success you hear this off often where it's like oh you need 7,000 wish list before you can even consider releasing and I think for the most part that is true I think we kind of were able to break out of this purely because of two things first of all we got lucky with the new and trending that is one thing but then how did we get on the new and trending in the first place we made a game that drived on virality basically like once someone saw it you have this whole waterfall and that's what happened as well if you go and look just on YouTube at all of the like pieces of content made about unicycle Pizza Time like you'll see a lot of this is Japanese we really struck a Japanese audience for some reason talk about it later as well but like all of these pieces of content came out pretty quickly after launch we only had one piece of content really that came out before launch and then on launch because the game was so like appealing to streamers people still ended up playing the game and we got a big boost when we look at our wish list actions here of like 500 and another 770 in the first two days because we had that Viral this is not something that you can immediately plan for it's not something you can fully reproduce but certain genres once again will be better than others now I made a video about this entire process about I think four or five months ago that goes Super in-depth on hey how do you get influencers how do you contact them how should you structure your emails and all of that I'll link it up there it's a really good video but I want to give a quick rundown once again of how do you do it because this is also a way of marketing that doesn't cost you any money basically all you need to do is find that big list create it yourself most likely and then send out a few hundred emails ideally and wait and all of that you can do in like 4 to8 hours and that's your entire marketing strategy basically could be that and would be fine already as you can see here this is the Excel list that we had for ourselves where you're going to compile all possible YouTubers who play similar games to yours and you they like hey this would be a good fit for them to play my game now you can see like some of these are very big like there's people like foren queso like they have millions of subscribers but some of them are also much smaller like like here for example we have some with 15,000 subscribers anything I would say from like 5,000 is worth it you can send to less than 5,000 subscribers as well but it becomes very much a more limited return on investment then like at the end of the day getting the keys to send out to influencers is still very cheap because you don't pay anything you just click a button on Steam but you're going to just go through all of YouTube scour everyone you can find and put them in the list and then yeah you get a final big list like here we have punch with like 9,000 and whatever and you're going to contact all of them I've got the keys and the emails blocked out in this Excel list because that's not really uh what I'm supposed to be sharing with you but you just go through this I gave two keys as well normally can you do just one but because we have a one to four player co-op game I figured I would send two and then once you have those YouTube channels you want to get their email and how you do that is if you on YouTube there's this very easy thing that you can do as you can see on my screen I'm here on bite me you can go to like the about section there's Channel details you can click view view email address and voila you can contact someone our primary form of contacting people was just using email and you can do things like Twitter DMS as well it's something I personally didn't have any experience with beforehand and everyone I wanted to contact basically I could find emails for through YouTube so I didn't need to but if you want to go for like super high volume it's definitely something you can try out as well and then you just want to send them an email this is an email that I sent out we got a response for there was content made by this so this is the basic template that we made and this is not good I'll talk about in a second what I was actually still missing here but it's like hey name I'm part of this Indie studio and we're working on our own game and you give a very very short pitch like one or two sentences then we gave some information of like hey is there an embargo or anything we put it in here of like hey look you can already create content about it know that these things will most likely still change before the game fully releases we gave the two codes put the code in the email already some YouTube content creators themselves they even say like in the title put like hey key inside I think what I more believe and this is like kind of my my sales experience from my previous Life coming in is don't just title your email of like new upcoming game but here it's like are you a unicycle Pro like you wouldn't know this is kind of a click baity email title that's more of the idea that I have for Forge industry with a similar thing where it was like we reached out to automation YouTubers and then we told them like hey conveyor belts suck we've got something better and that's the title we used there I think that is more appealing than just being like very generic like key attached new Rog light game coming coming out or something I think this is better this is my personal opinion I don't know the exact thoughts of real actual people who just play the content maybe if they watch this video at one day they can comment but what was this email missing and it is something that I only started doing after IID already sent out basically 100 plus emails a press kit basically what is a press kit if you've never heard of it before this is a press kit it's just like a single big piece of information that you feature like some gifs you feature the trailer you feature some screenshots if someone wants to create content about your game or for example for YouTubers this is very important thumbnails then you want to give them your press kit because what we included here is we included the highquality logos of the game we included the font basically that we use for the logo if they want to reproduce and we had like these funny like cutout images of the unicycles as well which you will see some people actually ended up using in their thumbnails here and it helps a lot in making more custom because otherwise what they'll do is they'll just go to your steam page and they'll take like one of the screenshots and have to Overlay their own stuff on it it's not always as engaging also if you have things like good captal art put the captal art in the press kit as well I'm using a tool called press Kitty by impress games which is completely free I talked about them in a previous video and it's very easy to just create your own little press kit so there's a link down below to that but having that press kit was definitely a worthwhile Edition that we should have done now one thing to keep in mind when you have these YouTubers and it's something that I personally also want to tell people who are like hey I want to do influencer Outreach is don't get stuck on the subscriber number like you'll see like of course we start a bck list with like a queso a ques not a forsen whoever like the big YouTubers because if this cover your game perfect you're good then right the problem is and this is generally around the 100 to 150,000 subscriber Mark is you'll start running into this and that's called agencies where hey you send an email but you're not sending an email to the talent itself anymore like if you send an email to Talent directly the chance of you getting covered is infinitely higher then if they're using someone like Mythic Talent OR GG talent group like agencies that are become the gatekeeper between the influencer and whoever wants to do sponsorships and whatever and their job basically is to earn money for the influencer which means that hey you will get emails like this or it's like hey thank you for reaching out but do you have any budget for money because realistically if you don't give them a bag of money and we're talking about multiple thousands of dollars here at a minimum then we can't guarantee you any coverage and it's like yeah maybe we'll play one day and you can it gets if you're lucky but there's no planning at this point so you're much more shouting into the void by going to the people with more than 100,000 or like 150,000 subscribers or basically just anyone with an agency like managing them versus finding direct emails of people basically and yeah that's basically the main thing of how to we your Outreach it wasn't that hard now one question that I did get a lot as well is how do you approach the Japanese streamers because this is actually kind of a funny one where Japanese streamers and Japanese febers which is most of the content creators as you can see here and these febers actually have a bit of the same problem or you'll encounter the same problem as with regular us streamers that I just said the agencies it's even worse in Japan because even Youtubers with like 5,000 and less subscribers are often part of talent agencies it's part of the culture here to have usually somewhat predatory agencies that take like 70% of all the money you take but you have to go through them there's no good contact email it's like all Japanese forms I want to bother with that which is also why we originally didn't reach out to a lot of Japanese people we reached out to I think this is like seven or eight up until here like the first 70 we did before launch and out of that we got lucky because there was one called tomari Mari and they are a like independent vtuber so we could contact them directly and then we got lucky because then it snowballed and other agencies actually reached out to us and we're like hey what are the rules and regulations about the game do you have press kits do you have codes or whatever and we got lucky that way but contacting them directly the agencies was not going to go anywhere so once again you need to get lucky to a certain degree I don't want to attribute all of this to luck by the way a lot of this is just putting in the effort and the more emails you send the more chance you're going to have of being lucky I think it's not just that oh you just got covered it's like everyone can get covered and having good one good piece of coverage can often do a lot for your game it can make or break your entire marketing campaign almost but that's basically how you do the Japanese YouTubers it's I think a maybe a good one is if you want to find out how do you find Japanese YouTubers it's you can see it in my history here we've looked at a similar game stretcher man which was the closest in terms of like when it released compared to ours because games like only up they're like 2 years older YouTube changes a lot what you do to find Japanese YouTubers is you write the name of your game and then what you can see here in the Katakana is game and if you just look up this you're going to find Japanese YouTubers Japanese influencers playing your game and then once again it's very easy like for example I did it here with cont I think you open their Channel you go to the more tab you click on the like more about this Channel and then voila you can get their email address it's very easy that way and you just have to send them the email then later on so this is how you do it for Japanese YouTubers there are other ways to do it for like other languages but I was focusing mainly on us a little bit of France and then also Japanese as our big big is targets basically if you have more localized languages of course you can do like Turkish we have some Indonesian streamers for the Japanese ones one other thing may be that is interesting to say is the emails that I sent they were in Japanese but I just used CPT to translate it it was not rocket science basically then one other thing that I want to cover because it's the first time that we were using it now with our influencer campaign is this all tool called coverage bot by once again the same people who made press kit um impress do games and what they do basically is they track all of the content being made about your game basically basically like every time a video comes out or like a tracking like you don't manually have to look for are people making content about my game you get notifications they track it or like for example are there articles are there links from Reddit for example going back to your store Page it's very easy here to track all of that basically and I think generally this was a pretty good tool and the big thing I liked is as you can see here you get notifications when people are live streaming basically it's like every time a new piece of content releases or a new person starts live streaming you immediately get a notification and a link of hey this person is streaming and it's something that helped us a lot as well of hey you can just hop into their chat you don't have to manually refresh all the time hop into their chat talk with them just being a very human developer at the end of the day especially at least with the Japanese influencers I did the most ha can help a lot in just getting more sales because you're not just soulless developer like interacting with people it does a lot still in getting a little bit extra sales getting a little bit extra reviews so I think the coverage B is pretty good um we also have an affiliate code if you want um that is like 10% discount if you use code bite me 10 I'll put it up here somewhere first when I first got this I was like o I don't know if it's going to be worth it but now it has made a lot easier to track when things are going on and especially like this also allowed us to find some other things that are not just YouTube videos but I want to talk also it's a good segue into press coverage because 80 level which is like a press thing for game stuff basically they covered our game once again we knew from it because we we got the notification of like hey new article about unicycle Pizza time we did not reach out to ad level um basically like press was not really a core focus of us of course I made a video once again half a year ago where I went to a Japanese Press Company automaton and I talked about hey how do you approach press how does the entire process work basically I I have mixed feelings I think press is not for our style of game if you're making like more of the Cozy games and more of the visual games you can try press the problem is also if you go to like a YouTube video you can see how many people actually watched it with press all of that information is hidden basically so often you'll have like press and it's like 10 people may have read it and other times like maybe 10,000 people may Afra it who knows so it wasn't our core Focus I did reach out to one person and that was the guy that I did the interview with caros from automaton and they wrote a pretty good article of course it's once again it's all in Japanese so good luck but this was pretty popular as far as I can tell from like Twitter interactions and things like that did this help a lot I don't know probably like one influencer covering our game would have done about the same but it's still nice the structure for this email was a bit different it's like hey we've met before and it's like hey this is the story so we link to like our devlog of we're making the game in one month this is the game give it a spin basically was what we did and of course the pitch and then they wrote the article on them like once again you don't ever have guarantees that you'll have coverage either from influencers or press but if you can try it's always worth it because the end of the day this is still free you're not paying anything to get this coverage you just have to send some emails now what would I have done differently because of course we did a whole bunch of stuff some good some bad there were two main problems or two things that I would change personally if I had to do this again the first thing that I didn't do is start making that big influencer list early enough like right now we're sitting at about 126 emails that like we've collected I think that is still on the low end I think ideally you want to go for 150 200 and anything above that even better sometimes you'll read a problem that hey this specific genre that I'm looking at there's not even that many content creators who fit the Bild but still the more you have the more chances of getting lucky once again a content creator picks up the game makes a video about it and you get the wish list so really the earlier start because this will take some time and you have to scour YouTube and it's like oh this is boring I don't want to do this the earlier you start and collecting the emails the better because you'll just build up a bigger list and then the second big mistake with it but that is something that normally hopefully you have is only having those 3 days between having the build of our game that we could send out to streamers and actually you know releasing the game three days is not enough we got lucky there that we had those streamers who could basically immediately get the email and be like okay I'm going to play this tonight you get lucky there normally always I would say have two weeks because that is the general amount of time that content creators need to have like go through their backlog because like the first next few days are usually scheduled already they have to record the video they have to edit it and then they have to like make thumbnails titles it takes time so generally I would say at least 2 weeks in advance send out those emails if there's things like for example steam Nexus and things like that sent them out even earlier because my God they're going to be so swamped with emails with bills and things like that some of these they get like 10 to 20 emails of other developers every day so there will always be more games than they can physically cover there's only three videos basically you can upload a day on YouTube before the YouTube algorithm severely punishes you so it's just also yeah once again I keep saying this it's it's partially being lucky but the more you send out the more lucky you're going to be and the more chance you get that someone covers your game ideally before it releases because then you can build up those wish lists in our case after it releases it was still all right because it was like 2 days after release so keep that in mind as well just do whatever I did earlier and do a lot more as well like we didn't do the fests but this doesn't mean once again that you shouldn't do fests join fests join all of that do your best at Marketing in different ways of course but I do think that influencers can like carry a very big amount of your marketing and it doesn't even have to cost you anything anyways I know the style and presentation of this video was a little bit different if this was something that you're interested in then of course let me know I'm always curious about your thoughts I hope I taught you a bit more marketing wise because it is the bane of a lot of game developers at the end of the day so I hope you enjoyed it if you have any other questions you can leave them in the comments down below or ideally join our Discord which is also linked down below where I can just respond much faster and we have an actual conversation versus me just sending you like asynchronous messages 17 every so often if you want more content like this we upload two videos every week talking more about just things we learn making our own games the mistakes we make and the wins we have sometimes as well so be sure to head down below and subscribe if you haven't done that yet because it really helps us out as well because I like to see number go bigger as well that's all for me thank you very much and I'll see you guys in the next one bye